Mike Morrell has articulated a good question about the thesis of The Coming of the Son of Man and Re: Mission. It comes down to this: Given the metaphorical potential of biblical language, what keeps us from deflating all apparently final language to historical proportions? Or more crudely: Why not ‘go the full preterist route’? By what criteria do we decide that in some contexts the language of cosmic transformation is figurative and in other contexts literal? This is how he sums it up:

I see the first and second horizons clearly in Scripture, but I guess what you see as a third horizon I see as firmly ensconced in your second. I don’t know if the NT writers could be metaphorical and symbolic when speaking of Rome’s downfall but then woodenly literal when talking about the cessation of natural forces and planets.

I must say, I understand the force of Mike’s comments and I have toyed with the idea that Revelation 21-22, for example, offers simply another metaphorical representation of the mundane transformation of the people of God, much as we have in Isaiah 65. However, on both theological and literary grounds I am still inclined to think that something beyond the mundane, something that supercedes history, is imagined on the outer edge of the New Testament vision. Jesus does not speak in such terms - his eyes are firmly on the first horizon of the war against Rome; and I think that much of the cosmic language used elsewhere (2 Peter 3:10-13, for example) is meant to describe historical events in a foreseeable future. But a number of thoughts or texts suggest to me that the early church, presumably as a result of its reflection on Jesus’ resurrection, came to envisage an ultimate victory of the creator over evil and death.

The implications of Jesus’ resurrection

I think we have to affirm that Jesus’ resurrection was ontologically real, not merely a spiritual resurrection. Paul certainly makes metaphorical use of it, consistent with Old Testament language, to speak of the transformation of those who are baptized into Christ and receive the Spirit by which Jesus was raised from the dead. But in 1 Corinthians 15 he appears to argue both for the (transformed) bodily reality of Jesus’ resurrection and for a future resurrection of those in Christ - a hope that he expresses for himself much more personally in Philippians 3:10.

My argument in The Coming of the Son of Man is that Paul is thinking here not of a final resurrection but of a resurrection of the martyrs at the second horizon of the church’s victory over Rome; but the point is, in any case, that we have the expectation of a real resurrection not only of Jesus but of those ‘in him’. I agree with Wright and others who argue that resurrection is a ‘new creation’ event and therefore an anomaly prior to a renewal of creation of the same ontological character as Jesus’ resurrection. So in the apocalyptic narrative Jesus and the martyrs reign in heaven from the moment of their vindication until the time when they can find a fitting home in a new ontology - a new heavens and new earth.

A thousand years to go

There is presumably a reason why, in the closing chapters of Revelation, a rather uneventful thousand year period is inserted between the resurrection of the martyrs directly after judgment on Rome (the ‘first resurrection’) and a final resurrection and judgment, significantly of all the dead, not merely of those in Christ, following the abrupt disappearance of the old heavens and earth. It seems to me that this must be intended to dissociate the final judgment scene from the historical defeat of blasphemous Roman paganism. Why would he choose to do that? Why would he add to the historically relevant apocalyptic narrative such an indeterminate future beyond the fall of Rome? It seems to me that the best explanation is that he needed to establish the sort of symbolic distance between the second horizon and a final judgment that would allow a radically different type of hope to emerge in the final visions.

John then describes the new creation in a way that makes it difficult to suppose that he conceives it as simply a ‘natural’ continuation of the old order of things - of our geology. When Isaiah speaks of the restoration of Israel as a renewal of heaven and earth, there are some utopian elements in the description, but he does not dare to imagine that death and sin are finally defeated: ‘the young man shall die a hundred years old, and  the sinner a hundred years old shall be accursed’ (Is. 65:17-20). John re-uses Isaiah’s vision, but he emphatically consigns both evil and death to the lake of fire, which is the second death - an image, it seems to me, of absolute destruction.

I would argue, therefore, that John works very hard in these final chapters, within the parameters and possibilities determined by the apocalyptic genre, to suggest that out of the narrative of covenant renewal, culminating in the resurrection of Jesus, there has emerged a fundamentally different type of hope.

The last enemy is death

Paul also speaks of a final victory over death, not on the grounds that the believer is now raised with Christ in a spiritual sense, but because he expects the suffering church to be raised in the future, at the parousia, at the second horizon of the church’s vindication against its enemies. He is not describing the same ‘moment’ as John describes in Revelation, which is why he speaks of inheriting the kingdom rather than of the renewal of creation. The argument is put to the church not because they have failed to realize the spiritual dimensions of their new resurrection life. Indeed, Paul reproaches them for imagining that they have already become kings, they already reign, when the reality is that the church, like the apostles, faces suffering and death (1 Cor. 4:8-13). Without the hope in a literal resurrection following a literal death - and not merely a spiritual resurrection following a spiritual death - their vaunted faith is worthless (1 Cor. 15:12-19). But if this literal resurrection does not in turn presuppose a literal new creation, we are left with what is ultimately the very un-Jewish prospect of resurrected bodies trapped forever in the non-bodily sphere of God’s existence.

The eager longing of creation

Romans 8:20-23 also seems to me to express a more ‘literal’ hope for the transformation of creation, a release from the tyranny of death and perhaps the second law of thermodynamics. It would be hard to maintain that Paul introduces this expectation merely as a figure for the transformation of the community. In fact, I would argue that here the historical transformation of the community provides the ground for personified creation’s hope in its own eventual transformation.

