Luke/Acts: The Church and the Spirit

from R.E. Brown: The churches the apostles left behind...

As indicated above (p. 20), Luke/Acts constitutes another form of the Pauline heritage, even though the author shows no knowledge of the Epistles.81 The Lucan Paul is a more moderate figure than the Paul who wrote Galatians and the Corinthian correspondence. For some scholars this is a falsification of Paul; yet Paul was not a monolothic character, and there would have been a tendency to recall selectively the more benevolent and pacific aspects of his career, especially after the martyred apostle had become a pillar of the church (I Clement 5:2-5).82

A work like Acts is not an apt parallel in form or in content to the Pastorals or to Colossians/Ephesians, and so we must move cautiously in evaluating its contribution to post-Pauline ecclesiolgy. Unlike the authors of those other works, the author of Acts has not written a work of Pauline theology; he has written a story in which Paul plays a decisive role as a missionary witness, not as a doctrinal authority. Scholars are far from agreement on the audience addressed in Acts,83 an audience that may have been less specified than {62} the addressees of the Epistles. Nevertheless, we can work with the likelihood that Luke was working with largely Gentile churches84 affected at least indirectly by the Pauline mission.

Luke's perspective

Even though we use the name "Luke," there are many reasons for thinking that the author was not a companion of Paul and had not known him personally.85 Perhaps not even the audience had been in direct contact with the historical Paul. But for the author and presumably for the audience, Paul was an extremely important figure in God's plan to bring Christ to the Gentiles and to the ends of the earth. Paul had become the guarantor of the legitimacy of these Gentile churches. While the purpose of Luke/Acts may be complex, it certainly involves the basic geographic line traced in Ac 1:8, which constitutes the table of contents of the book: "You shall receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you shall be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth." Acts begins in Jerusalem, moves through Judea and Samaria, and ends in Rome. Personified in Peter and Paul at almost equal length, witness to Jesus is borne before Jews and Gentiles alike during the first three decades of Christian life (early 30s to the early 60s). The account was written decades later;86 and one may debate the accuracy of the report and to what extent sources were available to the writer. But those questions need not concern us as we ask how Luke/Acts would help a Christian audience to survive the death of the apostles. {63} Acts uses the term "church" for local churches, and certainly one finds in this book none of the church mysticism that pervades Colossians/Ephesians. Nevertheless, the author has been acclaimed the theologian par excellence of the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church, since every one of those features marks the Christian life he describes. The author made a bold ecclesial step when he enlarged the story of Jesus' ministry and death that Mk 1:1 called "the Gospel of Jesus Christ," not only by rewriting and developing the Jesus story, but also by adding a second book concerning early Christianity. He was putting together on the same level the story of the proclamation of the kingdom by Jesus and the story of the proclamation of Jesus by Peter and Paul.87 This means that the good news or gospel88 concerns not only what God has done in Jesus but also what He has done in the Spirit.

Sense of continuity

This step resulted in a major characteristic of Lucan ecclesiology, a sense of continuity wherein the church is closely related to what went before. First, it is clear that church beginnings are related to Jesus himself. The Jesus who on Easter night ascended into heaven, bringing the Third Gospel to an end (Lk 24:51), is restored to the earthly scene at the beginning of Acts, so that clearly he introduces all that follows. This risen Jesus offers a partial answer to the relationship between the kingdom and the church which we saw discussed both in Matthew and in Colossians (p. 51 above). When, asked whether at this time he would restore the kingdom, the risen Jesus replies that it is not given to the apostles to know the time, but that they should bear witness over the whole earth. An essential question that tortured early Christians has thus been answered in a way that ever afterwards the larger churches will make their own against sectarians, namely, in the Christian balance more attention is due to bearing witness to what Jesus has done than to expecting his coming. This answer by Jesus makes church existence {64} both explicable and essential until the coming of the kingdom.89 It also makes intelligible why Luke is writing a book describing that existence.

But the continuity does not depend only on Jesus. Although Luke's book gained the title of "Acts of the Apostles," the title is not really accurate, for Luke never stresses that Paul is an apostle. Yet the title does underline the role played by identified leaders in the story. People who were with Jesus during the public ministry (the Twelve, the women, his mother and brothers) come over into early Christian life to insure the continuity Jesus wanted. Paul was not one of those, but he was commissioned by the risen Jesus; and later Peter and James certified the correctness of Paul's radical missionary decision to convert communities of Gentiles without demanding circumcision. Thus, not only are the early stages of church life continuous with Jesus, but also the later stages represented by Paul are continuous with the early stages represented by Peter.90 If Peter does the same kind of miracles that Jesus did, Paul then does the same kind of miracles that Peter did. The sermons that Peter and Paul preach are remarkably similar, as a sign of a continous message as well as a continuous power. As for the later period after Paul will be gone, Paul has appointed presbyters in each church (Ac 14:23). When he parts from the Eastern mission-field for the last time, he urges the presbyters of Ephesus: "Keep watch over all the flock in which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers (bishops) to care for the church of God which he obtained with the blood of His own Son" (Ac 20:28). Thus a continuity beyond Paul is envisioned.91

