Acts of the Apostles

Following the four Gospels within our Bibles is the ‘Acts of the Apostles,’ in which the New Testament shifts from the accounts of God, present among us in the person and work of Jesus the Son, to the Son’s presence among us’with the Holy Spirit’in the persons and works of the church.

Sorely neglected (save for annual readings around Pentecost), Acts is not only an action-packed dossier on the early mission and expansion of Jesus’ kingdom’the holy Christian church’but also an authoritative statement of the church’s rule of faith and a confession of its doctrine. Thus Acts ever belongs to the normative canon of Christian Scripture, to be mined by each generation of the church for orthodoxy and orthopraxy. Amid the alarming advancement of Sunni Islam, coupled with the utter loss of urgency in missional endeavors’to say nothing of contemporary Christianity’s slouching progress toward secularism and consumerism’revisiting Acts’ enduring message of the church’s raison d’être could hardly be more timely, for it speaks directly to the church about the lampstand committed to her and, with the book of Revelation, the perils of undervaluing it.

The very placement of Acts (following the Gospel of John in the canonical, though not compositional, order) indicates some continuity, a degree of continuance with the Gospels that immediately precede it. And that’s precisely what the opening verse of Acts requires: the perspective of historical progression. The operative word in Acts’ first sentence begins: ‘In the first book, O Theophilus, I have dealt with all that Jesus began to do and teach’ (1:1). Luke, the traditionally accepted author of the book, pens a sequel to the pioneering ‘doings and teachings’ of Jesus in the Synoptic Gospels with more kingdom ‘doings and teachings’ now that Christ has been raised from the dead and possesses all authority in heaven and on earth (Matt. 28:18) and is claiming his rightful inheritance’namely, the entire globe and ‘a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, tribe, people and language’ (Rev. 7:9). Although these post-resurrection ‘doings and teachings’ initially take place almost exclusively through his apostles, they also increase through commonplace disciples, which eventually becomes normative. The movement is linear: The Father acted decisively through the Son to accomplish the redemption of Israel in real human history. Now the Son acts decisively through the church in the power of the Holy Spirit to apply redemption to both Jew and Gentile, thereby reconstituting the Israel of God in the Son, again, in real human history. Simply put, Acts is the open-ended, factual story of the world’s rightful king expanding his global kingdom through its citizenry, demographic divisions notwithstanding. It heralds a new world order with a new king enthroned: not Caesar, but Christ’ruling not by coercion and force but by grace and gospel. Good news for the world, especially a world that has found peace by every other means perfectly elusive.

It was of necessity that Luke broke from his first book and started afresh with this new composition. Something momentous had been inaugurated: through the death and resurrection of Messiah, God’s kingdom had come at last; and now the ascended and enthroned Jesus was ruling and reigning over, in, and through his kingdom citizenry. That’s what a king does. Jesus was no longer engaged in the cosmic battle to establish God’s kingdom’his perfect life, death, and resurrection achieved that. Now he was expanding his kingdom of peace, truth, and love through the means of grace committed to his kingdom people. What was impossible with sinful humanity was now possible with a merciful God, because Jesus Christ had fulfilled all covenant obligations, borne the penalty for covenant violations, and by his expiating blood and perfect righteousness made humanity once again inhabitable by the Holy Spirit. This is the content of Acts’ apostolic homilies. They repeatedly intimate that the works of Christ are of one piece: from the incarnation to the crucifixion and resurrection, ascension, and Pentecost. Christ doing and teaching, Christ ascending and reigning, Christ gifting and dispensing. And following Pentecost, says Luke, Jesus is doing so through the likes of those baptized into the life of the Triune God.

To be sure, there’s a noted discontinuity due to the finality and once-and-for-all efficacy of the crucifixion of the Son of God; but with Christ’s resurrection, there is now his promise to renew the existing creation. Consequently, there is continuity with Jesus’ establishment of the kingdom of God on earth: his ‘doing and teaching’ continues. The transition point for how Christ continues to ‘do and teach’ is, significantly, the ascension. And it is the ascension that yields the symbolic rebirth of people from ‘every nation under heaven’ (Acts 2:5), the outpouring of the Holy Spirit on Pentecost.

An all-too-typical reading of Acts sees it emphasizing the presence and performance of the Holy Spirit to the exclusion of Christ: Pentecost cueing the presence of the Holy Spirit; the ascension punctuating Christ’s absence. The notion of a truant Jesus, however, is the exact opposite of what Luke intends by the ascension. For the ascension hallmarks the presence of Christ ‘doing and teaching’ through the church.

