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’.

I like this provocative and nicely weighted take on Christian imperialism, ancient and modern, by Mark Van Steenwyk at The Jesus Manifesto. He makes the point that the Christianity we have inherited – even if we regard ourselves as dissenters – is the product of imperialism in one form or another, whether American, British or Roman, and that this may have rather profound and difficult implications for how we regard the essential legitimacy of Christianity.