Do we really want a new creation anyway?

One question Mike poses I find particularly interesting: “Can we, in the 21st century, dare hope (or even want to hope) for a literal ‘do-over’ of our geology?” I would say in this regard that although the New Testament finds it necessary to affirm, in apocalyptic language and as a matter of fundamental theological conviction, the ultimate victory of the creator over the enemies of his creation, it does not encourage us to think of this as a simple extension of our own history or geology. The only narrative of this final transformation that we have is Revelation 20:7-21:4, and not only the symbolic thousand years but also the curiously undramatic flight of the old cosmos from the presence of God (20:11) suggest that John is much more concerned with the theological significance of this vision than with the narrative-historical relation between the old and the new. The early church waited anxiously and impatiently for its historical vindication and the end of suffering. There is no comparable suggestion that we now as the people of God should be similarly preoccupied with the actual end of history, though Romans 8:20-23 keeps in view a fundamental yearning of all things to be free from pain and death.

It seems to me that this at least gives us room to affirm that the creator will have the last say over his creation, that the final existential enemy will be defeated, and indeed that as God’s covenant people we will in the end be vindicated for having put our trust in the God who raised Jesus from the dead, without at the same time compromising our sense of being called to exist in and for the sake of the existing historical and geological reality. In fact, I would argue now, in the post-second-horizon circumstances of the church, that it is supremely John’s vision of all creation made new that establishes the dimensions of our prophetic calling. Yes, an over-emphasis on an ideal future may erode the integrity of our being in the world, but it belongs to the nature of authentic prophecy to resist that temptation and remain firmly connected with the reality of what it means to be human.

I have argued a couple of times recently that Jesus’ post-resurrection instruction to his followers to make disciples of all nations, which we call the Great Commission, is actually more restricted in its scope than we have traditionally understood it to be. There was some discussion of this point under What is a missional church? And why I think Mark Driscoll is wrong; but you could also have a look at Matt. 28:16-20 - The not so Great Commission.

My basic argument is that the instruction is given within a pressing and historically relevant eschatological horizon and with a limited purpose in mind. So first, the reference to the ‘end of the age’ has in view the war against Rome and the destruction of Jerusalem; and in light of that, secondly, we should suppose that Jesus’ purpose was to ensure that this new community of restored Israel, centred around his disciples, would be securely established as an international movement, in fulfilment of eschatological hopes outlined chiefly in Isaiah, before national Israel was consumed by the foreseen political catastrophe. To be baptized in the name of the Father who restores Israel, of the Son who suffers in expectation of being vindicated, and of the prophetic and renewing Spirit was to be initiated into a community of eschatological transition, through whose faithfulness and endurance the people of God would be saved from destruction - and indeed, from historical irrelevance.

If this is correct - if as a matter of strict biblical interpretation we should read this is as a contextually limited instruction analogous to Moses sending spies into Canaan to spy out the land - are we then to assume that this Great-ish Commission has no relevance for the ‘post-eschatological’ church, the church after AD 70 or after the collapse of Roman paganism - or however we wish to characterize the ‘end of the age’? A friend recently sent me the following comments, which provides a good opportunity to draft a response to that question.

I was interested to note your view that the Great Commission was set in the context of disciples living in the expectation of the destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70, which makes a lot of sense to me. I read the discussion on Open Source Theology but would be interested in more detail as to how your understanding of the Great Commission affects the church today. As far as I see, your argument is that the task of making disciples needs to be looked at in the immediate context in which a local church finds itself. Is this a fair summary?

Historical truth is not inferior to metaphysical truth

I would insist, in the first place, that the fact that Jesus’ commission to his disciples relates to a particular moment or period in the history of the people of God does not mean that it has no relevance to the church today. But the relevance it has must be construed, in the first place, historically or narratively. We find this difficult because our modern minds are so accustomed to dealing with religious ideas on an ahistorical or existential or metaphysical basis. We make the Platonic assumption that historical reality is somehow inferior to abstract, absolute, and universal truth. So we can’t help but think that if we shrink the Great Commission to these restricted historical proportions, we have diminished its religious value in some way. I don’t think that’s the case.

I think that the effect is rather to elevate the significance of the community as it relates to God not merely in its geographical or cultural context but in its narrative context. Not least at a time when the future of the church is very much a cause for concern in the West, it is important to recognize that scripture is always preoccupied both with the past and the future of the people - that is, with the narrative which is continually being told in order to account for its existence. We have forgotten how to do that because we have come to think of the church as an unchanging entity, doing what Jesus told us to do, happily floating along on the river of history, paying little attention to the passing scenery - or the treacherous rapids that lie ahead. What a historical reading of the New Testament teaches us is that we are not the early church; we have to learn to trust God, make sense of what it means to call ourselves the ‘people of God’, under our own pressing historical circumstances.

To my mind that does not diminish but rather enhances the ‘truth value’ of scripture. It is of enormous importance to us that Jesus sent out followers to make disciples from all nations who would learn the radical obedience and trust necessary for a people - communities, fellowships, churches - to walk the narrow path leading to life. But the question still remains.

Should we still be making disciples?

