Reading Acts

The Summer Reading List, minus Jesus and the Disinherited,
which was probably my favorite read of the summer.

Since it came out this spring, I have been reading in Willie Jennings new commentary on Acts.  Most people have never picked up a Bible commentary, and for good reason.  So many of them die on the altar of ancient language and history.  The normal person who pics up a commentary is likely to have no sense of the what the commentary is doing or what quality it has.

But Jennings is not a biblical scholar, he is a theologian.  This means that his job is not primarily to dig down and down into the textual variants and the history of the how the text developed and was passed down.  As a theologian writing a commentary, he needs to have that information, but his primary line of questioning is not "How did this text come to be?" or "How does the language work?" or "How is the writer capturing an objective history as a chronicler of events?"  No a theologian doing biblical scholarship, or at least the kind Jennings is, gets to ask "What happened in the world when this text was read?  What was its aim?  What possibilities did it open up?"  A theologian sees a text as a performance of theology, and so she gets to ask "What happens to the audience when this is performed? What happens to God and God's people when they receive this word?  What worlds are now possible after this story?"

And so that's what Jennings does.  Jennings reads acts as history, but not the "objective" history that people often imagine, but history as history actually is: a carefully crafted interpretation--a created thing.  And so Jennings asks: what was this story created to do?

And his answer is surprising.  For Jennings, Acts is Luke's interpretation of the how and what the Holy Spirit was teaching the church about what the death and resurrection of Jesus means.  He lays out the improbable joining, bringing in, and letting go that was all part of the constructing something new that became the Christian church.  His emphasis on the disruptive aspects of the new social reality that church was, helps us to understand why it is so hard to be faithful as Christian communities: it goes against so many of our instincts to safety, security, certainty, and comfort.  It is a dynamic read that people in church would profit from tackling.