The J. Craig Venter Institute has announced that it has successfully created the first living cell by means of man-made genetic instructions. Venter told The Times:

It is our final triumph. This is the first synthetic cell. It’s the first time we have started with information in a computer, used four bottles of chemicals to write up a million letters of DNA software, and actually got it to boot up in a living organism.

Inevitably the breakthrough will provoke much bewildered and alarmist debate among Christians, highly sensitized by the long-running cultural wars over evolution, abortion, and stem-cell research, about the ethics of creating and manipulating life at such a fundamental level. All that’s probably unavoidable and maybe necessary; but it could also cause us to miss a more subtle and more significant transformation that is taking place.

In his disappointing and underachieving book The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, Philip Pullman has a disillusioned Jesus pray to the emptiness in Gethsemane. There are no miracles, no healings, no answers to prayer – he cannot keep making promises that God never fulfils. There will be no great coming of the Kingdom of God, no dramatic divine infraction in the lifetime of the people who had heard him teach. Maybe his brother Christ was right when he talked about ‘this great organisation, this church of his that was going to serve as the vehicle for the Kingdom on earth’ (197). Jesus’ whole being revolts against the prospect because he can see what will happen, how the devil will rub his hands with glee – the extravagant temples and palaces, the aggression, the exploitation of the poor and of the innocent and not least of the children…

I have been reading a book by Cory Labanow called Evangelicalism and the Emerging Church (Ashgate, 2009) for the purpose of writing a review for the Evangelical Quarterly. The book is an ethnographical study of a rather poorly camouflaged Vineyard congregation in the UK that has expressly associated itself with the ‘emerging church’ movement. The research was done in 2003-04, and in the fast-moving world of contemporary ecclesiology it is likely that a lot of water has passed under the bridge since then for all concerned. But it is an interesting example of how such formal academic work might cast light on the dilemma of the emerging church and its difficult relationship with modern evangelicalism.

When we think of the words ‘gospel’ or ‘evangelism’, what invariably comes to mind is the church telling people (often reluctantly) that God loves them, that Jesus died for them, and that if they believe in this good news, they will have the assurance of eternal life, by which is usually meant life after death in heaven. This is a very inadequate synopsis of how the word euangelion (‘good news’ or ‘gospel’) and the verb euangelizō (‘to proclaim good news’) are used in the New Testament. The problem essentially is that these important biblical categories have been extracted from their original context and modified to fit an understanding of Christianity as a universal, a-historical system of belief, whose ultimate objective is to secure eternal life. If we restore these categories to their natural environment (see also ‘How to rescue Romans from the fish tank of Reformed theology and return it to the sea of history’), what emerges is a powerful story about how a devastating crisis in the history of the people of God came to be interpreted as good news for the world.

I regard myself as an evangelical, but the social and intellectual structures that have sustained and made sense of modern evangelicalism are disintegrating, and it is not at all clear that modern evangelicalism can or should survive their collapse. My broad aim as a theologian is to endeavour to renew the biblical framework within which a new, transposed ‘evangelical’ commitment might emerge, one that might provide self-understanding and motivation for the church as it confronts an uncertain future. The key to this undertaking, in my view, is first to recover the contingent historical perspective of the New Testament as it imagined its own future – a programme which will, in fact, get us to the heart of New Testament theology; and then to set about the creative and adventurous task of re-imagining new futures for ourselves consistent with that critically, realistically, and faithfully reconstructed narrative. If you like, this constitutes a rough manifesto for this website.

Here’s an extraordinary insight into the historical Jesus from an ancient source that is unquestionably independent of the Gospels. The historian Josephus, writing a few years after the disastrous Jewish uprising against Roman occupation, describes Jesus as a rustic from the provinces who came to Jerusalem at the time of the Feast of Tabernacles and began publicly to prophesy impending disaster for the city.

