As this is the last contribution to this installment, I would like to take this opportunity especially to thank Eric Lee for organizing and facilitating this conversation, and to all at the Church and Postmodern Culture blog for hosting it. Also, I would like to remind readers that the publisher is still offering a 40% discount on Christ, History and Apocalyptic: The Politics of Christian Mission to all readers. To receive the discount, just go to the Wipf & Stock website, and when checking out enter the coupon code "KERR40".
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Let me begin by expressing my profound gratitude to the contributors to this 
symposium – Josh Davis, David Congdon, John McDowell, John Wright, Doug Harink, and Jamie Smith – for being so gracious as to engage my work. I am grateful also to the facilitators of this symposium and to all of those whom I cannot name that have participated in the conversation. I take the conversation as a whole to have been a gesture of genuine theological friendship, of which I am grateful and to which I hope to remain faithful. I have learned much more than I could say from the conversations that have taken place; and I eagerly look forward to the extension of those conversations as they go forward from here. The contributors to this symposium and the conversations which have taken place have raised many criticisms and questions; many more, of course, than I could possibly hope to address in a single post. So, rather than attempting to “answer” all of these questions and criticisms, what I should like to do in this response is to articulate what for me is at the heart of this conversation: viz., the nature of Christ’s singular, apocalyptic historicity as constitutive of the “truth” of his lordship in history. The reason for my focusing on this point in relation to the current symposium is that, for the most part, much of the criticisms and questions that have been put to my book have failed to engage my work at precisely this point. And yet, it is this one point that is decisive for my book as whole, in regards both to the genealogy I tell as well as my own constructive understanding of Jesus Christ as constitutive of the irreducibly missionary existence of the church. As a result of this lacuna, much of the criticisms that have been directed towards my own constructive proposals have failed also to account for how the very assumptions concerning the reality of Christ’s lordship in history underlying these criticisms might themselves be called into question by my own articulation of that reality. Thus, the reason why I insist upon rehearsing my understanding of Jesus’ apocalyptic historicity as constitutive of the truth of his lordship, is because this is the one point which would be decisive for launching a serious debate over the questions that have heretofore been raised, especially as regards the recurrent question of whether or not my “ecclesiology” is adequate to the task I have set myself. So my focus here shall not only be upon what I mean by Jesus Christ’s apocalyptic singularity (what Yoder calls Jesus’ “independence”) as constitutive of his lordship, but in what ways this singular historicity as such is constitutive of that very reality that we call “church.”
To begin with, I should like to recall, as my friend Josh Davis did in the very first post of this series, that the very subject of my book is that of Jesus’ “lordship.” In fact, this is precisely what my language of “singularity” is meant to address: viz., what it means to affirm, in history and in practice, the reality that “Jesus is Lord.” My whole critique of Constantinian ideology and the recurrence of Hegelian and idealist residues in thinking about Christ’s relation to history turns upon the way in which these modes of thinking conceive that relation in such a manner as to render the church incapable, not just as a matter of accident but by definition, of witnessing to and embodying the truth of that lordship in its own historic life and practice.
As against the backdrop of Constantinian and idealist modes of conceiving Christ’s lordship, my point about the singularity of Jesus’ apocalyptic historicity is a rather straightforward. To insist upon the singularity of Jesus’ historicity as constitutive of his lordship in history is to insist that in the historicity of Jesus of Nazareth we are confronted with an event of such radically singular concreteness that it resists being rendered explicable in light of some other, more universal reality. To be sure, to insist upon the apocalyptic historicity of Jesus is to insist that no account of Christ’s lordship whose axiom is the apocalyptic action of God can escape the problematic of “history.” However, the point of focusing upon the singularly apocalyptic reality of Jesus’ historicity is to suggest that here the question of history is posed to us in such a way that the historicity of Jesus short-circuits any Hegelian or idealist mode of historical determination which requires that Jesus instantiate a universal reality, the recognition of which is then reflective and expressive of his own (and every other) particular “identity.” The crucial point here, for me, is that where the “truth” of Jesus’ historicity is conceptualized according to this (inevitably dialectic) relation of particularity to universality, we will be led not only to an account of Christ’s lordship but also of Christian witness that prioritizes universality in such a way as to be determinative of every particular identity, including Jesus’ own. The nature of Jesus Christ’s lordship will invariably come to be articulated in terms of his particular history as representative of a “concrete universal” (as in Barth), and Christian witness to that lordship will be reducible to Christianity’s exhibited (as practiced) commitment “to a particular way of structuring the whole” (as in Hauerwas). This is the idealist temptation that I sought to trace throughout my genealogy: Christ is thinkable as Lord only at the point of conceptualizing his universal significance, which conceptualization mediates the church’s “being” as the lived, historical instantiation of that universal reality.
By contrast, what I mean to articulate in stressing the manner in which Jesus’ singular, apocalyptic historicity is constitutive of Christ’s lordship, is the sense in which Jesus’ singular historicity is not only irruptive of this universal-particular structure, but also the sense in which the Christic logic of singularity names that truly catholic reality by which the church happens – and thus lives – in this world. Let me explain what I mean by this.
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