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St Francis Magazine Vol 8, No 4 | August 2012
which fails to take into account his continuing heavenly incarnation:
this weakens appeals to the incarnation as a basis for such ministries
and dilutes critical consideration of Islamic claims regarding Mohammed’s
‘heavenly’ ministry. Span (2010d) has advanced this need
for more attention to be given to the heavenly Christ, advocating
the need for ‘outsider movements’ which, on the basis of Hebrews
13:12-14, are comprised of “Heaven Foreground Believers (HFB)”.
His rhetoric has a clear polemical edge, but the context and content
of Span’s argument is important for the ongoing debate regarding
C5, especially in relation to possible strategies of subversive fulfilment,
discussed below.
Also, within such a biblical theology, there is a need to recognise
that the church in Acts and elsewhere in the NT constitutes the fulfilment
and renewal of Israel as a particular salvation historical
event (cf. Chris 2009: 160). This has, at times, caused significant
contention within C5 discussions (Corwin 2007: 54). In this sense,
apologists for C5 are accused of lacking a sufficient covenantal understanding
of the church (Nikides 2009: 97-101; cf., similarly, Waterman
2007: 57-58). Responses are weakened, however, where Biblical
“narrative” is set against “clear didactic” sections of Scripture
(Nikides 2009: 102) in a manner which a cohesive biblical theology
would preclude.
In various other ways a more robust sense of biblical theology
will both strengthen and challenge the basis for C5 ministries. As
Reitsma (2005) demonstrates in a nuanced discussion of the Jewishness
of Jesus, considerations of C5 need to maintain a clearer analytical
distinction between first-century and twenty-first-century Judaism.
A more developed biblical theology will also highlight the
question of differences in biblical and Qur’anic metanarratives, given
their divergences at the fall of Adam (see Miller 2010a; n.n.
2010b: 487-491). At a more micro level, a developed biblical theology
combined with the exegetical contextualisation outlined earlier
will also temper appeals to biblical metaphors abstracted from the
overall wider symbolic matrix of scripture. Thus ‘yeast’ as frequently
appealed to as a positive metaphor for insider movements
(e.g. Caldwell 2000: 30; Kraft 2005b: 92; Lewis 2009b: 19) presently
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