Yes, these questions inevitably arise when we attempt to read New Testament eschatology historically.

1. I don’t really think that the New Testament has much to say about the existence of Israel following the war against Rome. The conviction was that Israel was under judgment, that this would take the form of a devastating war, the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple, the loss of the kingdom, the death of many, and the scattering of Jews from their homeland. These events are decisive and terminal at least to the extent that Jesus was justified in gathering an alternative community around himself as Torah, temple and king - and then he sends them out to claim the whole world as God’s holy land.

So from our perspective perhaps the diagram is flawed, but as a representation of how Jesus, Paul and others saw the future of their people, I think it is correct.

2. It seems to me that the New Testament regards the prophetic narrative about suffering and vindication, which reaches its climax in the victory over Greek-Roman paganism, as definitive not in the sense that the church would never again experience violent persecution but in the sense that it is this narrative about Jesus and the community that suffers in his footsteps that establishes the lordship of Christ over his people in place of the lordship of Caesar.

My argument, at least, would be that the story of the Son of man, which is a story about the defeat of pagan oppression and the giving of the kingdom to the suffering community of the saints of the Most High, is used to define the nature of the transition that God’s people must make from judgment to restoration, from oppression to the reign of God over them, from second temple Judaism to the renewal of the covenant in the Spirit. Having made that transition, I think the assurance to the church as a whole is that it will never again have to face such comprehensive oppression and the threat of annihilation. Christ is now Lord over the people of God and his place can never again be usurped.

Yes, churches and believers have been persecuted and oppressed since then, and it would be appropriate to speak of their experience in the light of the New Testament narrative. But I would say, again, that the New Testament doesn’t really look that far ahead. What mattered to the churches was their immediate situation. The fact is that if these small pariah communities had not remained steadfast in the face of extreme hostility from both the synagogues and from the pagan authorities, they would probably have gone the way of countless other oriental religious movements that had attempted to infiltrate the Roman world.

I got the idea from Hirsch’s missional DNA or mDNA. The essence of it is the promise to Abraham that God would bless him, that he would make him fruitful and multiply him, and that he would fill the land. That is clearly meant as a restatement of the original blessing of Genesis 1:28, except that it is in microcosm. If humanity as a whole will not live in accordance with the intentions of the Creator, then perhaps a single family or nation will. My argument is that this cDNA gets transmitted right through the biblical story and in particular is saved from extinction by the faithfulness of Jesus who provides Israel with an alternative path leading to life. So yes, it’s a metaphor, though I can’t believe that you seriously imagined otherwise.

Daniel, I’m really not sure what conclusions to draw from the fact that the Christendom paradigm in other parts of the world. It seems to me that a significant part of the Western church has gone too far down the postmodern road simply to turn back. Global Christianity is migrating into Western Europe and building large churches, often with a strong ‘prosperity’ focus; but they remain largely isolated both from indigenous forms of Christianity and the indigenous culture. It also seems likely that sooner or later global Christendom will run out of cultural and intellectual space and fall off the precipice of modernism in the same way that the Western church has. There are certainly cracks opening up already. The emerging church is becoming increasingly a global and not a purely white, Western phenomenon.

So a lot of questions. But I agree with you that the post-modern church needs to take positive account of global Christendom.

On the cDNA point… I argued in Re:Mission that the calling of Abraham, which is God’s creative response to the comprehensive failure of human society, is conceived in creational terms: it is that God would bless him, that he would make him fruitful and multiply him, and that he would fill the land. This is the language of Genesis 1:28 and it is found throughout the patriarchal narratives. So God’s foundational missional act is to bring into existence a new creation, an alternative to corrupt and idolatrous human society, that has recovered the original blessing of creation.

Because Israel persistently sinned, as a nation it came under a final judgment. So how would the promise, the cDNA, the hope of new creation, of justice and righteousness, be preserved? The answer that the New Testament gives is: through the faithfulness of Jesus, who gave his own life so that Israel might live and not perish. The announcement of that answer to the world is the proclamation of the ‘good news’, the gospel. If you like, the good news is that God has kept his promise to have for himself a new creation people in the world. But to characterize either the cDNA or the gospel as a universal truth risks missing the point. What matters is not some universal truth but the concrete existence of the people, because it is in the corporate life of that people that God’s intentions for his creation are embodied, lived out, and the recovered creational blessing is transmitted to other peoples and cultures.

Thanks, John. Frustration is just part of the process; it doesn’t have to put an end to dialogue. I still think the jibe about a ‘very contentless and anarchic biblical hermeneutic’ was uncalled for, but your gentle rebuke is well taken.

If Peter and others like him weren’t there to challenge the argument, I would have to do it myself. That might make for better scholarship on my part, but at the moment I think it would be less fun.

Peter knows that the dialogues have helped me think through the implications of this historical hermeneutic. I admit that I have a rather tendentious and blinkered approach to biblical interpretation at times, but I do keep the questions in mind. My aim is to see if a coherent, comprehensive and practical account of what it means to be church can be developed in light of a consistent and realistic narrative-historical reading of the texts. And to be honest, I’ve got a lot of intellectual (and even spiritual) satisfaction from watching this perspective evolve. Whether the church - or even that part of it that thinks it is emerging - will ever agree with me, however, is another matter. I am only one minor voice in a cacophonous clamour.

The diagrams were just to impress Alan Hirsch, who does that sort of thing much better than I do. They are slightly tongue-in-cheek.