One of the hallmarks of the Emerging
Church is its desire, it commitment, to move beyond
traditionalism, to examine various aspects of Christian
faith with an openness to new answers- and new
questions. While critics often (unfairly) accuse the
movement of "rejecting the Bible", the reality is that
those immersed within the EC conversation are often
willing to embrace the complexities of the Bible in ways
that are unfamiliar to others. And embracing the Bible
means entering into the story, understanding the journey
as it was for the earliest believers, as part of the
process in receiving it as our own.
Andrew Perriman is actively engaged on that quest.
His book the Coming of the Son of Man: New Testament
Eschatology for the Emerging Church offers
penetrating insight into the apocalyptic tradition and
the circumstances in which it was written. Grounded in
history and textual tradition, Perriman's book takes our
understanding of New Testament escahtology in some -
what may be to many - very surprising directions. I
recently had the chance to speak with Andrew about his
book.
Darren King:
What’s your particular Christian background? Did you
grow up a Christian? And, if so, what tradition were you
a part of?
Andrew Perriman: No particular
tradition. I grew up vaguely Anglican, was influenced by
standard student evangelicalism at university; but we’ve
lived in various parts of the world and have been in and
out of various types of church. I’m beginning to get
quite interested in the potential that churches like the
one we attend (Crossroads International Church of the
Hague) have for speaking prophetically in an
increasingly global postmodern culture. I am also
impressed by the inventiveness and purpose that
Christian Associates is bringing to the task of
re-imagining church and mission in post-modern Europe.
Darren King:
Do you remember when you first began to notice that
traditional 20th century understandings of the Bible –
especially as it applies to the apocalyptic tradition –
were misguided? What was that rabbit trail like for you
as you pursued it further?
Andrew Perriman: The simple answer is,
No, not really. I suspect it goes back to the fact that
I did a degree in English Literature. You just tend to
read things differently. You don’t get so hung up on
dogma. Tom Wright obviously had a lot to do with it too.
Darren King:
Both the subtitle and the tags of your new site,
andrewperriman.com, read: “biblical theology – after
Christendom – in a narrative-realist mode”. How would
you describe the perspective you’re coming from – summed
up in that subtitle – to someone completely unfamiliar
with such concepts?
Andrew Perriman: Maybe it’s easiest to
take the three parts of that subtitle and unpack them a
bit.
First, I think that a new way of understanding ourselves
as church is emerging from the collapse of the
Christendom mindset. Whether or not we refer to that as
the ‘emerging church’ or imagine that it amounts to a
well-defined movement, it needs a congruent theology;
and I believe that that theology needs to be confidently
and consistently biblical. What we mean by ‘biblical’,
of course, is another matter – that’s the third part.
Secondly, I think that the basic ‘theological’ challenge
we face is, on the one hand, to disentangle our minds
from the dilapidated mental infrastructure of
Christendom, and on the other, to design for ourselves a
new post-Christendom infrastructure. It’s as
though the house in which we have lived for the last
1600 years has collapsed – it was too badly built to
withstand the storms of rationalism and floods of
postmodernism. So we are currently homeless and somewhat
bewildered and frightened. Most of us are living in
makeshift shelters constructed from stuff we have
salvaged from the wreckage. We need to build a new
worldview, a new plausibility structure, a new
theological paradigm, within which to be a meaningful
and sustainable missional community. That will be a long
and difficult task.
Thirdly, I think we need to grasp again how scripture
engages realistically with the experience in time of a
historical community. Scripture is the work of a people
making sense of its past, present and future at
different stages in a narrative; and if we fail to take
into account either the historical experience of the
community or the narrative structure of its
self-understanding, we are bound to misinterpret.
Imagine that you are driving along a country road at
night in a heavy downpour. The headlights of the car
pick out a road sign indicating a ford ahead. You
naturally slow down as you approach the river; you make
a careful judgment about whether it is safe to cross;
you proceed cautiously.
The meaning of this little parable is this: first, you
encountered the river at a particular moment on the
journey; and secondly, the road sign only made sense at
that moment. If a few miles further down the road you
came across another sign indicating a ford but found
that there was none, you would curse the highways agency
for its incompetence. The sign would have been at best
meaningless and at worse a dangerous distraction.
Much of scripture works in the way that these road signs
work. It has to be contextualized; and I think that this
is especially true for prophetic or apocalyptic texts.
Our problem is that in much of our interpretation of the
New Testament we have lost sight of the connection
between sign and event, between text and history.
Darren King:
Okay, approaching the “coming of the son of man” idea,
what you suggest this represents in your book - when you
ground it in history and textual tradition - is a far
cry from typical evangelical constructions. Can you give
us a quick recap on how you understand the “coming of
the son of man” idea?
Andrew Perriman: Sure – well, it
depends what you mean by a ‘quick recap’!
