Conversion in Luke-Acts

Divine Action, Human Cognition, and the People of God

Green, Joel B.

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781441220967
• Topic: Theologie & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblische Studien

Repentance and conversion are key topics in New Testament interpretation and in Christian life. However, the study of conversion in early Christianity has been plagued by psychological assumptions alien to the world of the New Testament. Leading New Testament scholar Joel Green believes that careful attention to the narrative of Luke-Acts calls for significant rethinking about the nature of Christian conversion. Drawing on the cognitive sciences and examining key evidence in Luke-Acts, this book emphasizes the embodied nature of human life as it explores the life transformation signaled by the message of conversion, offering a new reading of a key aspect of New Testament theology.

1
Questioning Conversion in Luke-Acts

As motifs in the narrative of Luke-Acts,1 conversion and repentance are ubiquitous. Their importance is signaled immediately in the opening chapter of the Gospel,2 in the angel Gabriel’s summary of the anticipated consequences of John the Baptist’s ministry:

He will turn many of the people of Israel to the Lord their God . . . he will go before him,

to turn the hearts of fathers to their children, and

[to turn] the disobedient to the wisdom of the righteous,

to make ready a people prepared for the Lord. (Luke 1:16–17)3

This opening reference to repentance (ἐπιστρέφω, epistrephō, “to turn”) signals, first, the degree to which this is God’s story. Repentance in Luke-Acts is centered on God. Gabriel’s sketch of John’s vocation is profoundly theocentric. He will turn people to the Lord, go before the Lord, and prepare people for the advent of the Lord. God is at work, the angel announces, and this invites response: repentance, obedience, and readiness. If the third evangelist proceeds to identify Jesus as the “Lord” before whom John will go (3:4–6), this is because, for Luke, Jesus shares in God’s own identity.4 This theocentrism is carried forward into the Acts of the Apostles, as in Peter’s directive to his Jerusalem audience, “Repent, therefore, and turn [to God]!” (Acts 3:19), for example, or Paul’s proclamation in Lystra, “Turn to the living God!” (Acts 14:15; cf. 26:20).

Gabriel’s Speech	Israel’s Scriptures
He will turn many of the people of Israel to the Lord their God . . . he will go before him, to turn the hearts of fathers to their children, and the disobedient to the wisdom of the righteous, to make ready a people prepared for the Lord. (Luke 1:16–17)	“return to the LORD your God” (Deut. 30:2)
	“he turned many from iniquity” (Mal. 2:6)
	“. . . who will restore the heart of the father to the son” (Mal. 4:6 NETS)
	“to turn the heart of a father to a son” (Sir. 48:10 NETS)
	“I am sending my messenger to prepare the way before me” (Mal. 3:1)
	“Prepare the way of the Lord . . .” (Isa. 40:3 NETS)

Second, those with ears to hear will recognize how Israel’s Scriptures have influenced Gabriel’s speech (see table for comparison). These scriptural resonances embed John’s ministry of calling Israel to repentance deeply within Israel’s story and, especially, locate John squarely within the story line of Israel’s anticipation of God’s eschatological restoration of God’s people. Indeed, this is the first of two clear allusions in Luke’s birth narrative to Isa. 40:3, the second appearing in Zechariah’s song (1:76)—both of which anticipate the citation of Isa. 40:3–5 in Luke 3:4–6.5

Third, from the beginning of the Gospel narrative, we learn that repentance is for Luke no theological abstraction. Rather, “turning” is aimed at a transformation of day-to-day patterns of thinking, feeling, believing, and behaving. This is decisively emphasized in Luke 3:7–14, where John identifies the markers of repentance in especially socioeconomic terms for the crowds, tax collectors, and soldiers. In the Acts of the Apostles, too, economic koinōnia and hospitality are typical correlates of conversion (e.g., 2:42–47; 16:13–15, 30–34).

What begins with the angelic message in Luke 1 continues throughout the Lukan narrative. John proclaims a “baptism of repentance” and urges the crowds that come out to him “to produce fruits in keeping with repentance” (Luke 3:3, 8; cf. Acts 13:24; 19:4). Jesus summarizes his mission as calling sinners to repentance (Luke 5:32), reports rejoicing at the repentance of even one sinner (15:7, 10), and informs his followers that the Scriptures themselves have it that repentance must be proclaimed to all nations (24:47). Early on in Luke’s second volume, at the close of the Pentecost address, Peter sketches the appropriate response to the good news: “Repent, and be baptized” (Acts 2:38). At Athens, Paul announces that “[God] now directs all people everywhere to repent” (17:30). Toward the end of Acts, Paul retrospectively summarizes his entire ministry as declaring “first to those in Damascus, in Jerusalem, and in every region of Judea, and also to the gentiles . . . that they should repent and turn to God, producing deeds in keeping with conversion” (26:20).

