Your suggestion tends to compensate for the Platonic subordination issue by creating an arguably (not that I would argue it because as I said I sympathise with your view) equally problematic subordination of present to past.

Yes, that is a danger, I agree. But every perspective can be distorted or abused – we always have to be vigilant, self-critical. But I could also turn your ‘problematic subordination’ around and say that a narrative theology makes the past subordinate to the present. We tell stories of where we come from as a people in order to make sense of our identity and purpose in the present. We look to Jesus’ death for Israel as a defining moment in the historical existence of a community.

In fact, that’s exactly how narratives work: one thing leads to another; one event explains subsequent events. Why did Bruce Wayne become a caped crime fighter? Because his parents were gunned down in the street when he was a child. The narrative past is subordinate to the present: it accounts for the present, it determines the present, it gives meaning to the present. It does not have to be the case that ‘ethically… we have less purpose now than the first believers did’. The purpose is always to be the faithful people of God, which is surely an ethically significant vocation. My argument is that we have to be that under different historical or eschatological conditions and that by treating Jesus’ death and resurrection solely as universal, context-free, saving events we greatly restrict our ability to understand and respond to our situation.

If anything, surely, it is the argument that we should simply replicate the practices of the early church without taking into account changes of context that is tantamount to subordinating the present to the past. Christianity becomes the perpetual imitation of its formative moments.

The synchronic and diachronic axes of faith

We can treat Jesus’ death as a universally applicable or accessible event – to the extent that we can say, ‘Jesus died for my sins’, with very little sense of that being an event in the story of a historical community. In other words, we relate to his death in conversion or in worship or in discipleship synchronically as an ever-present metaphysical reality. But that makes it in effect a Platonic or perhaps Gnostic myth: we may insist by faith that it is true, even that it is something that can be personally experienced, but there is no realistic sense in which Jesus’ death forms part of my personal narrative.

As a people, however, we are part of a historical narrative stretching back through the experience of global and then European Christendom, to the early church, to Israel, and eventually to Abraham. The death of Jesus is an integral, realistic, non-mythical part of that story, to which we now relate as a community diachronically. The question I am raising is, Why do we prefer the ‘mythical’ account over the historical account? Why do we prioritize the personal, existential, ahistorical interpretation of Jesus’ death over the community-based, historical interpretation – indeed, often to the exclusion of the historical interpretation?

This is not a matter of whether Jesus’ death really was an atoning sacrifice or whether he really was raised from the dead. It is a question of why we choose to locate that event in a mythical narrative rather than in a historical narrative.

The New Testament trajectory

Is it not a better solution to simply take the New Testament church, for what it was in its own context, responding to the issues of its own day, on an equal footing with the issues we face in our own day?

If we put it in terms of responding dynamically to present circumstances under guidance from the Holy Spirit, that’s fine – except that ‘under guidance from the Holy Spirit’ must presuppose some sort of biblical framework or it can be made to mean whatever we wish. So we are back with the question of how we construe that biblical framework.

We could assume as we have tended to do that we are called to do what the early church did for the reasons that the early church did it. Or we can extrapolate from the narrative trajectory of the New Testament. My argument in Re: Mission is that the New Testament church is designed to participate in a narrative of suffering and vindication that is expected to culminate in the foreseeable future in some sort of public victory over aggressive pagan imperialism. That narrative, however, slots into a larger narrative about the renewal of creation to which the church had to adjust after Constantine. The church adjusted to that narrative imperfectly, and the model it developed has now effectively collapsed. So I think that we are again having to construe what it means to respond to the calling to be new creation – both in the imperfection of our concrete existence and prophetically, being a sign, as Christendom imperfectly was, of the hope that God makes all things new.

This is not simply a pragmatic argument about how we respond to present circumstances. To my mind it is in the first place an argument about how we read the New Testament. Postmodernism (roughly speaking) has afforded as a different perspective on the construction of significant meaning; and I think that it is worth asking how far we can push the contextually sensitive, narrative-historical reading, which has unquestionably been extremely fruitful – even Peter will admit that. I think it can be taken further than Tom Wright has taken it – I think he loses his nerve. But I freely admit that it can be pushed too far, not least because the New Testament already offers different perspectives on the significance of Jesus’ death, and appears in places to strain towards a more universal formulation.

I agree. Several different people have brought this concern up with Andrew—including myself. There is an overvaluation of the past at the expense of the present.

Jesus’ life, death and resurrection put into their historical context is a great and worthy task. It may elucidate the social and theological lives of people then, in the ancient world. But we are here today, in the late modern world. So, it seems the more relevant questions have to center on what Jesus’ life, death and resurrection mean to followers today. And it will have many varying meanings depending on the context in which it is articulated—be it suburban America or urban China or rural Africa.