My name is Andrew Perriman. My wife, Belinda, and I have lived in various parts of the world in the last 20 years: the Far East, Africa, Holland, the Middle East, London, and now back in Holland. I’ve combined theological studies and writing with an ad hoc, haphazard, unconventional, opportunistic pastoral and missionary function. Belinda works in the oil industry.
In addition to some articles in academic journals, I have written Speaking of Women: Interpreting Paul (IVP, 1998); and 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); Re: Mission: Biblical Mission for a Post-Biblical Church (Paternoster, 2007); and I edited a report for the Evangelical Alliance in the UK entitled Faith, Health and Prosperity, also published in the US.
I run Open Source Theology, which supports the development of an ‘emerging theology’ for the current shift in ecclesial and missional self-awareness that commonly gets labelled the ‘emerging church’; and I am working with Christian Associates, seeking to develop open, creative communities of faith for the emerging culture in Europe.
Comments
Re: About Your project.
How exciting to find out that after all these centuries of trying, Europe has finally achieved an emerging culture.The central problem with all restoration-like movements like yours (speak where the Bible speaks, silent where the Bible is silent) is how the new tools of rational historical thinking - birthed late in the Enlightenment - are used to trim away history itself and rest within the Biblical frame. Hans Frei was not about an originist movement. Your emerging theology already emerged more or less in the nineteenth century when primitivism met the Scottish Enlightenment.
Europe’s culture is too thick, much less to modern and cosmopolitan (as in Kant) to be cut with such a thin and dusty knife.
Re: About Your project.
Feodor, thanks for taking the time to react - albeit sceptically!
The phrase ‘emerging culture’ has often been used in the context of a perceived shift from modernity to postmodernity, but I accept that its meaning is not immediately transparent. I suppose it reflects some hesitation with regard to what postmodernity is becoming. We are aware of cultural changes that are taking place but we are not sure where they are taking us. It is not meant to suggest that European culture is approaching some sort of climactic fulfilment.
More importantly, I think you may have missed the point in taking this to be a ‘restoration-like’ project. My view is that the church needs to reinvent itself following the collapse of Christendom and that in order to do that we must take our bearings from scripture. But I do not think the answer is simply a restoration of the New Testament church. I think, in the first place, that the biblical narrative disallows that. The New Testament defines a transitional existence, when the people of God had to make a difficult journey from judgment through suffering to an eventual victory over Roman pagan imperialism. In an analogical sense we might think of the marginalized and ‘illegitimate’ church in Europe now making that journey again, but it is, I think, a journey towards a new way of existing as a distinctive ‘new creation’ people in the midst of the nations and cultures of the earth.
I see no trimming away of history in this. On the contrary, I use the phrase ‘narrative-realist’ precisely to ensure that we keep in mind the fact that the biblical narrative was thoroughly embedded in history and that we are still somehow part of that story.
I’m not sure I follow your remark about Europe’s culture being too thick. The aim of this ‘project’ is not primarily to analyze European culture but to tell the biblical narrative in a way that helps the church in Europe to recover identity and direction when the social and intellectual structures of Christendom are collapsing around its head. The following posts develop the argument and may (or may not) be helpful:
Re: About Your project.
You may reinterpret the situation of the New Testament church, but to reinterpret it as transitional and then to prescribe it by analogy is restoration under your understanding of the dynamics of the NT church.
The history trimmed away is the secular history which has often adopted the Christian church rather than being the adoptee. It was Roman imperialism that gave victory to the church, unless one sentimentalizes Constantine - yet more history thrown in the bin. I am not saying that the church did not do some great things with the gift, and also horrid. (The "new creation" quickly lost its ontological reality and became a spiritual project instead and, thereby, metaphorised.)
But since your paradigm is indeed a dehistoricized myopia (deep into the shift from modernism to postmodernity is a shift, even still, not a birth - you ontologize analytical frameworks while denying the analytical project), your language becomes egocentric and nostalgic. The church has reinvented itself many times since the "loss" of Christendom, but perhaps you are not happy with those efforts or point to the failure of imperialistic triumph. So, except for antiquity, Christian history is glossed over.