This judgment regarding the centrality of repentance and conversion to Luke-Acts finds easy support in recent scholarship. Thomas Finn detects twenty-one conversion accounts in the Acts of the Apostles and claims that “conversion is the major theme in Luke’s second volume.”6 Charles Talbert finds only ten such accounts in Acts, but refines Finn’s overarching judgment only slightly: “Conversion is a central focus of Acts, maybe the central focus.”7 Beverly Gaventa eschews any conversion “pattern” in Luke-Acts but, importantly for our purposes, devotes just over half of her important study of “aspects of conversion in the New Testament” to the Lukan narrative.8 For Guy Nave, repentance is “a keynote of the message in Luke-Acts,” and the book of Acts is “full of conversion stories.”9

Heightened emphasis on Luke’s part has not led to a long history of study of repentance and conversion in Luke-Acts, however, or to general agreement around what conversion entails for Luke. Until recently, conversion attracted little attention in Lukan studies. When scholars studied this motif, they tended to refer only to the second half of Luke’s two-part narrative, engaging little or not at all with the Gospel of Luke. This is true of Finn and Talbert, for example, and the same can be said of the important article by Jacques Dupont, which Talbert takes as the point of departure for his own study.10 Studying the “paradigmatic experiences [of conversion] found in the New Testament,” Richard Peace declares his interest in the Gospel of Mark and Paul, which leads him to consider the Lukan narrative only for its accounts of Paul’s experience on the way to Damascus.11 Of the five dissertations published in recent years on our motif, one concerns itself with the book of Acts but not with Luke’s Gospel (Babu Immanuel), and one is focused on the Gospel but not Acts (Fernando Méndez-Moratalla).12 Although the others examine conversion in the narrative of Luke-Acts, Mihamm Kim-Rauchholz deals with only two conversion accounts in Acts, Nave devotes a mere twenty pages to conversion in Acts, and David Morlan focuses on only three texts as he paves the way for a comparison of conversion in Luke and Paul.13 The earlier dissertation by Robert Allen Black, completed in 1985, concerns itself, too, with conversion in the Acts of the Apostles.14 If study of this important Lukan motif has suffered neglect since the onset of scholarly interest in Luke-Acts in the mid-twentieth century, the renaissance of interest in more recent years has not yet exhausted the witness of Luke’s two volumes.

What Is Conversion?

Before surfacing key issues and unanswered questions from recent contributions to the study of Luke-Acts, I should first register the surprising, general lack of explicit, critical reflection concerning how the biblical writers seem to have defined conversion. That is, recent study of the motif in Luke-Acts has focused on an array of significant and relevant issues—for example, whether conversion is a moral or a cognitive category, what conversion is from and/or to, or whether conversion and repentance are discrete categories. What conversion entails, however—how best to define conversion for Luke-Acts—seems largely to have been assumed.

The importance of definition can hardly be exaggerated. After all, what one assumes conversion to be will determine what one looks for in the Lukan narrative and how one knows when one has found it. With the rise of conversion studies in the past few decades, though, how best to understand conversion has become a topic of some controversy. In fact, in their introduction to The Oxford Handbook of Religious Conversion, Lewis Rambo and Charles Farhadian begin their discussion of contemporary problems in conversion studies with this claim: “One of the most important and also most contentious issues in conversion studies is defining the term ‘conversion’ itself.” They go on to adopt a minimalist starting point, using the terms “change” and “transformation,” noting that the converting process is itself “dynamic and malleable.”15

A Question of “Frame”

Today, someone asking “Have you been converted?” could be heard in a variety of ways, depending on the context within which the question is asked. In an electronics store, the question might relate to one’s finally “seeing the light” and adopting one computer brand over another. Those witnessing a street-corner evangelist are likely to conjure images of an altogether different sort. In the field of cognitive linguistics, questions of context like this are understood in terms of “framing,” the larger patterns within which we locate, experience, and make sense of terms, concepts, and experiences. Thus, those of us who are interested in how institutions “think” can frame those institutions—like a university, a church, or a dot-com—so as to draw attention to their organizational charts, the giftedness of their people, the distribution and exercise of power, or the values they want to inculcate. An organization is all of these things and more, but different people visualize them through different frames, so they see different things.

For Vyvyan Evans and Melanie Green, “frame” refers to “a schematisation of experience (a knowledge structure) . . . represented at the conceptual level and held in long-term memory. The frame relates the elements and entities associated with a particular culturally embedded scene from human experience.”16 We associate terms and experiences with whole patterns of thought and belief. “Student” is thus automatically associated with “teacher,” and a host of related terms—aspects and types related to the student experience—are signaled: syllabi, textbooks, exams, papers, online discussion groups, and library hours. The experience of being a student extends into other realms as well: increased coffee consumption, concerns about future repayment of student debt, balancing time, and so on. Like knocking over a single dom...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• 1. Questioning Conversion in Luke-Acts
• 2. Conversion and Cognition
• 3. Orienting Conversion
• 4. Texts and Metaphors
• 5. Community, Agency, and Apostasy
• Epilogue
• Bibliography
• Index of Scripture and Other Ancient Sources
• Index of Modern Authors
• Index of Subjects
• Back Cover