Luke left off the ‘former treatise’ with the risen Christ making himself known to his disciples and apostles ‘in the breaking of the bread’ (24:31, 35) and in the Scriptures (24:27, 44), and then ascending ‘up into heaven’ (24:51). The Gospel of Luke and the book of Acts, however, are not to be read as discontinuous because of the ascension. Rather, in addition to the resurrection, it is the ascension that further renders them a contiguous account of the acts of Christ. Heaven, of course, is not ‘up there, out there.’ It isn’t far away. Instead, our spatiotemporal dimension is suffused with the invisible dimension of heaven, comprising one reality over which Jesus has all authority (Matt. 28:18). The ascension, perhaps surprisingly, actually signals the enthronement of the ever-present Christ and thus his active reign on earth, as well as heaven, until the two dimensions are fully reintegrated and manifested. After all, the ascension doesn’t bring a postponement of his availing prayer, ‘Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven’ (Matt. 6:10), but the initiation and instantiation of its fulfillment. So we should expect Christ’s present earthly reign (not heavenly) to be the subject of Acts: a progressive rule that reaches its apogee and fullness on ‘the Last Day,’ not in chapter 28 verse 31.

Acts would have us remember that it was the present Christ who sent the Holy Spirit upon the disciples and apostles (Luke 24:49; cf. John 20:22). And so Christ himself is present and active in the church and not merely the Holy Spirit, just as Jesus himself promised in John 14:18 and Matthew 18:20 and 28:20. So critical is this understanding that it serves as the lodestar for the reading horizon of Acts as it recounts the ascension. Luke records how Jesus ‘was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight’ (1:9). The cloud conceals Jesus from their sight, leaving them ‘gazing into heaven’ (1:10). Beginning with the apostles themselves, the church would learn to ‘live by faith and not by sight’ (2 Cor. 5:7) when it comes to the promises and presence of Christ; that is, when it comes to his real voice and real presence. Significantly, the cloud doesn’t vanish, and that is because it signals the presence of heaven or, better, the heavenly presence of Jesus. Too frequently, commentators take the cloud as signaling Jesus’ absence. But Meredith Kline’s Images of the Spirit makes the correct identification of this Old Testament ‘glory-cloud’ with the visible manifestation of the Lord’s abiding presence called the Shekinah. (1) This cloud appears throughout the Bible at key junctures in redemptive history, punctuating the epochal work and presence of God among and for his people.

Once one appreciates this, then one finds that John 14:14, ‘If you ask me anything in my name, I will do it’ (emphasis added), is fulfilled in Acts. Jesus isn’t upstaged by the Holy Spirit, but rather is working in the power of the Holy Spirit through his body’the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church. Luke and Acts therefore teach an orthodox Christology that sets the parameters for orthopraxy concerning the ministration of the word and the sacraments. We have not a distant Lord, but one who is ever present, accomplishing his will concerning his kingdom; and we’the church in every age’are the means by which it advances ‘against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places’ (Eph. 6:12).

Outside of the Gospel of Mark, no writing in the New Testament compares with Acts’ tempo, variety, and intensity. Jaroslav Pelikan aptly describes it as ‘a book of frenetic action amid a constantly shifting scene.’ (2) Lutheran commentator Gerhard A. Krodel quotes perhaps the best description of Acts, offered by Edgar Johnson Goodspeed:

Where, within eighty pages, will be found such a varied series of exciting events’trials, riots, persecutions, escapes, martyrdoms, voyages, shipwrecks, rescues’set in that amazing panorama of the ancient world’Jerusalem, Antioch, Philippi, Corinth, Athens, Ephesus, Rome? And with such scenery and settings’temples, courts, prisons, deserts, ships, barracks, theaters? Has any opera such variety? A bewildering range of scenes and actions (and of speeches) passes before the eye of the historian. And in all of them he sees the providential hand that has made and guided this great movement for the salvation of mankind. (3)

There’s undoubtedly a particular feeling and understanding that Luke wants his readers to have’namely, that Jesus remains very much on the move, that his is the providential hand guiding Peter, Paul, and Barnabas, so that his powerful and truly liberating kingdom is established everywhere his word is proclaimed and the Spirit poured out.

These then are the multiple levels for reading Acts; the two most important being the story of the early church and the particular concerns and interests of the early church. Acts provides essential information about the expansion of the gospel among the Gentiles, the reversal of Babel’s confusion and alienation, the lamentable trajectory of Judaism vis-à-vis the church, the controversies regarding power and authority, cults of personalities, and God’s will for all the world to be found in Christ. But one thing is certain: Even though we are reading about the church in its apostolic era, this entire book (like its predecessor) is about Jesus, about his actions in and through the apostles. It’s that which is really the story of the early church and, indeed, our ongoing story: Christ is the principal actor in and with the power of the Holy Spirit to the glory of God the Father. Christ is like the maestro of an orchestra, but with the apostolic orchestra in the foreground and the conductor in the background.

But in this ongoing concert, there is to be full audience participation, a choir keeping time with the apostolic orchestra directed by the great Maestro. And there’s the third level of reading Acts: those baptized into Christ in every age are participants in this global performance. To be sure, the truncated end to the book of Acts lends itself to this understanding. The story continues, and we share in the performance of apostles, the score of which Christ has committed to Holy Scripture and makes manifest in the church’s mandate from age to age. These acts of Jesus through the apostles, and since then the post-apostolic church, continue until this same Jesus comes ‘in the same way as you saw him go into heaven’ (1:10). Readers today can have the greatest confidence that Christ works in and with the church. His presence indeed abides with us through word, sacrament, and the assembly of believers.’