In a display of extra-legal frustration, leaders of the Jews had him arrested and severely beaten. Jesus submitted to the chastisement without complaint, merely reiterating his belief that the city and the people were doomed. Supposing that ‘this was a sort of divine fury in the man’, the authorities brought him before the Roman procurator, who had him whipped until his bones were exposed. But, Josephus tells us, Jesus did not ‘make any supplication for himself, nor shed any tears, but turning his voice to the most lamentable tone possible, at every stroke of the whip his answer was, “Woe, woe to Jerusalem!”’ When the procurator questioned Jesus about his identity and the meaning of his dismal message, Jesus refused to answer. Seeing no great threat in the man the procurator washed his hands of him, but in the end Jesus was killed by the Romans.

The clownfish Nemo has been netted in the open seas, just off the reef that he calls home, and imprisoned along with a number of other exotic tropical creatures in a fish tank in the office of a Sydney dentist. In addition to the humiliation of their captivity, they face the threat of being bagged and committed to the unsafe keeping of the ghastly, destructive child Darla.

This is a metaphor – or a parable. Nemo and his friends in the tank are the key elements of Paul’s theology in Romans: gospel, wrath, salvation, righteousness, faith…. They have been forcibly decontextualized and confined to the artificial and very modern environment of a personal narrative, whose end is the assured salvation of the individual. As if that affront to their dignity were not bad enough, if they do not escape soon, they are likely to meet a wretched end at the hands of a brutish and careless secularism.

The point is not that these beautiful creatures have been rendered meaningless – they have been kept alive, and to some good; but they have been diminished, misrepresented, misunderstood. So what can we do to ensure that they are returned to the surging, expansive sea of history? Here are some suggestions.

Traditional biblical ecclesiologies mostly assume that the pattern for the life and purpose of the church is directly and sufficiently established in the account of its genesis that we have in the New Testament. Jesus gave the movement its initial impetus by calling and teaching the first disciples; Pentecost and the preaching of the apostles added an expansionist dynamic; and the teaching of Paul and other New Testament writers gave concrete definition to its communal life.

That pattern always requires new contextualization – the emerging church today is understood by many to be simply the recontextualization of the New Testament pattern in a postmodern cultural setting. But the general relevance of the original model – within the framework of a broadly evangelical theology – is rarely questioned. What the church was, it is now, and ever shall be. It seems to me, however, that this very flat, two-dimensional understanding of how the form of church today is determined by the form of the New Testament church must be challenged in two important respects, the first basically exegetical, the second historical.

Here is a good reason for taking seriously the thesis of The Coming of the Son of Man: New Testament Eschatology for an Emerging Church: it offers a neat, cogent and historically meaningful way of reconciling the conflicting views of Markus Bockmuehl and NT Wright, though admittedly in a manner that neither are likely to be impressed by.

In a lecture entitled ‘Did St. Paul Go to Heaven When He Died?” presented at the recent Wheaton ‘Theological Dialogue with N.T. Wright’ Bockmuehl takes issue with Wright’s view that the final hope of believers is not heaven but resurrection as part of a renewed creation here on earth. Bockmuehl argues essentially that neither the New Testament nor Patristic tradition found anything fundamentally odd or intolerable about the idea that resurrected bodies should go to heaven.

In a paper on ‘The Nicene Marks in a Post-Christendom Church’ (2006) Darrell Guder discusses the challenges facing mainline Protestant churches such as the PCUSA now that ‘Christendom is over’. He thinks that there is a consensus among ‘schooled observers’ that a fundamental paradigm shift is underway but doubts that this is a perception shared by the general church-going public. The decline of Christendom has given rise to considerable confusion and uncertainty regarding the identity and purpose of the church: ‘Ultimately, this massive paradigm shift confronts us with the most basic of questions: Why is there a church at all?’ But he thinks that the crisis presents us with an opportunity to ‘reassess the western theological tradition from the liberating perspective of the actual and unquestioned end of Christendom’.