Three initial questions of clarification. (1) What do the dashes signify in “God-world-church”? The answer to this may head off my next question. (2) You say that the above order is that of God’s missionary existence in Christ. I took that to mean that God sent Christ to the world and the church followed from that. But that is not quite the canonical order. God sent Christ to gather only the Jews (to the Syro-Phoenician woman’s chagrin); then Christ sent these gathered Jews into the world. In fact, it may be that the primary reason for the partial post-exilic return to “the land” (Ezr-Neh) was so the Gospel could go forth in diasporic fashion “beginning from Jerusalem” in fulfillment of the Scriptures (Luke 24:44-47), thereby honoring God’s appointed role for his people Israel. Christ’s refusal to embark on the Gentile mission independent of this gathered people was necessitated by his claim to be the one Israel awaited and to fulfill Torah–presumably including its founding promise that all nations will be blessed through Abraham’s descendents. Do I misunderstand you here? The Scriptures? (3) As someone whose dissertation focused on a Yoderian reading of the OT and its implications for ecclesiology, it is not clear to me how an event-constituted church stands in fundamental continuity with the Old Testament narrative, which appears to identify the formation of a people (Gen 12-Malachi) as God’s answer to the problem of global degradation resulting from sin (Gen 6)—an answer that honors his postdiluvian covenant not to destroy creation again (Gen 8-9). I agree (and argue elsewhere) that a diaspora-constituted church stands in fundamental continuity with the OT (and affirm defining diaspora as the intensification of landedness rather than the renunciation thereof), but can church-as-event uphold the same level of canonical continuity?

http://theophiliacs.com/2010/06/17/some-thoughts-on-the-apocalyptic-theses/

As to our meeting at Halden’s, I cannot buy your plane ticket, but I will buy the first beer.