First of all, you are right to highlight the point that
in order to understand the phrase ‘coming of the son of
man’ and the whole set of ideas related to it we must
get a sense of how it is grounded both in history
and textual tradition. I’ve touched on that
already, but just to clarify: the New Testament uses
apocalyptic ‘templates’ (bits and pieces of language,
images, stories, symbolic dramas, etc.) drawn from the
Old Testament to interpret the historical condition and
foreseeable future of the early communities of
disciples.
My argument is that the central organizing template for
the New Testament’s understanding of the foreseeable
future is a story about a Son of man who will come on
the clouds of heaven, which in the first place Jesus
tells in order to prepare his followers for what they
will have to face after his death.
The story has been borrowed or adapted from the highly
symbolic vision that is recounted in Daniel 7. What
Daniel foresees is a situation in which a blasphemous
pagan king (the little horn on the head of the fourth
beast) makes war against the saints of the Most High. In
the frame of reference of Daniel’s prophecy this king is
Antiochus Epiphanes, who attempted to impose by force
Hellenistic culture and religion on the Jews in the
early second century BC. In the vision a tribunal is set
up on earth and the beast is condemned and destroyed.
Then a figure in human form is seen approaching the
throne of God with the clouds of heaven, to be given
‘dominion and glory and kingdom’. An angel later makes
it clear that this ‘one like a son of man’ is not an
individual but a symbolic representation of a community,
namely the saints of the Most High, the Jews who
suffered because they refused to abandon the covenant.
The point of the vision is that
eventually the pagan power that opposes and persecutes the saints of the
Most High will be overthrown by God, apostate Israel will be punished, and
the righteous will be vindicated and rewarded. My argument is that this
story is retold in the New Testament – by Jesus, then by Paul and
others – for the sake of the community of Jesus’ disciples, who could
expect to be rejected and persecuted first by the Jews and then by the
Rome. So for example, in Matthew 16:21-28 Jesus explains to his disciples
that the Son of man must suffer many things and be killed, and on the
third day he will be raised from the dead; but the story climaxes in the
vision of the Son of man coming in his glory or in his kingdom. Jesus
tells the story first about himself, but he also includes the disciples in
it: they must also take up their cross and risk losing their lives for his
sake; and they can expect to be vindicated with him when the reimagined
‘coming of the Son of man’ is fulfilled.
The big question that must then be answered is: When will that be? To cut
a long story short, I would argue that for Jesus the historical event that
constituted the fundamental vindication of his mission to Israel
was the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple by the Romans in AD 70.
That, in effect, is what he reveals to his disciples in his apocalyptic
discourse – and I would take very seriously Jesus’ statement in Matthew
16:28 that ‘there are some standing here who will not taste death before
they see the Son of man coming in his kingdom’.
For Paul, however, the story of the Son of man must be lived out on the
much bigger stage of the Roman empire, and vindication for the suffering
early churches would be the eventual victory of the church over an
idolatrous and unjust Roman imperialism. The point is that this is the
future that actually mattered to the early church, and it seems
entirely reasonable to me to think that it was this foreseeable
future that is described in the apocalyptic passages. This is what I mean
by biblical theology ‘in a narrative-realist mode’.
Darren King: You’ve
spent plenty of time outside of North America. I’m curious, how do you see
American conceptions of Christian faith differing from other contexts –
such as Europe? I’m guessing that your book goes over “better” in
non-American circles. Is that fair to say?
Andrew Perriman: To be honest, I can’t say I’ve noticed
much of a difference in response between Americans and Europeans. A lot of
sane and frustrated Americans are looking for a credible alternative to
the ‘Left Behind’ school of apocalyptic fantasizing, but they’re also wary
of a methodology that gets labelled ‘preterist’ much too quickly for my
liking. Europeans are probably less hidebound in many respects, but
eschatology is not such a hot issue here – so it’s not immediately obvious
why a book about the ‘coming of the Son of man’ is really so relevant to
the ‘emerging church’. I have tried in Re: Mission: Biblical Mission
for a Post-Biblical Church to show not only how eschatology is
crucial for our understanding of the New Testament but also how by
exploring outward from this centre we can develop a robust creational
approach to mission.
Darren King:
How open do you sense people are willing to be when it comes to rethinking
apocalyptic literature and eschatology? Surely some people see you as
coming to kill a sacred cow or two? And these may be cows they’re used to
milking. Do you sense a willingness to discuss the evidence? Or do you
feel people are automatically, almost superstitiously, dismissive?
Andrew Perriman: It depends how you approach the
question. If you talk about the need to recover a sense of the historical
relevance of the New Testament’s apocalyptic vision or the power of a
final hope that is not merely an escape to heaven but embraces the whole
of creation, people tend to follow along. If you argue that the doctrine
of the second coming as we hold it in the church is a very poor account of
what Jesus or Paul meant and should be consigned to history (in more ways
than one), then people get rather uncomfortable.
