Duncan’s post on the narrative of Revelation has sparked an interesting dispute about the relationship between an emerging theology and preterism. Since the conversation isn’t directly relevant to the post, I wonder if we might explore its implications separately. It’s an opportunity to think a bit about what we mean by an emerging theology and how we might negotiate the boundaries between different dogmatic traditions as well as between modern and postmodern ways of thinking.

The Christian Associates Thinkings group will be getting together in the Hague in October to explore the question of what it means to proclaim Christ as Lord in a post-Christendom, post-modern and religiously pluralist Europe. With that in mind I recently got hold of a copy of a smallish book called The Supremacy of Christ in a Postmodern World, edited by John Piper and Justin Taylor, knowing full well that it was not going to be especially sympathetic to an emerging perspective. The chapter on ‘The Church and the Supremacy of Christ’ by Mark Driscoll caught my eye for a particular reason that I will come to later.

I’ve just got back from a fascinating and at times harrowing week in Rwanda and Burundi where I took part in a gathering of ‘emerging’ African leaders, organized by Amahoro Africa. The theme of the conference was ‘The Gospel of Reconciliation’, the 1994 genocide and its aftermath being the inevitable focus for a conversation that broadly addressed the inadequate response of the post-colonial church to the humanitarian, social and political crises that currently afflict East and Southern Africa. We listened to the barely believable stories of genocide survivors and visited a number of sites - churches in particular - where defenceless Tutsis had been slaughtered in their thousands. Even fourteen years after the event it is clear that beneath a veneer of micro-managed social stability anger, grief and fear are still intensely felt. The church has powerful stories of forgiveness and reconciliation to tell, but in the eyes of many Rwandans the church was largely ineffectual when it really mattered, when the frenzied mobs came wielding their machetes to exterminate the cockroaches.

I have been rather bothered recently by the way in which the emerging church - though not only the emerging church - makes use of the concept of the ‘kingdom of God’ to define its mission, the idea being that the task of the church is to extend or build the kingdom of God on earth. Very often there is an implicit polemical aspect to the usage: we build the kingdom of God rather than merely convert people; or we are more concerned about the concrete social dimension of the kingdom on earth than the rarefied - if not mind-numbing - prospect of an eternity in heaven. The phrase ‘kingdom of God’ appears to capture for us something of the down-to-earth political and moral relevance of the gospel that we are so anxious to reintroduce into Christian discourse; and it gives substantial theological justification for this shift in missional focus. But I am not at all sure that this is how the term works biblically.

I have voiced some reservations in a couple of recent posts about the appropriateness of modelling the life and mission of the church on the form of discipleship found in the Gospels (see ‘Alan Hirsch, The Forgotten Ways, and the future of the church in Europe’ and ‘We have to go back, but not to square one’).

I suggested in my review of Alan Hirsch’s book The Forgotten Ways that, in our search for a new paradigm to replace the now more or less defunct Christendom worldview, the historical moment which we should revisit for inspiration is not the beginning of the narrow path of suffering that the radical Jesus movement took in pursuit of its Lord but the end, when the faithful community, having finally overcome the opposition of Greek-Roman paganism, was in a position to ask far-reaching questions about how it should organize and define itself as God’s ‘new creation’.