When you say bearings, I am not hearing a statement about scripture being the primary source for theological reflection on God’s revelation. Instead, I hear your use as scripture bearing as the church as structural guide, if only in analogously prescribed dynamics. Am I wrong?If not, your project is pinned on what is ultimately not capturable. Not simply because holy writ is inappropriate to this kind of softened historical restoration, but also because we are not ancient people. We are modern/postmodern.
Your bearing should deal with us as we are and scripture is the primary guide among many for theological reflection on who are we under God and how we can best believe in the world (as believers living in the world as it is and as believers in the world itself as a creation of God as it is).
Re: About Your project.
I don’t see how ‘by analogy’ can be understood to entail a direct restoration of the New Testament church: it surely suggests something like but not the same as. You certainly cannot reach that conclusion without exploring what ‘by analogy’ might mean in this particular context.
I agree that history has in a sense ‘adopted’ Christianity and that the outcome of that has been ambiguous. But the Constantinian settlement also involved choices made by the church, and my argument would be that we are having to make similar choices again now that the imperial model of Christianity is no longer viable, now that the Christendom project has been abandoned. We are searching for another modus vivendi. We cannot make those choices in a historical vacuum, but it is encumbent upon us to seek to remain in continuity with the biblical narrative.
I simply don’t get the ‘dehistoricized myopia’ bit, and I’ve very little idea what you mean in the context of this discussion by ‘you ontologize analytical frameworks while denying the analytical project’. Please explain, giving examples. And where is the egocentrism and nostalgia?
Again, I’m not sure I follow you. Scripture gives us a story about a people that originated in the promise to Abraham. We have become part of that story. But that participation has a narrative structure. We don’t tell the story simply by repeating the chapter about the emergence of the early church. On the one hand, the story of the emergence of the early church is itself part of a larger biblical; on the other, it anticipates certain historical outcomes as the narrative stretches into the future.
Re: About
Just where would you put the Restoration project on the spectrum between replica and analogy? I don’t think Campbell-Stone conceived of themselves as ideal types (direct restoration) and certainly were not oblivious of being nineteenth century embodiments of an effort which they could see traces of throughout Christian history. Your “direct restoration” is vague, and I agree analogy covers a lot of ground.
Continuity with biblical narrative is just as much a creation of theological interpretation as is “biblical narrative”. The value and efficacy of such a “narrative” of interpretation depends on how rooted one is, not in antiquity, but in the present modes of understanding ourselves and in the light of faith and in a disciplined close reading of scripture.
Schematizations of cultural time as modern or post-modern are attempts to analyze the agendas of power and popular response. Modernity has moved through different forms as generally described and is now often thought to be in its latest and perhaps last (dissolving?) form of post-modernism. However, post-modernism has not been able to kill off its immediate predecessor, modernism. We seem, as you indicate, to be in a fugue state of the two. But these are just descriptive schemas that have more or less usefulness in analyzing Western culture. No theorist believes these categories have ontological existence. They are descriptive modifiers for the current journey through social and private life as lived by a minority of the world’s population.
Yet, you want to utilize these schemas to posit a theory of potential but passive (“descriptive” not “dispensational”) heilsgeshicte that should order and shape private and corporate evangelical faith. They are abstractions that you want to make ontologically determinative for Christian life (“a new way of existing as a distinctive ‘new creation’ people…”) But about these schemas, potential moments in heilsgeshicte though they are, you are “aware of cultural changes that are taking place but we are not sure where they are taking us.“
You have an odd way of accepting contemporary analytical schemas as passive abstractions and then applying them as a determinative framework for faith, since their structure prescribes faith’s response. You have a biblical “narrative” for history but deny a biblical “plan” for history. This is ontologizing contemporary abstractions with one hand behind your back and fingers crossed.
Coming of the Son of Man Preview on Amazon.
Dear Mr. Perriman,
Usually I only buy books if I can see a preview of it…Usually on Amazon we can see the contents page (so we know what’s in the book) as well as Chapter 1.
Would it be possible to please upload the contents page and chapter 1 as a preview on Amazon
With thanks,
René Barrow