Darren King:
If part of what Jesus was doing was calling a group of people to a
specific calling for a specific time – how does that change how we see
that calling as applying to us today in the 21st century, so far removed
from that context? How does the cut-and-paste method fall short?
Andrew Perriman: My view is that we answer this by
grasping the bigger biblical story which contains the chapter
about the calling of a specific group for a specific time. The story of
the Son of man is the story of how Israel was saved from final destruction
(the judgment of AD 70) through the suffering not of Jesus only but also
of the community that was called to follow him down the difficult path
leading to life. But what is actually ‘saved’ in this way is a bigger,
overarching narrative about the God who brings into existence a new
creation – a creation in microcosm – which will embody, both actually and
prophetically, the full scope of an ideal createdness in the world.
Darren King:
If what you’re saying is true, that in many ways we have moved beyond
eschatology, how should that change how we envision being Jesus followers
in the here and now?
Andrew Perriman: Yes, that’s the crucial question. My
argument is that most of New Testament eschatology has to do with how the
early church faced persecution and overcame its ‘enemies’ – not through
violence but through the same self-sacrificing trust in God that Jesus
demonstrated; indeed, by becoming part of his story. But the story doesn’t
stop there; we have travelled a lot further down the road. We have moved
beyond the crisis of extreme pagan opposition that called forth
the hope of vindication, and in that sense I would say that we are a
post-eschatological church. But at the outer edge of the New
Testament’s prophetic vision is the conviction that the whole of creation
will eventually be made new – that there will be a final justice, a final
victory over sin and death, and a final renewal of heaven and earth.
So in the here and now our mission must be defined not primarily in the
light of the hope of vindication against our persecutors (though that may
still happen on a localized basis) but in the light of the belief that God
will not allow injustice and idolatry and corruption and death to have the
last word over his creation. So the church must see itself now as God’s
response to a creational crisis – and I would argue that much of
what we see happening in the emerging church is a struggle to grasp the
scope of that calling and develop the resources to respond to it.
A narrative theology does not allow us to disengage ourselves from the Son
of man who suffered because of the sins of Israel and was raised and
vindicated for the sake of the future of the people of God. The kingdom
has come: it has been given to the vindicated Son of man, who has been
given the name above all the ‘names’ that dominate our lives; and we are
bound to confess him as Lord. But a narrative theology at the same time
compels us to look back to Abraham who was called, I would argue, to be
the father of God’s alternative humanity, already in effect a ‘new
creation’, a world-within-a-world; and it compels us to look forwards to
the final hope of a new heavens and a new earth in which the dwelling of
God, the new Jerusalem, has descended to be with humanity in the midst of
things.
Darren King:
What would you say to the people who fear that the trail you’re on leads
to a slippery slope; where the end result is relativism and the loss of
biblical authority?
Andrew Perriman: I would say that, yes, this path is the
beginning of a slope, perhaps a slippery one, certainly a difficult one;
but it leads upwards rather than downwards, towards a more
coherent and realistic grasp of the narrative power of scripture.
has a degree in English literature from Oxford and
post-graduate degrees in theology (MPhil, PhD) from what is now the London
School of Theology. In addition to a number of articles published in
scholarly journals, he has written Speaking of Women: Interpreting
Paul (IVP, 1998),
The Coming of the Son
of Man: New Testament Eschatology for an Emerging Church
(Paternoster, 2005),
Otherways: In Search of an Emerging Theology (OST, 2007), and
Re: Mission:
Biblical Mission for a Post-Biblical Church (Paternoster, 2007);
he also edited Faith, Health and Prosperity for the Evangelical
Alliance in the UK. He runs the
Open Source Theology
website. He has lived in various parts of the world but is currently to be
found in the Hague with his wife Belinda, where he works with
Christian Associates.
Brian McLaren's Inferno
(2006) "We should consider the possibility that
many, and perhaps even all of Jesus’ hell-fire or end-of-the-universe
statements refer not to postmortem judgment but to the very historic
consequences of rejecting his kingdom message of reconciliation and
peacemaking. The destruction of Jerusalem in A.D. 67-70 seems to many
people to fulfill much of what we have traditionally understood as
hell."
Scot McKnight the Full Preterist (2009)
"Scot
makes 70 AD the focal point of not only many of Jesus’ prophecies,
but the eternal things that He spoke of
as well. That is the point
where I feel Scot crosses the line into full preterism and unorthodoxy.
Yet Scot still concedes that not everything is fulfilled which really
puzzles me. How can someone believe that Matthew 25:31-46 has been
fulfilled?Or is Scot saying that this is not part of the eternal
things? That would make even less sense. The section above remains
unchanged in his recently published series so he obviously still
believes this doctrine of full preterism, but this following quote from
the original has been changed."