To be a disciple of Jesus was to learn to walk the road that he walked, which meant leaving behind family and home and livelihood, enduring rejection and vilification, proclaiming that the God of Israel had acted in defiance both of national Judaism and pagan Rome in raising Jesus from the dead, quite possibly facing imprisonment, physical punishment and death, clinging to the hope that through all this they would be vindicated as a community along with Jesus. This is not some sort of generic, one-size-fits-all, Sunday-school discipleship: it is the specific adoption of a radical calling and a radical lifestyle under the extreme eschatological conditions that are foreseen in the New Testament. It is a quite literal ‘imitation of Christ’ - a willing participation in his sufferings and vindication, which is why I think there is a problem with current approaches to mission and church that focus on the person of Jesus in isolation from his narrative context (see also Being a disciple of Jesus is not enough).

So how do we proceed from here? The New Testament defines a community of eschatological transition, called and discipled for that purpose. But this community makes that transition in Christ, through the upheaval of war, the devastation of national Judaism, and the eventual bankrupting of Roman paganism, for the sake of a people of God that was always meant to be ‘new creation’. I see this as a much more expansive, creative, humane, social, encultured vocation than the definition of a Christ-like community that we find in the New Testament. But I also think that this post-eschatological ‘new creation’ vocation is anticipated in the New Testament, not least in the emergence of the conviction that the Jesus who died and was raised for the sake of the historical restoration of the people of God is also the one through who all things are made. The one who is ‘firstborn from the dead’ is also ‘firstborn of all creation’ (Col. 1:15, 18).

The New Testament community located itself primarily in the story of the one who suffered and was vindicated, the story of the Son of man, the ‘firstborn from the dead’, who was eventually given victory over the pagan oppressor; and it undertook the task of discipleship on that basis. The post-eschatological community - that is, the church as we know it - locates itself primarily in the bigger story about the renewal of creation, in the story of the cosmic Christ, the ‘firstborn of all creation’; and we do ‘discipleship’, if we want to retain the term, on that basis. But then discipleship becomes learning how to do life well, learning how to exploit and experience the fulness of life that is found in this cosmic Christ, as a prophetic sign that God is creator and that he will not ultimately be rendered ineffectual or redundant by the corruption of creation. That is a possibility for us because the early church pursued a much narrower and much more constrained form of discipleship, taking up its cross in imitation of the one who suffered and was raised from the dead.

But then again…

Having said that, it is important to recognize that we are always ‘new creation’ under difficult conditions: there are always contextual challenges. In particular, the church in the West is having to learn how to be authentically and prophetically ‘new creation’ after Christendom, and there is perhaps some point to seeing that situation as analogous to the situation of the early church: we are in structural transition, and this imposes constraints on the life of the community to which our ‘discipleship’, if we choose to retain the term, must adapt (see also We have to go back, but not to square one). So I think that we have to ask ourselves serious questions about how we shape and develop communities that will successfully make the journey from Christendom - or from the modern church, if that is easier to get a handle on - to whatever lies ahead.

Perhaps in that thought of shaping communities lies a key to what it means to do discipleship as ‘new creation’ under present conditions. Modern ecclesiology has put the emphasis on making individual disciples - though ironically any individuality was usually ironed out in the process. In our post-modern, post-Christendom context I suggest that we need to think much more in terms of fashioning a certain type of community life, a certain type of culture, adapted to local conditions, but cognizant of the community’s place in the narrative.

There was an interesting article in the UK Times yesterday about the global success of ‘US-style muscular Christianity’ - that is, evangelicalism. The article is by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge and is based on their book God is Back: How the Global Revival of Faith is Changing the World.

The basic thesis is familiar enough. There is some evidence for decline in church attendance in North America (they cite Jon Meacham’s Newsweek article on ‘The Decline and Fall of Christian America’). But in South America, Africa and Asia the evangelical church is flourishing. Adherents of the much ridiculed faith of Ned Flanders (they think of this very much as an American export success) can be found ‘in churches the size of football stadiums across Latin America, in 4,850ha (12,000-acre) “redemption camps” in Nigeria, in storefront churches in the slums of Rio and Guatemala City, in brick-and-mud tabernacles with metal roofs and dirt floors in rural South Africa’.

In post-Communist Russia 86% of the population identify themselves with Christianity (not an American export success, of course); and China, which already has more Christians than Communist Party members, is well on its way to becoming the world’s largest Christian country.

In light of this it is Europe’s proud secularist tradition that appears to be the historical and sociological anomaly; and even Europe is proving less resistant to religion than is usually assumed. Micklethwait and Wooldridge think that not only Islam but also Evangelical Christianity and charismatic Catholicism are on the rise, albeit from small bases. More than two million people have taken the Alpha course; Tony Blair now does God; and Nicolas Sarkozy has written a book arguing that religious voices should be heard in the public square.

The statement that really caught me off-balance, however, was this one: ‘Look around the world and you find that risible old Nedward - or at least the phenomenon he epitomises - has won one of the great intellectual battles of the past two centuries.’ Now it has seemed to me that Christianity in the West has lost pretty much every intellectual battle it has fought over the last two centuries; and in continuing to oppose the theory of evolution on the grounds that it contradicts scripture it shows itself determined not to interrupt a losing streak. How on earth can they claim that Christianity has won a great intellectual battle?

Of course, they are referring to one particular point of debate - that secularism will eventually eradicate religion in the same way that a competent and rational society might expect to eradicate other communicable diseases. And Evangelicalism has not so much won the intellectual battle as defied the opinion of intellectuals such as the sociologist C. Wright Mills, who argued in 1959 that ‘in due course, the sacred shall disappear altogether, except, possibly, in the private realm’.

