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CHAPTER 1
How We Lost Luke's Theology of Church Life
Research into the summary narratives in the twentieth century followed traditional lines of application of source, form, and redaction criticism to the book of Acts. These interpretive methods have their roots in the historical-critical method, which developed in the nineteenth century as a product of the Enlightenment. To understand how Luke's theology of church life in Acts was lost, we need to grasp how the historical-critical method cast its shadow over the way Acts is read.
Acts and the Rise of the Historical-Critical Method
The Enlightenment brought about three profound shifts in the way people approached historical knowledge and documents like Acts that purport to tell about the past. First, a methodological skepticism led people away from accepting the authority of the church on the nature of Scripturetoward treating the Bible like any other human document. In one sense, reading the Bible as a historical document affirms that God revealed Himself in history and that the early church produced written documents in order to preserve the knowledge of God's deeds in the world. Asking questions of a historical nature about things like authorship, date, occasion, genre, and purpose affirms that God's self-disclosure did not occur in a historical vacuum. I. Howard Marshall correctly observes that anyone who tries to "understand the New Testament or defend its historicity against skeptics by any kind of reasonable argument is already practicing the historical method." The difference between a historical perspective and that of the Enlightenment, however, is that the latter argued that purely historical questions should be asked about Scripture without reference to doctrine or any dogmatic position of the church on the nature and authority of Scripture.
Second, the rise of the scientific method led to the naive assumption that a dispassionate objectivity in every area of knowledge is possible. This led to the belief that history writing was a science that could recreate the past in a purely unbiased way. Of course, the Bible's historical documents are anything but unbiased. The Gospels and Acts were written by passionately devoted followers of the resurrected Jesus. They were committed, without apology, to persuading readers to follow Jesus too. As Daniel Marguerat points out, "Luke does not display a historian's intellectual autonomy; his reading of history is a believer's reading." From the perspective of nineteenth-century scientific historiography, this perceived lack of objectivity in the New Testament raised serious doubts about the reliability of biblical accounts of history like the kind seen in Acts.
Third, the scientific method also demanded that claims about truth and knowledge be verifiable through empirical testing and that explanations for all extraordinary phenomena be sought strictly in terms of causes and effects observable in nature. Thus, the fact that the Bible reports a miracle no longer warranted the conclusion that the laws of nature had been suspended and a miracle had actually occurred. A rational explanation was now to be preferred. This created a tremendous crisis for people who wanted to remain intellectually relevant in society and hold on to the divine inspiration and authority of the Bible, because Scripture, especially the book of Acts, is driven throughout by the miraculous. As a result of these shifts, the historical reliability of the Bible came under a withering assault in the universities of Europe in the nineteenth century. The methodology for interpreting the Bible that arose out of this new mindset is called the historical-critical method.
Acts in the Shadow of F. C. Baur
F. C. Baur and the Tübingen school in Germany that he represents epitomized the application of the historical-critical method to the text of Acts. Baur contributed an important insight when he recognized that the New Testament itself is part of church history. By that he meant that the history of doctrine did not begin when the last book of the Bible was written. The New Testament introduces us to people of different cultural and religious backgrounds all striving, sometimes against each other (see Acts 15:1–2; Gal 2:11–14), to come to grips with the meaning of Jesus Christ. Early in his career Baur adopted the dialectical philosophy of Friedrich Hegel as his lens for understanding the conflict he saw in the New Testament. Hegel viewed the movement of history in terms of a thesis, an antithesis, and a resulting synthesis. An idea or thesis emerges in history and grows in influence until it provokes an opposing point of view or antithesis. At some point the conflict between the opposing viewpoints resolves itself in a new reality or synthesis.
For Baur, the Hegelian thesis was the emergence of a thoroughly Jewish Christianity represented by Peter and the church in Jerusalem. As the gospel moved beyond the borders of Judaism, a culturally Gentile Christianity emerged, an antithesis that was represented by Paul and the church in Antioch. The earliest decades of Christian history, as Baur saw them, were marked by conflict between these two factions. The application of Hegel's dialectic so magnified the discord between Jewish and Gentile Christianity that Baur only accepted as authentic those New Testament books that evidenced the strife between them, like Galatians and 1 Corinthians. The book of Acts, on the other hand, has a more conciliatory tone. Acts displays a united church, as the summary narratives show (see Acts 2:44; 4:32). Acts also shows the Jewish and Gentile factions resolving their differences (15:1–35) and the emergence of a synthesis in the form of an "early catholicism." Baur believed that this synthesis did not emerge until at least the mid to late second century AD. Therefore, in Baur's view, Acts could not have been written any earlier than the middle of the second century and so was of little historical value to him. This does not mean Baur did not study Acts from a historical perspective. Rather, he sought, with the historical-critical method he helped develop, to go behind the text of Acts (which for him represented the situation of the late second-century church) in order to get at the actual history of the first-century church.
