Exemplary Life

Andy Chambers

• Publisher: B&H Books
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781433678356
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

Exemplary Life articulates Luke's vision for life together in a local church using key passages from Acts 2: 42-47; 4: 32-35; and 5: 12-16 (known as "summary narratives") as the starting point of reference. Although Luke is rightly acclaimed as the church's first historian, he was a powerful writer and theologian as well. He also planted churches with Paul and had definite convictions about what life together in the church should look like. Yet, Luke's theology of church life is underemphasized in modern scholarship, downplayed by issues rising from the historical-critical method.However, when the summary narratives are studied through the lens of narrative and rhetorical criticism, Luke's strategy is unmistakable. Those passages cast a vision for life together in an exemplary church, drawn from the historical circumstances of the church in Jerusalem. These narratives also serve as a starting point for studying church life throughout Acts. When the church planting movements in Samaria, Antioch, Ephesus, and Troas are examined, we find echoes of the narratives almost constantly. These amplify and drive home Luke's message in the summary narratives.Taking this path, twenty distinct characteristics of exemplary church life emerge. From repentance and Scriptural authority to praying together and earning the respect of neighbors, each one is thoughtfully presented here by author Andy Chambers to reassert Luke's voice in 21st century conversations about the faithful formation of New Testament churches.

Chapter One

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 Scripture toward treating the Bible like any other human document.1 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.”2 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.3

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.4 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.”5 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.6 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.7 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.8

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.9

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.10 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.11

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 ...

Table of contents

• Endorsements
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Bible Txanslation Abbreviations
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Chapter One: How We Lost Luke’s Theology of Church Life
• Chapter Two: The Rhetoric of Summarization and Exemplary Church Life in Acts
• Chapter Three: Exemplary Life Portrait 1: Acts 2:42–47
• Chapter Four: Exemplary Life Portrait 2: Acts 4:32–35
• Chapter Five: Exemplary Life Portrait 3: Acts 5:12–16
• Chapter Six: Exemplary Life in the Gentile Churches of Acts
• Chapter Seven: A Theology of Church Life in Acts
• Chapter Eight: Directions for Application
• Bibliography
• Name Index
• Subject Index
• Scripture Index