But the assertion serves to highlight a huge but quite simple and probably unanswerable question: Is Christianity on an unstoppable upward trend? Or is it bound sooner or later to run into the Slough of Post-Christendom (Post-Colonial?) Despond.

Will the global church have to fall to the ground and die to itself in the way that the European church has done? Or does it have enough momentum, enough exuberance, enough stuff-you-secularism faith, enough uncomplicated confidence in the reality of God, to leap over the challenges of modernism and postmodernism - the two sides of the rationalist coin - in a single bound? Does the future lie with the global church or with the emerging, post-Christendom church?

Or to put it another way: Do the intellectual battles really matter?

Or to put it another way: What are we all so worried about?

I forget quite how I got there - by what tortuous cyber-trail - but I came across a post on Mark Driscoll’s Resurgence blog promoting his new book Vintage Church, in which he touches on the question of what ‘missional church’ is. Driscoll is not naïve. Even from this brief statement the polemical agenda is clear: he is attempting to wrest control of the terminology from various progressive or emerging movements that have made things far too complicated and attach it to a neo-Reformed programme (see also Literal this that and the other, and for a different aspect of the debate Peter Wilkinson’s review of Tom Wright’s response to John Piper on justification). My comments here have to do not so much with the nature of missional church as with the underlying theological model that shapes our understanding of mission. According to one paradigm Driscoll is absolutely right, but I think that the paradigm is wrong - or at least seriously misleading.

There is a dominant paradigm that takes the missional task of the church to be a direct and straightforward continuation of the Great Commission. Jesus sent the disciples into the world to make disciples from all nations, to baptize them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and to teach them how to live in accordance with his teaching. Although Jesus says nothing about the church in the texts that Driscoll cites in support of this paradigm (Matt. 28:19-20; Mark 16:15-16; Luke 24:46-49; John 20:20-31; Acts 1:5-8), Driscoll finds in these narratives the template for a missional agenda for the church that will eventually encompass the whole world:

Jesus speaks of going, evangelizing, making disciples, and planting churches that plant churches to continue the process. Therefore, the mission of the church is nothing less than bringing the entire world to Christian faith and maturity.

That task is not going to change - it will last until the end of the age. What the missional church has to do is not question the timeless mandate but in timely fashion ‘strategize how to carry out the mission to today’s increasingly non-Christian culture’.

The second paradigm, unfortunately, sets out by doing exactly that: it questions the simplistic application of the timeless mandate, on two grounds.

First, it recognizes the historical context in which the instruction to the disciples was given, asking in particular (I would suggest) what Jesus meant when he said that he would be with them not ‘always’ (as in many translations) but ‘every day until the end of the age’. In the context of the Gospels the end of the age can only refer to the decisive political-religious transition that would by triggered by the war against Rome and the destruction of Jerusalem (cf. Matt. 24:2-3). Acts 1:5-8, which Driscoll also cites in support of his argument, points to the pressing eschatological context: the sending out of the disciples to the end of the earth has something to do with the restoration of the kingdom to Israel. This cannot be reduced to a simple matter of endlessly producing disciples and churches.

This recognition encourages us to consider, secondly, how Jesus’ instruction to the disciples fits into the overarching narrative about the restoration of the people of God. Paul’s argument in Romans captures perfectly the missional programme that we find in Isaiah, which is that God redeems Israel, heralds are sent out to declare this fact to the nations, and as a consequence the nations acknowledge the glory of the God of Israel, even to the point of participating in the process. This is what Paul is getting at in Romans 15. Christ became a servant to the circumcised so that, on the one hand, the promise to Abraham would be confirmed (there was a serious risk of it failing), and on the other, so that the nations would have cause to glorify YHWH for his mercy - not towards the nations, as the following quotations make clear, but towards Israel (Rom. 15:8-12).

Not everyone who says, ‘emerging, emerging,’ will agree with the details of this analysis; but I think it is at least representative of the sort of constructive alternative that is taking shape, and it helps us to see the shortcomings of the traditional paradigm. Driscoll’s approach to mission relies on a drastic truncation of the biblical narrative. The price paid, I think, is a correspondingly diminished sense of the reason for the existence of the people of God in the world. If we reduce mission to the function of disciples making disciples, churches planting churches, we risk missing the wonder of being a historical people called to be - actually and prophetically - new creation in the midst of the nations.

It also ill-equips us to address the particular set of historical challenges that the church in the West, and probably globally, currently faces. By extracting the larger biblical narrative we recover a sense of God journeying with his people from slavery, through wilderness, into nationhood, into exile, through oppression, into revolt, along a narrow path of salvation, through vindication, into an ambiguous alliance with imperialism, and now out into a disturbing postmodern space in which we must imagine again what it means to be loyal to the Creator God. As long as we are tied to a limited Protestant-evangelical perspective, constructed as part of the Christendom experience, we will struggle to make sense of the emerging post-Christendom stage in the journey.

I’ve just been listening to what strikes me as an excellent introductory podcast on eschatology by Martin Scott - a nice example of how a rethinking of eschatology along narrative-historical lines has the potential for generating good new theological syntheses. It caught my eye because Martin lists The Coming of the Son of Man as a ‘provocative’ influence on his thinking alongside NT Wright and Open Theology. But he rather spoils the effect, from my point of view, by concluding that I have presented ‘such a strong fulfilment in the events of AD 70 that you’re left wondering if he proposes an actual parousia at all’.

