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.

In a sermon given at a recent ‘Together for the Gospel Conference’ John Piper asks the question, ‘Did Jesus Preach the Gospel of Evangelicalism?’ – by which he means, in effect, ‘Did Jesus Preach Paul’s Gospel?’ His expressed concern is with the argument of critical scholarship ‘that Jesus’ message and work was one thing, and what the early church made of it was another. Jesus brought the kingdom; it aborted; and the apostles substituted an institution, the church.’ The concern is a valid one. I agree with Piper that it is possible to derive an understanding of Jesus that is historically and theologically coherent from the Gospels as they stand. But the problem will not be addressed by yielding to dogmatic pressure and assimilating the Gospel narratives to a Reformed misunderstanding of Paul.

Reading through the London School of Theology’s Open Learning module on Hermeneutics, I came across a good quotation from Richard Bauckham regarding the potential that time-honoured interpretive traditions have for creating an illusion of permanence and absoluteness:

The sheer length and continuity of the Western Christian tradition – which actually results from contextualization in a long series of more or less overlapping contexts – can create the illusion that long-standing features of it are so because they are appropriate to the human condition as such and so can be transferred to any context. Of course, the arrogance of European cultural imperialism since the nineteenth century has aided and abetted this, and the discovery of the relativity of the Western Christian tradition has been somewhat painfully combined with the need to repent of the colonial mentality.