The Mennonite Centre Trust and the Anabaptist Network are holding a Disorganised Religion day in London on 3rd November to explore “how alternative ways of understanding the bible might help us recover how we can live distinctively in 21st Century Britain”. They will have Lloyd Pietersen there, whose book Reading the Bible After Christendom will presumably set the parameters and direction for the conversation. More details can be found on the London Mennonite Centre website.
I’ve signed up already. I don’t entirely buy the Anabaptist line—I think that we have to accept that “Christendom”, for all its failings, was in important respects the fulfilment of central New Testament hopes, not a lamentable aberration from pure New Testament ecclesiology. But the Anabaptists take the post-Christendom context much more seriously than most strands of the post-modern church, and I expect this to be a stimulating event.
I will also take this opportunity to highlight the fact that I have finally started a list of resources that have shaped my thinking or that support, to a lesser or greater degree, the sort of narrative-historical reading and application of scripture that I am arguing for here. The only book on the list is Pietersen’s, though I have only glanced through it. It will take a while to develop it, but if anyone wants to make recommendations—and is willing to provide a brief description of the book or article—I will happily include submissions. Please use the contact form.
I think that we have to accept that “Christendom”, for all its failings, was in important respects the fulfilment of central New Testament hopes, not a lamentable aberration from pure New Testament ecclesiology.
For what it’s worth, and I suppose very little in this environment, I propose that central New Testament hopes were for the kingdom of God, which now resides as leaven in the lump of Christendom and the world outside it, and thus whose coming remains largely unnoticed and unheralded by a church preoccupied with itself.
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