I have come across this misunderstanding - or at least, misrepresentation - a number of times. I’m not sure how it comes about, unless people are only reading the first two or three chapters; but I will take this opportunity to clarify my argument. It seems to me - and I think the point is made clearly enough in the book - that the New Testament has three quite distinct future horizons.

The first horizon is the foreseen war against Rome, interpreted as the final historical outworking of God’s wrath against a disobedient people. This is basically Jesus’ horizon. As Martin says, following Wright, Jesus is the eschatological prophet to Israel, calling the people to a renewed faithfulness - but also warning them that they are otherwise walking a broad political-religious path that within a generation will lead to the destruction of the nation. Jesus looked to this event as the concrete vindication of his prophetic stance.

The second horizon comes into view as the church moves beyond the borders of national Israel into the pagan world and finds itself opposed by a vast, powerful, and at times virulently hostile belief system, at the pinnacle of which sits the divinized emperor - the king who thinks equality with God a thing to be grasped. Rome is the ‘beast’ that will be the instrument of judgment against Israel, but God will not allow the empire to have ultimate victory over his people. So Paul, in particular, foresees a historical triumph of Jesus as Lord over the lordship of Caesar, and the eventual vindication of the ‘saints’ who suffer at the hands of the blasphemous oppressor. This is how he restates or re-applies the parousia motif - it is the ‘coming’ of Jesus, on the one hand, to deliver his followers from their enemies and, on the other, to receive the ‘kingdom’ that has been taken away from the fourth beast.

The third horizon emerges on the outer edge of New Testament expectation as a corollary of the resurrection of Jesus. I think that Jesus’ resurrection has its conceptual origins - if we can put it that way - in the hope of Israel’s restoration; but a real victory over injustice and death raises the possibility that the whole of creation might be made new. The bodily resurrection of Jesus is seen to entail not only the mundane renewal of the microcosm but also the ultra-mundane renewal of heaven and earth and the final abolition of injustice and defeat of the last enemy of creation, death. The important point to note is that this final horizon is not associated with the language and imagery of the parousia motif, which has to do fundamentally with the historical vindication of the people of God.

So where are we now? We have moved beyond the first two horizons, which have become part of our story, integral to our identity, definitive moments in the the transformation of the historical people of God. But we derive a fundamental hope in the Creator from the vision of a new creation, and we allow that hope to shape our life and mission.

The death and resurrection of Jesus, locked together in a brief three-day period, constitute the defining moment of Christian belief. It is here that the light of God’s love for humanity burns most brightly through the dingy fabric of history. But the light of the Easter event can be so intense at times that we fail to see the surrounding context, the whole unrolled cloth, the long narrative of which the cynical execution and ambiguous resurrection appearances are an integral part - and without which they so easily become misappropriated by a truncated mythology of personal salvation. This simple contribution to our Easter reflections highlights four of the narrative insights that foreshadow and explain the resurrection of Jesus from the dead.

The death and resurrection of Jesus, locked together in a brief three-day period, constitute the defining moment of Christian belief. It is here that the light of God’s love for humanity burns most brightly through the dingy fabric of history. But the light of the Easter event can be so intense at times that we fail to see the surrounding context, the whole unrolled cloth, the long narrative of which the cynical execution and ambiguous resurrection appearances are an integral part - and without which they so easily become misappropriated by a truncated mythology of personal salvation. This simple contribution to our Easter reflections highlights four of the narrative insights that foreshadow and explain the resurrection of Jesus from the dead.

Ezekiel’s vision of a valley of dry bones

Ezekiel is told that the dried, sun-bleached bones of the house of Israel will live; they will be raised from their graves in exile, raised from the death of judgment, and restored to life, brought back to the land (Ezek. 37:1-14). Resurrection is the hope of a nation that has suffered punishment for its failure to observe the terms and conditions of the Law; it is a metaphor for the renewal of the createdl microcosm of Israel through the Spirit of God: “And they will say, ‘This land that was desolate has become like the garden of Eden, and the waste and desolate and ruined cities are now fortified and inhabited’” (Ezek. 36:35).

Resurrection on the third day

Hosea calls rebellious, idolatrous, unrighteous Israel to return to the Lord. The nation has been politically wounded, ‘oppressed, crushed in judgment’ (Hos. 5:9-13), but God will heal it; Israel has been struck down, but he will bind up the people. After two days, the prophet says, God will revive his people; on the third day he will raise them up from death, so that they might live before him (Hos. 6:1-2). Resurrection - indeed, resurrection on the third day - is again a metaphor for the restoration of the people following judgment.

The righteous will shine like stars

At the climax of the crisis of national faith provoked by the Syrian tyrant Antiochus Epiphanes, there will be a time of suffering unlike anything that the nation has experienced before. But the righteous are given hope: the people of YHWH will eventually be delivered from the oppressor; those whose names are written in the book will live. Many of the dead will be raised. Those who have been disloyal to the covenant will be raised to receive ‘shame and everlasting contempt’; but those who suffered because of their faithfulness and who helped to preserve Israel through the crisis by turning many to righteousness will be raised to the life of the coming age: they will ‘shine like the brightness of the sky above…, like the stars forever and ever’ (Dan. 12:1-3).

