I came across some comments posted by Patrick in a nice conversation about ‘the future of Christian eschatology’ on Jesus Creed, which capture the sort of problems that many people have with the thesis of both The Coming of the Son of Man and Re: Mission. Rather than clog up Scott McKnight’s elegant blog with my self-justification, I have addressed the main points here. This is Patrick’s complaint:

…I spent some time struggling through Andrew Perriman’s Re:Mission: Biblical Mission for a Post-Biblical Church a while ago. As the title suggests he pushes his preterism so far that pretty well nothing in the Bible speaks to Christians today, we are ‘off the map’ in a post-Biblical age. Jesus never imagined Gentiles being added to the church; the kingdom has come and is no longer the hope of the church; the parousia has happened; even Phil 2:9-10 becomes a text fulfilled in the first century etc … I found this sort of radical historicism very destructive, it seemed to remove the Bible from the church - in contrast to N T Wright’s Surprised by Hope which seems to ‘balance’ historicism with the ‘not yet’ in a much more biblical and constructive way?

If we accept that Jesus had a historical horizon in view, namely the war against Rome, should we not at least consider the possibility that Paul also looked into the future with a similar realism? The Old Testament narrative that makes sense of Jesus’ prophetic outlook also points to a conflict with an aggressive paganism that is quite naturally interpreted in relation to the conflict with Rome and the expectation of an eventual victory. This proved to be just as much a historical reality – and just as much a vindication of the suffering community – as the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple was from the more limited perspective of Jesus and the movement in Judea.

Yes, I think it is right to say that the kingdom has come because the kingdom expectation seems to be so bound up with the renewal of Israel (cf. eg. Isaiah 52 and Daniel 7). But that does not mean that ‘kingdom’ is not part of the hope of the church. The church lives out missionally what it means to be a renewed people that proclaims Christ as the one to whom that kingdom or lordship has been given. My argument is simply that the language of this reign ‘coming’ belongs to the story of the judgment and restoration of Israel. Once we get beyond that historically (that is the point of us being a ‘post-biblical church’), our ‘horizon’ – and our fundamental hope – becomes that of creation renewed.

Where I differ from Wright’s schema in Surprised by Hope is simply in separating out the New Testament ‘parousia’ hope of victory over the pagan oppressor (expressed eg. in Phil. 2:5-11 or 2 Thess. 1-2 or Rev. 18-19) from the prospect of a final judgment of all the dead, a final defeat of evil and death, and a complete remaking of heaven and earth. Wright sees these as part of the same event, but there is no renewal of creation in either 1 Thess. 4:13-18 or 2 Thess. 2:1-12; and there is no coming of the Son of man in Revelation 20:7-21:8.

Again I would stress that, apart from the detailed exegetical arguments (addressed in much greater depth in The Coming of the Son of Man), this has to do in a very serious way with the realistic assumption that Paul and the church in the Greek-Roman world would have wanted to speak prophetically about an eventual end to persecution and a vindication of the Christian movement not only against apostate Judaism but also against Roman imperial paganism. This is partly why I am resistant to the label ‘preterist’. This is a perspective that has not been developed backwards from debates over preferred end-times scenarios. I think it arises quite properly out of the story of Jesus, grounded historically and biblically, and of the movement within Israel that he inaugurated.

Finally, I would suggest that the argument of Re: Mission makes us a more, not less, biblical people because it connects us narratively to the larger biblical story about the vocation of a new creation people, in which the decisive redemptive story about Jesus and the early church is inescapably embedded. I think this can still be described as an ‘evangelical’ position, but in a broader sense than is characteristic of modern usage. I think we need to understand the ‘good news’ with consistent historical discernment along a diachronic rather than synchronic axis.