Preparing for the book of Acts
It’s Willie Jennings time, y’all
If we were each to make a list of Top Ten Most Triggering Books of the Bible, I know the book of Acts would be on mine. It may not contain some of the wanton violence or clobber passages found elsewhere, but it is one of the books used most often to justify toxic Christian practices.
For one, Pentecostals and other charismatic evangelicals often use the stories of speaking in tongues to sanction their two-tier splitting of Christians into real ones who have the supposed gift and the forlorn ones who do not. On top of that, missionaries of all stripes have taken catchphrases like “the Lord added to their number” and “the church increased in numbers” and “the word of God continued to spread” to motivate dehumanizing (and colonizing) efforts around the world.
But there’s more than one way to read a book.
Theologian Willie James Jennings (whose The Christian Imagination I wrote about in a post about decolonizing) has written an incredible commentary on Acts. In our Thursday night Harbor gatherings, we are about to embark on a series of conversations about Acts, and Jennings’s work will likely shape many of our discussions. So today I just want to summarize, in my own words, the introduction to his commentary—which we will look at again on Zoom this week.
Here’s my best shot at understanding and summarizing WJJ’s overall view of and approach to Acts:
Acts is history, but the point of history is not to sit around and debate its accuracy or to amass the most knowledge about it. No, history is a creature of God, loved by God, and we are supposed to grapple with it. As we do, the past recorded in the text connects to our present now and propels us into the future. We do this grappling in three ways: entering history, telling it, and learning it. And, perhaps somewhat arbitrarily, Jennings ties each of these three history-grapplings with one of the hallmarks of his own theology:
We enter history: the tension between empire and diaspora
– “The book of Acts takes place in empire—the Roman empire—and this not a fact that we should ever let escape our attention. The goal of the Roman empire was to reshape the world in its own image. This is always the desire of empire.”
– “Diaspora means scattering and fragmentation, exile and loss. It means being displaced and in search of a place that could be made home. For Israel it means life among the Gentiles. Danger and threat surround diaspora life.”We tell history: the Spirit’s joining of people and peoples
– “Acts renders the Gentiles as a profound question to the Jews of diaspora: What will you do if I join you at the body of Jesus and fall in love with your God and with you?”
– “The hierarchies nurtured so carefully by the Roman empire are being undone by the Spirit, who will not release slave or free, Jew or Gentile, to their own self-interpretations but who will relentlessly prod them to open themselves toward one another in a life that builds the common.”
We learn history: God’s (erotic) desire
– “God’s desire is for the living. We are the pearl of great price sought after by the Spirit. Yet the new thing Luke narrates is intensification of divine desire in flesh.”
– “The prevailing fantasy of people is to have power over others, to claim the power of self-determination, and to make a world bow to its will. This is the fantasy of nations and clans, peoples and corporations. But the Spirit offers us God’s own fantasy of desire for people, of joining and life together and of shared stories bound to a new destiny in God.”
I hope you can join us on some upcoming Thursdays as we observe and talk about these themes in the stories Acts tells us about Christianity’s earliest days.