So Jesus tells a simple but devastating story about a harvest at the end of the age of second temple Judaism, when the weeds of sin and lawlessness will be burned up in the fires of divine judgment, and ‘the righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father’ (Matt. 13:43). Resurrection is the culmination of the crisis of pagan aggression against Israel: it does not mark the end of history; it marks the historical deliverance and vindication of the righteous.

The resurrection of the martyrs

The Maccabean literature also illustrates how this hope of vindication developed under conditions of intense pagan hostility. When the nation is suffering under the brutal hand of the foreign invader because it has sinned against God, resurrection is the hope of the righteous who refuse to renounce their faith even under extreme torment. The fourth of the seven brothers savagely tortured by Antiochus, now at the point of death, upbraids the tyrant: ‘It is desirable that those who die at the hands of human beings should cherish the hope God gives of being raised again by him. But for you there will be no resurrection to life!’ (2 Macc. 7:14). In language that foreshadows Paul, the martyrs are spoken of as athletes in a divine contest:

Truly the contest carried on by them was divine, for then virtue, testing them for their perseverance, offered rewards. Victory meant incorruptibility in long-lasting life. Eleazar contended first; the mother of seven boys entered the fray, and the brothers contended. The tyrant was the antagonist; the world and human society looked on. Godliness won the victory and crowned its own athletes. Who did not marvel at the athletes contending for the divine law code? Who were not astonished? (4 Macc. 17:11-16).

The fulfilment of hope

In his death at the hands of Rome, betrayed by a nation on the brink of apostasy, Jesus suffered for the sins of his people, anticipating the faithfulness of those who would take up their own cross out of loyalty to him during this protracted eschatological crisis. In his resurrection from the dead through the power of the Spirit, he anticipated the restoration of the people of God and the eventual vindication of the community that would take the risk of following him down a narrow and dangerous path leading to life.

The story would soon clash with the dominant religious conceit of the pagan world. Unlike the lawless, blasphemous, self-aggrandizing type of Caesar, Jesus did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped. He embarked on an entirely different trajectory, downwards towards servanthood, humiliation, suffering and death. But God raised him from the defeat of death - he did not abandon his soul to Hades (Acts 2:27) - and gave him a name far above all the governors and kings and emperors of the earth; and because of his faithfulness and obedience, all the ends of the earth would come to see that YHWH alone is God, that he is sovereign over the nations and cultures of the world.

Firstborn of all creation

In overcoming the enemy of righteous Israel, Jesus also overcame the final enemy of all creation - and thus opened up the unprecedented possibility that not merely the microcosm of Israel but the whole cosmos might be rescued from corruption and made new. The resurrection of Jesus from the dead was the hoped-for renewal of the life of the people of God. It was the re-creation of a nation that, for all its good intentions, had simply failed to escape from the law of sin and death that ruled over the macrocosm. It provided the assurance that those who would lose their lives for his sake and for the sake of the gospel in that time of eschatological upheaval would find their lives again - that those who would enter the fierce contest against pagan tyranny would win a crown on the day of their vindication.

But the resurrection of Jesus also inaugurated a new incorruptible ontology; and the whole of creation came to find in the imminent vindication of the suffering community the promise of its own eventual liberation from a bondage to decay (Rom. 8:19-22). Hope jumps from the microcosm to the macrocosm, from the small, condensed story of Israel to the grand, expansive story of the cosmos. Jesus is not merely firstborn from the dead for the sake of his body; he is firstborn of all creation, the image of the Creator, through whom ‘all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities’ (Col. 1:16; cf. Jn. 1:1-3; 1 Cor. 8:6). So the New Testament came to imagine a final resurrection of all the dead, a final accounting for all that has been done, and a final destruction of everything that stands in opposition to the good work of the Creator God (Rev. 20:11-21:8).

In the light of this extraordinary transposition of the resurrection motif, as Tom Wright wrote in an opinion piece in today’s Times, notwithstanding a couple of details, ‘We who live in the interval between Jesus’s Resurrection and the final rescue and transformation of the whole world are called to be new-creation people here and now. That is the hidden meaning of the greatest festival Christians have.’

The documents of the New Testament provided a specific eschatological framework for the formation of the early communities of Christ followers. They taught them, first, how to see themselves as a people of God reconstituted beyond the geographical, historical and theological boundaries of Judaism; and secondly, how fundamentally to overcome - from a position of weakness and dishonour - the opposition of Greek-Roman paganism, manifested supremely in the form of the cult of the emperor.

The early church, therefore, was taught how to walk the long and difficult path that led from the Sermon on the Mount (‘Blessed are you when others revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account’: Matt. 5:11) to the eventual legalization of the Christian movement in AD 313. That, I think, is the inevitable conclusion of a historically realistic narrative theology. In a nutshell it is the story of the Son of man - of the faithful community in Christ that suffers and is vindicated. But the church was not taught - certainly not directly or by the documents of the New Testament - how to deal with the unexpected gifts of wealth and power and status, which is why Christendom proved such a mixed blessing for the world.

The Chinese church and the end of persecution

To judge from a fascinating article in The Times last Saturday (‘One Billion Souls to Save’), the illegal church in China finds itself in a position very similar to that of the pre-Constantinian church. Persecution is by no means a thing of the past; and the fast growing church is still seen in many quarters as a threat to the hegemony or ‘lordship’ of the Communist Party; but increasingly it is being regarded as a force for social good.

