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?