Baur left a permanent mark on subsequent Acts scholarship among those who followed his presuppositions. Nearly a century later, Rudolf Bultmann would argue in his Theology of the New Testament that the New Testament contains two strata, the first embodying the early church's kerygma (or preaching) and the second representing an early catholic falling away from the truth. For Bultmann, Luke's writings belonged to the early catholic distortion of the gospel message. He did not see them as normative for the church's faith as he thought Paul's letters and John's Gospel should be.
Not everyone was persuaded by Baur's conclusions. J. B. Lightfoot of Cambridge University challenged Baur's late date for Acts. Lightfoot published commentaries on several New Testament books that are still in print today. He also wrote extensively on postapostolic literature, especially the late first- and early second-century letters of Clement of Rome and Ignatius of Antioch. Lightfoot demonstrated convincingly that 1 Clement and the seven letters of Ignatius were genuine and written near the turn of the first century. Their writings do not reveal the disunity between Peter and Paul and between Jewish and Gentile Christianity that Baur was convinced dominated the first-century church. Lightfoot's response significantly discredited Baur's position on the late date of Acts and its lack of reliability as a historical resource for knowledge of early Christianity. Lightfoot desired to write a commentary on Acts but was not able, and we are poorer for it. However, he did publish several extensive critiques of Baur's conclusions.
With regard to the summary narratives, an affirmation and a basic criticism of Baur can be made. He correctly observed the conciliatory nature of Acts. Luke portrays the Gentile and Jewish wings of the church resolving their differences (see especially Acts 15 in re the Jerusalem Council). I would go farther than Baur and argue that Luke does more. Luke commends their faith and churches to each other. He especially commends his portraits of exemplary church life drawn from the Jewish mother church in Jerusalem to his Gentile readers in churches scattered throughout the Empire, and he shows Gentile churches adopting many of the practices of the Jerusalem church. Baur's observation of the tendency of Acts toward conciliation is an enduring contribution. However, he wrongly assumed that the display of unity in Acts between factions in the church demands that we believe Luke misrepresented the facts as he knew them. Baur's radically historicist approach unnecessarily pits historical and theological concerns in Acts against each other. This led to the assumption that the more theologically-oriented Luke was, the less reliable a historian he had to be — or worse, the more willing he was to write falsehoods in order to advance his own theological agenda.
The longer view of reading Acts through church history reveals a more basic principle animating reflection on tendencies in Acts and in Scripture generally. It is that Christianity is at heart a historical religion. This is reinforced from the call of Abraham and the formation and preservation of Israel to the ministry of Jesus and beyond. The Bible continually speaks of a God who reigns over and intervenes in history to accomplish His purposes. The death and resurrection of Jesus are presented as historical events on which the faith itself was said to hang (1 Cor 15:12–19) and which a person must believe happened if they want to be saved (Rom 10:9). Reading Acts in view of the Bible's habit of presenting Christianity as a historical faith should lead one to resist pitting theological concerns against the historical concerns in the study of Acts. Baur is a case study on how presuppositions can affect the direction and even the outcome of research and how interpreters can be swayed by the influence of their own presuppositions.
The Summary Narratives in the Shadow of Historical Criticism
The tendency of the Tübingen school to separate the actual history of the early church from what they saw as the theological tendencies of Acts profoundly impacted the interpretation of the summary narratives in the twentieth century, as they were read through the lenses of source, form, and redaction criticism. These tools continued the historical-critical quest to go behind what were seen as the theologically biased and therefore historically unreliable statements of Acts to the supposedly real history of the early church.
Source and Form Criticism. Source and form criticism developed first as tools for analyzing the Synoptic Gospels and then were applied to Acts. Source criticism sought to identify the sources used by the writers of the Gospels and Acts. Form criticism treated these sources as the end stage of a process of handing down traditions of the teachings and deeds of Jesus until they were codified in recognizable literary forms. Form critics saw in these forms evidence of the sources utilized by the authors of the Gospels and Acts in their compositions.