On the one hand, just as the selfless response of the early church to the plagues that devastated the Roman world was a major factor in the victory of Christianity over a morally bankrupt paganism, so it appears that Christians made up a large proportion of the volunteers who offered help in the aftermath of the earthquake in southwest China last year. ‘Many are still there, helping the survivors and, sometimes, preaching.’

On the other hand, recent meetings between government officials and leaders of the underground churches suggest that the Protestant church at least (the Vatican is still regarded with considerable suspicion) may function as a ‘force for harmony’ in modern Chinese society. President Hu told a Politburo seminar on religion in 2007 that ‘the knowledge of religious people must be harnessed to build a prosperous society’, which neatly parallels the pragmatism behind Rome’s adoption of Christianity as a unifying force for the empire following the decline of classical paganism.

If this is correct, then the underground church in China faces the same dilemma that the early church stumbled over when the empire converted to Christianity. A movement that is ideologically equipped for the struggle for survival on the margins of legitimacy is likely to find that it is not well equipped to provide a coherent and honest witness when it is offered a platform at the party congress. Some missiologists in the West will argue that the underground church should refuse to co-operate - not least because they fear that legitimacy will puncture a rapidly inflating church-planting movement whose success must to some extent be the direct result of persecution. To quote Jane Macartney’s Times article: ‘Underground Christians say that as soon as one house church is closed, its members split up and found their own small congregations, further multiplying numbers.’

I fully understand the concern. But the further argument, which is usually the whole point of the analysis, that the explosive growth of the underground church in China offers a model for the reinvigoration of the post-Christendom church in the West is not a good one. The post-Christendom church has been marginalized not because it is seen as a threat to state power but because it is held by our culture to be irrelevant, a thing of the past. What is causing churches to close in most cases is not the heavy hand of an anti-religious political system but simple demographic decline. The last congregant to die must remember to turn out the lights.

The church before global meltdown

That is not to say, however, that there are no lessons to be learnt from these stories. Both the early church and the modern Chinese church are prophetic movements. By their praxis, by their worship, by their testimony - by their very existence - they assert not merely that Jesus Christ is Lord (and conversely that neither Caesar nor the Party is Lord) but that the God who gave Jesus the name which is above every name will triumph in history over all self-aggrandizing, oppressive and blasphemous ideological systems. The New Testament takes history very seriously. The New Testament expects the church to win out over Caesar.

Until we grasp the distinctive nature of our own prophetic vocation, in all its difficult historical contingency, I doubt that the post-Christendom church will feel confident that it has really found a way forward. The emerging church in the first centuries needed to be taught how to leave the crumbling fortress of Judaism and set out across the unfamiliar terrain of classical paganism on a dangerous journey to overcome Rome. We likewise need to leave the ruins of the Christendom mindset and set out across the difficult, broken terrain of post-modernity… but to what end? What will be our suffering - our ‘tribulation’? What will be our parousia? What will be our vindication? How will the church in the decades or centuries to come show up the bankruptcy of Western culture? What would it mean for the church again to be invited to the table - to be consulted and seduced?

That is too big a question to answer here. But I think that Len Sweet is right to include the prospect of a coming environmental catastrophe in his ‘perfect storm’ analysis of the challenge facing the church (see ‘Global warming, storm warnings, and the future of the church’). I have just read an article in New Scientist magazine by Fred Pearce. He discusses the likely accelerating impact of the melting of arctic ice and the thawing of northern permafrost on global warming. The social consequences of runaway climate change are terrifying - Pearce focuses on the failure of the Asian monsoon as a result of a slowdown in the ‘ocean conveyor current’, on which 1-2 billion people are directly dependent for food and water.

I think it is time the church started to get seriously frightened by this sort of warning - not for the sake of idiotic, I-told-you-so doom-mongering, but so that we might learn to fear the Creator God - because I think that is where we will begin to discover our prophetic vocation. He has made us new creation in Christ; and out of that self-understanding, I suggest, we need to shape a global prophetic movement that by its life and work - by its very existence - bears witness to the reality of the Creator God and to the hope that he will make all things new.

Mark Driscoll, who is beginning to inhabit the darker regions of my consciousness like some baleful theological bogeyman, recently announced by Tweet that Charles Haddon Spurgeon is his favourite mentor outside of scripture. You have to wonder what sort of nightmarish world Driscoll is living in if he is willing to let himself be mentored by someone who not only is dead but was, as Driscoll himself writes, ‘kicked out of his own Baptist denomination for his unwillingness to stop teaching such things as eternal torment in a literal hell, the literal truthfulness of Scripture, a literal creation by God, and the perfection and divine inspiration of Scripture’. I just don’t see what hammering on about everything being literal and perfect is supposed to achieve these days.

So yes, I have trouble fathoming Driscoll’s attitude - and, I have to admit, his popularity. But the bigger question must be this: How are we going to break down the wall that divides the hard-preaching, literalistic, reconstructed neo-Calvinists from the soft-pedalling, sceptical, deconstructed emergents? Not to mention all those other dividing walls, partitions, garden fences, ditches, trenches, coils of razor-wire, and mine-fields that criss-cross the landscape of the church. Is this just something we have to live with? As Paul said, there are bound to be factions so that the genuine among us may be recognized (1 Cor. 11:19). I take some (albeit ironic) comfort from that!

