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Clarice J. Martin, Luke Timothy Johnson, Beverly Roberts Gaventa, C. Kavin Rowe, Justo González, Ben Witherington III, Douglas Campbell, Chris Tilling, Jaroslav Pelikan, and John Calvin
Amanda Diekman and Franklin Golden
Dr. James Earl Massey,
Gardner C. Taylor and Peter Gomes, Dr. Massey
Dr. W. C.
Turner,
Rev. Joanne L. Browne Jennings,
The book of Acts speaks of revolution. We must never forget this. It depicts life in the disrupting presence of the Spirit of God.
see a past unfolding in a future and making intelligible a present.
history is now.
Luke is offering us instruction in historical consciousness.
Such a vision, built on a slave economy, accommodated cultural difference and promoted a controlled cosmopolitanism that allowed for a diversity of beliefs as long as those beliefs were not a threat to the divinity of the emperor or the empire.
sedition.
In Acts we find faith caught between diaspora and empire. Faith is always caught between diaspora and empire. It is always caught between those on the one side focused on survival and fixated on securing a future for their people and on the other side those intoxicated with the power and possibilities of empire and of building a world ordered by its financial, social, and political logics that claim to be the best possible way to bring stability and lasting peace. The book of Acts is read poorly when we forget this double bind or forget the pain of Israel in its pages.
order to free faith to live in its true home in God. But this is not easy. Indeed the context of Acts is struggle. The content of Acts is also struggle.
We must hear in the Acts story the pathos of life caught in the grip of diaspora and empire—of people angry, confused, and frustrated as the resurrected Jesus calls them to envision the new creature in the Spirit, which is a mind-altering new life together. Fundamental to that new reality is the joining of Jew and Gentile.
The book of Acts reminds us that to follow Jesus is to already be a betrayer of one’s people.
The deepest reality of life in the Spirit depicted in the book of Acts is that the disciples of Jesus rarely, if ever, go where they want to go or to whom they would want to go. Indeed the Spirit seems to always be pressing the disciples to go to those to whom they would in fact strongly prefer never to share space, or a meal, and definitely not life together. Yet it is precisely this prodding to be boundary-crossing
crossing and border-transgressing that marks the presence of the Spirit of God.
it might be better to read Paul less as foreground and more as background to the agency of the Spirit. This is not to discount Paul’s important role in the story, but by focusing too strenuously on Paul, Acts too often gets read with a masculinist optic as a heroic tale, and a...
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Paul yields to the Spirit. This is the sum total of his story in the book of Acts, but inside that story is the story of a God who desires us and all of creation and will not release us to isolations, social, economic, cultural, religious, gendered, and geographic.
We are constantly trying to catch up with the Spirit and keep pace with a God who is calling forth the new creature in the Spirit.
We have yet to hear the message of Acts of an erotic God who seeks to place in each of us desire for those outside of us, outside our worlds of culture, clan, nation, tribe, faith, politics, class, and species.
Welcome to the real.
The Book of Acts . . . [is] . . . a call to Christians to be open to the action of the Spirit, not only leading them to confront values and practices in society that may need to be subverted, but perhaps even leading them to subvert or question practices and values within the Church itself.
Faith will not be rooted in a phantasm.
Whether they believe or not, Jesus is alive.
Jesus, however, is not a sign of resurrection. He is its Lord. Resurrection will not define him. He will define resurrection’s meaning and resurrection’s purpose. It will not be used by these disciples as an ideological tool for statecraft. Nor will it constitute them the winner’s circle. Such ways of thinking resurrection turn Jesus into the greatest victor in an eternal competition and produces disciples who follow Jesus only because they worship power.
These disciples consumed in spectacle may easily turn toward monument thinking and building.
The old definitions have not served us, nor the earth that supports us. The old patterns, no matter how cleverly rearranged to imitate progress, still condemn us to cosmetically altered repetitions of the same old exchanges, the same old guilt, hatred, recrimination, lamentation, and suspicion. For we have, built into all of us, old blueprints of expectation and response, old structures of oppression, and these must be altered at the same time as we alter the living conditions which are the result of those structures. For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.
Nationalism always engenders zero-sum calculations,
Nationalist vision is weakness and fear masquerading as strength and courage,
This however is a false freedom that depends on a history of conquest, uneven exchange, debt deployment and manipulation, violence, and war. To think toward national existence is already to be thinking toward captivity and death.
We struggle to imagine collective life beyond nationalist form.
collective life that the triune God is drawing Israel toward—a
a people who receives peoples, welcoming the stranger, and thereby expanding their identity without ...
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stories of Israel in Scripture show us a people pressed by God not to be like other peoples who desired a king and a world inscribed by the visible trappings of power and influence and forms of...
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Should disciples of Jesus love their nation, the one they claim and are claimed by? This is the wrong question. The question we are compelled to ask and answer by our lives is, How might we show the love of God for all peoples, a love that
cannot be contained by any nation, a love that slices through borders and boundaries and reaches into every people group, every clan, every tribe, and every family?
The love of God exposes our modern nations for what they are—simple fabricated containers for the rich multiplicity of peoples who each and every one are beloved creatures of the Creator God.
Nationalism remains a powerful way of imagining life together because it is a theological vision that mimics the desire of God for our full communion with each other. It is communion without God or God simply used as a slogan. This is why nationalism for us moderns is the first idolatry, because it places another god before God.
The god-bound-to-us nationalism, whether we articulate it through a theocracy, a monarchy, a democracy, an oligarchy, a socialism, the plight of an exiled people, or even a global corporation, always seeks to turn our imaginations toward a form of desire that is border controlled and boundaried by distinct objects of affection, for example, a flag, or founding documents and founding historic figures, or songs or stories of heroic sacrifice for the sake of the business or the nation.
The horror of the god-bound-to-us nationalism is not that it wants our respect; it wants our desire.
What belongs to God, God seeks to direct. God seeks to direct such desire in us toward holy ends and not the ends of statecraft or global or local markets.
God from the very beginning of the Acts drama will not share holy desire with any nationalistic longing that draws borders and boundaries.
motley
It is a life-draining deception to ever believe that one preaches alone. Of course, one voice speaks in the preaching, yet at every moment, at any given moment when a preacher speaks, many preachers past and present are speaking. The preacher is always a company of preachers.
The Jesus you knew—crucified, dead and buried, and now alive—is both Lord and Messiah, the bearer of the divine image and reality.
It is the contradiction inside of which all the disciples of Jesus will live forever. Life inside this contradiction means, as Samuel Proctor said, that we may now see the world for what it is: upside down.
different order of sacrifice is being performed here, one that reaches back to the very beginnings of Israel. Their God does not need possessions and has never been impressed by their donation. The divine One wants people and draws us into that wanting. This is intensified giving, feverish giving that feels not only the urgent need but the divine wanting. A new kind of giving is exposed at this moment, one that binds bodies together as the first reciprocal donation where the followers will give themselves to one another. The possessions will follow. What was at stake here was not the giving up
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