I gave Greg Boyd a copy of Re: Mission at the Christian Associates staff conference in Sopron. He read it straightaway and we had a highly invigorating chat about it on the bus to the airport. He has posted a short review of it on his blog. I’m delighted that he recommends the book so enthusiastically, but there are some matters raised by his review that I think need clarification.
The first is that the book was not written for Christian Associates and should not be taken as representative of the thinking of the organization. It is simply my attempt to work out a consistent narrative-historical reading of the Bible with particular regard to the mission of the church after Christendom.
Secondly, the reason I don’t like the label ’preterist’ is that it makes the book sound like a defence of a predetermined eschatological category - or worse, of a closed, dogmatic, baggage-laden, sectarian movement. I knew virtually nothing about Preterism until after the book was published - and don’t know a great deal about it now. The two guiding hermeneutical assumptions for me were: i) that the New Testament engages realistically and urgently with the actual conditions and foreseeable future of the early church; and ii) that the New Testament interprets these conditions and this foreseeable future in the light of analogous Old Testament narratives.
Thirdly, it is misleading to say that in my view ’almost everything we read in the New Testament about the second coming of Christ, the coming of the kingdom, the "wrath to come," the "wars and rumors of wars," "salvation," the "redemption of the saints," etc… is to be understood as referring to the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 A.D.’ My argument is that the New Testament in effect addresses the challenges of three eschatological moments or horizons. (Greg has since modified his remarks on this point, but I’ll let this response stand.)
1. The first is the war against Rome and the destruction of Jerusalem, which looms large in Jesus’ prophetic imagination but is not limited to the Gospels: it is also evident particularly in Acts, Romans, and Revelation. This is the event that would fundamentally vindicate the decision of the ’Son of man’ to establish an alternative community in defiance of the Jewish authorities.
2. There is the horizon of the foreseen victory of the suffering community over pagan imperialism. This is a more distant and much hazier prospect, but for the church as it moved out into the pagan world it was certainly not less important than AD 70. They did not want to be persecuted forever; they expected to be historically and publicly vindicated for their loyalty to the confession that Christ and not Caesar was Lord.
3. Most of New Testament eschatology has to do with these first two historical loci - judgment on Jerusalem and judgment on pagan Rome - and the suffering that the church would have to endure as it headed into this tumultuous future. But there is a third horizon that emerges on the outer edge of the New Testament’s prophetic vision, when there will be a resurrection of all the dead, a final justice, a final defeat of evil and death, a final renewal of heaven and earth, and the Creator will come to dwell in the midst of humanity (Rom. 8:19-23; 1 Cor. 15:24-28; Rev. 20:11-22:5).
This third horizon may be somewhat peripheral to the vision of the New Testament - realistically the New Testament is preoccupied with the more pressing historical challenges that the early church would face. But in terms of the larger narrative about the calling of a people to be God’s new creation in the midst of the nations and cultures of the world it is of huge significance. It defines for us a fundamental future hope that sin and death will not have the final word on creation. The mission of the church, in essence, is to embody that hope in life and practice.