Something in me wonders if the fragmentation of Christian worldviews isn’t just a matter of healthy competition. Perhaps it’s a good thing that the story is told in different settings, in different ways. Perhaps in some deep Darwinian sense it’s a good thing that we fight tooth and claw over our theologies. Perhaps it’s a good thing - or at least unavoidable - that we construct our belief-systems in the conflicted territories of the human mind. But at the same time, surely, the Spirit in us is groaning to be one. I just wish I knew what to do about it.

One important point of biblical interpretation that came up during the course of a recent TREK gathering with the Christian Associates team in Gothenburg had to do with the meaning of Jesus’ story of the sheep and the goats in Matthew 25:31-46. It is remarkable how this passage is widely and consistently misread as providing support for Christian service to the poor.

The context was a discussion about the relation between humanitarian missional projects such as Serve the City and evangelism. The usual argument is that in serving the poor - supposedly the ‘least of these’ - we are serving Jesus. To give a salient example, in their new book ReJesus: A Wild Messiah for a Missional Church (reviewed here) Michael Frost and Alan Hirsch describe an encounter with a woman outside the ornate Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow:

As Michael left the cathedral and headed through the snow to the nearby Metro station he encountered an elderly woman kneeling on the frozen pavement begging for loose change from disinterested passersby. While it was difficult to see the real Jesus in the cathedral frescoes, it wasn’t hard to recall Jesus’ words about what we do for the “least of these” being done as if for him. According to Jesus’ own words, he should be identifiable in the ragged image of the suppliant pauper outside the cathedral far more than in the astonishing gilt iconography inside. (4)

There is no question that the juxtaposition of the cathedral and the pauper throws into stark relief the frequent hypocrisy, apathy and moral blindness of the church. But to suggest that this woman fulfils the part of ‘one of the least of these’, in whom Jesus himself is identifiable, is misleading. The issue of social engagement and service to the poor lies at the heart of the current debate about what it means to be ‘missional’, and it is important that we do not make careless exegetical - and inevitably theological - assumptions in our eagerness to back up our missional instincts.

Judgment of the nations

The judgment of the nations that Jesus describes occurs when ‘the Son of man comes in his glory’. Within the framework of the Gospel narrative he is speaking not of a final judgment but of that historical moment - prophetically imagined - when the disciples will be delivered from their enemies and rewarded for their faithful obedience to their Lord. Since this is a judgment of the nations, the event cannot simply be associated with the destruction of Jerusalem. Jesus must have in mind circumstances under which his followers will be vindicated against their Gentile or pagan enemies. The allusion here to the image of the Lord coming ‘and all the holy ones with him’ in Zechariah 14:5 to fight against Jerusalem’s enemies supports this reading.

When the people are separated, as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats, those on the right ‘inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world’ (34); those on the left are dismissed ‘into the fire of the age prepared for the devil and his angels’ (41). The criterion for making this division has to do with how the nations treated ‘the least of these my brothers’ when they were hungry or thirsty or outcast or naked or unclothed.

So the question is: Who are these ‘least’, these ‘brothers’? There is no basis for supposing that they are the world’s poor and destitute - Jesus only ever speaks of Israel’s poor. The usage is well enough established in Matthew: they are Jesus’ disciples, whom he sends out into the world to announce that YHWH is about to act decisively as king (this is the coming of the kingdom of God) to judge, redeem and restore his people. So the risen Jesus, for example, instructs the women: ‘Do not be afraid; go and tell my brothers to go to Galilee…’ (Matt. 28:10; cf. 12:46). The teaching given to the disciples in Matthew 10 has in view the circumstances of their mission and concludes with what is in effect a summary of the story that will be told in chapter 25: ‘whoever gives one of these little ones even a cup of cold water because he is a disciple, truly, I say to you, he will by no means lose his reward’.

Romans 8:29 provides a further development of the motif: those who have the Spirit have been adopted as sons; if they suffer as Christ suffered, they will be fellow-heirs with him (8:16-17); they will in this manner be conformed to his image; and he will become ‘firstborn among many brothers’. Jesus’ ‘brothers’, therefore, are those who will share in his sufferings and vindication for the sake of the future of the people of God. Indeed, Paul’s accounts of his own apostolic afflictions mirror the hardships that Jesus describes (cf. Rom. 8:35; 2 Cor. 11:23-27; 12:10).

Little Jesuses

So the point of the parable of the sheep and goats is that the nations will be judged according to how they have responded to the presence of the Christ-like disciples in their midst. Those who treat them kindly will be surprised to discover that in so doing they have ministered to Jesus himself. They will be counted as righteous; they will inherit the life of the coming age. Those who mistreat or neglect them will, conversely, suffer the destruction that will accompany the end of the age.

Presumably Jesus intends to convey to the disciples, therefore, the assurance that as they face humiliation, rejection and suffering in the course of their mission, they count as much to their Father as Jesus himself did in his sufferings and death. They are, in this quite realistic and practical sense, little Jesuses. It is not simply that they are poor, nor even that they are disciples, but that they are suffering for his sake.

But the passage must also say something about the eschatological significance of the mission of the disciples for the nations - for the Greek-Roman world. It is precisely the presence among them of a community that shares willingly in Jesus’ suffering that will determine the fate of the pagan world. Their mission is not simply an invitation to believe in the gospel; it is a challenge to the nations of the Greek-Roman world to discern the reality of God in such radical, self-giving, Christ-like faithfulness. But this is not in itself an argument for serving the world’s poor.