Martin Dibelius in 1923 pioneered the application of form criticism of the Gospels to Acts in his Aufsätze zur Apostelgeschichte (Studies in the Acts of the Apostles) through a method he called "style criticism." He made a distinction between the style of Luke's sources (like the episodes and speeches) and the editorial summaries that tie the episodes together. Dibelius argued that Luke's sources were older and therefore closer to the actual historical circumstances of the early church. He believed that Luke creatively composed the summaries as generalizations that made individual scenes appear as particular instances of typical circumstances. Dibelius identified Acts 1:13–14; 2:42,43–47; 4:4,32–35; 5:12–16,42; 6:7; 9:31; and 12:24 as examples of Luke's generalizing tendency. These texts summarize in an ideal way the ongoing life and growth of the Jerusalem church, but because Dibelius saw them as later Lukan contributions, he believed they were deliberate departures from the older tradition and therefore historically suspect.
Henry J. Cadbury based his form-critical analysis of the summaries in Acts on his study of summarization in the Synoptic Gospels. He believed that the summaries in Mark were the latest addition to his Gospel, which he distilled from the episodes in order to provide generalizations and fill voids between detached scenes. He also argued that Luke utilized Mark's summaries in his Gospel as evidenced by his tendency to repeat and multiply them, while still adhering closely to their content. In Acts, Cadbury argued that the summaries were derived from a date later than the episodes they joined and, like the Synoptics, were designed to fill voids between detached scenes with generalizations that indicated "single events of the type described were multiplied at other times and places." Cadbury adopted a more moderate posture than Dibelius regarding the historical reliability of Acts, stating that Luke was limited by the accuracy or inaccuracy of his sources.
Joachim Jeremias, Lucien Cerfaux, and Pierre Benoit turned their attention to analyzing the internal development of the summary narratives in an effort to distinguish between sources and Luke's contribution to their composition. All three held that the disjointed construction of the summaries showed some parts came from earlier sources and others from the author or a later editor, but they came to different conclusions about which parts were early and which were late. The lack of a consensus between them illustrates how efforts to separate Luke's sources for the summary narratives from his own contribution really are speculative at best. In their quest for the history behind texts, form critics ended up isolating those texts from their literary and theological contexts in the final canonical form of the book. Form criticism does raise an important question about whether the summary narratives should be considered a distinct literary form within Acts (a tendency of form-criticism) or a narrative technique used by Luke in his rhetorical strategy in Acts (the tendency of narrative and rhetorical criticism). I will say more on this in chapter 2.
Redaction Criticism. Redaction critics saw the writers of the Gospels and Acts as theologians in their own right, who modified their sources to achieve their own theological goals in their writings. In their view, source and form criticism's emphasis on seeking the history behind the Bible led interpreters to dissect and atomize individual texts to the point where they overlooked the theology of the book's final redactor (or editor). They believed his theology could be identified in the editorial seams that connect the sources he used in his composition.
In 1956 Ernst Haenchen applied redaction criticism in his commentary on Acts. He spent considerable energy analyzing Luke's theological tendencies in the summary narratives. He also argued that Luke inserted them in order to separate Peter's speeches in chapters 2 and 3 by a "representation of the life of the community." Rather than emphasize their disjointed construction, which form criticism tended toward, Haenchen sought to identify a basic order in the progression of subjects in the summaries. Heinrich Zimmermann in 1961 also sought to identify possible strategies in the way the summaries were constructed by Luke to advance his theological agenda.
In 1963 Hans Conzelmann argued for Lukan authorship of the summaries. However, he attributed their apparent lack of organization to Luke's understanding of history, saying, "Luke does not think in terms of causal connections, but rather finds the meaning of the whole in individual parts." For Conzelmann, Luke's portrait of church life in the summary narratives, especially the sharing of property, is idealized and should not be taken as historical. He also did not think Luke intended to present them as normative for the church in his time. Rather, Luke is associating the earliest days of the church with Greek utopian ideals in the minds of his readers. Conzelmann reiterated his position on the historicity of the summary narratives in his 1979 book on New Testament interpretation, coauthored with Andreas Lindemann:
As sources, the summaries in Acts (see 2:42–47; 4:32–35; 5:12–16) have as little immediate value as the speeches. They do not permit a glance into the actual conditions of the early church; rather they present the ideal picture of the church desired by the author. ... The picture of the church that is drawn in the summaries is not historically authentic but represents an idealization of the early period of the kind frequently observed in classical historiography ("golden era").
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Excerpted from "Exemplary Life"
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Copyright © 2012 Andy Chambers.
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