Moreover, the continuity covers an ever greater span than from the sub-apostolic presbyters back to Jesus (through Paul and Peter). Jesus and the church stand in continuity with the whole tradition of {65} Israel.92 In commenting on the Lucan infancy narratives (Birth of the Messiah 242-43), I have contended that Zechariah, Elizabeth, Simeon, and Anna are figures patterned on OT models who are brought forward from the story of Israel to meet Jesus. The characters in Lk 1-2 who accept Jesus are pious Jews, and everything is done according to the Law (Lk 1:6; Lk 2:22-27,37,39), even as the earliest Christians in Acts are faithful to the piety of Israel (Lk 2:46; Lk 3:1; Lk 5:42). The Spirit of God that moved the prophets of Israel is conspicuously active in a prophetic way at the beginning of the story of Jesus (Lk 1:15,35,41,67,80; Lk 2:25-27) and at the beginning of the church (Ac 1:8,16; Ac 2:4,17). The line of continuity running smoothly through Israel, Jesus, Peter, and Paul is admirably summed up by Paul93 in Ac 24:14: "I admit to you that according to the Way (i.e., the way taught by Jesus which may have served as a name for the Christian movement)..., I worship the God of our fathers. I believe everything that is laid down by the Law or is written in the prophets."

Role of the Spirit

I have mentioned that for Luke the Spirit plays a connective role between the prophecy of Israel and the prophetic activity surrounding the birth of Jesus and the birth of the church. Indeed, the distinguishing feature of Lucan ecclesiology is the overshadowing presence of the Spirit. The 70 times that pneuma, "spirit," occurs in Acts constitute almost one-fifth of the total NT usages of that word.94 Some have suggested that the second Lucan book could have been named more appropriately the Acts of the Spirit rather than the Acts of the Apostles. The fact that Luke omits all further reference to Peter, the great apostle, after the meeting at Jerusalem in Ac 15 {66} and never tells about Peter's subsequent career or death has puzzled many. Even more disconcerting is that Acts closes when Paul gets to Rome and there is no reference to his subsequent career and death. (The inaccurate deduction that the book must have been written while Paul was alive stems from a failure to notice the parallelism with Peter.) Luke is not interested in these men as such, but in them as vehicles of the Spirit, bearing witness to Christ in Jerusalem, Ju-dea, Samaria, and to the ends of the earth. The Spirit is the main actor.

In the two sets of post-Pauline works considered thus far, the Holy Spirit is assigned relatively little ecclesiological role. As part of a total 7 instances of pneuma in the Pastorals,95 mention is made of regeneration by the Spirit in baptism (Tt 3:5) and of the entrusting of the truth to be guarded with the help of the indwelling Spirit (2 Tm 1:14) - both common, traditional Christian ideas. The reference to the Spirit that really matters for the ecclesiology of the Pastorals is found in 2 Tm 1:6-7 where "Paul" reminds Timothy "to rekindle the gift of God that is in you through the laying on of my hands, for God did not give us a spirit of timidity, but a Spirit of power and love and self-discipline" (see also 1 Tm 4:14). Since Timothy in turn lays hands on others (1 Tm 5:2), the gift of the Spirit is attached to commissioning, so that the Spirit enables the one commissioned to complete the assigned task. A Spirit thus attached to office can be mentioned infrequently since assumably, when the task is being done, the Spirit is at work.96

Pneuma is used 14 times in Ephesians, but only twice in Colossians! Most of the uses do not pertain directly to ecclesiology,97 although once again there appears common Christian tradition about the reception of the Spirit at baptism ("sealing" in Ep 1:13; Ep 4:30). {67} But the role of the Spirit in relation to the master concept of the church as the body of Christ is not clear. There is no mention of the Spirit in this connection in Colossians; and although Ep 4:4 writes of "one body and one Spirit," there is no explanation of the interrelation. The two letters are startlingly silent about the Spirit as the animating force of the body, for Christ the head has that role.98 Christ and the Spirit are very close in NT thought; and where Christ is stressed as ongoing and active, often there is less emphasis on the activity of the Spirit.99 The church of Colossians/Ephesians is not just on this earth; it reaches up into heaven which is the realm of the risen Christ.

In Luke/Acts, by contrast, Jesus Christ ascends to heaven while those who believe in him remain on earth. They are discouraged from looking longingly at the heavens (Ac 1:11), for the gift of the Spirit is precisely to take the place of Christ on earth.100 The consequent massive importance attributed to the Spirit in church history is unique to Acts in the NT.101 The author is not clear about whether he thinks of the Spirit as a person, but one cannot doubt the power of the Spirit. The crucial Pentecost scene is shaped by the imagery of the wind as the Spirit of God102 moving over the face of the waters at {68} the creation (Gn 1:2), and by the imagery of the God of the storm coming down on Mount Sinai to make a covenant with Israel as His people (Ex 19:16ff.). In the last days a new creative act of God is taking place that matches the first creation; Jerusalem has replaced Sinai as the site of a renewed covenant103 that will touch all peoples. And so there comes a sound resembling a mighty wind, while tongues of fire are distributed, filling with the Holy Spirit those who are to proclaim this renewed covenant (Ac 2:14-17).

Beginning of proclamation

Up to that moment after the resurrection, because they lacked either understanding or courage, the apostles had not proclaimed publicly what God had done in and through Jesus. The first step in making the following of Jesus a missionary movement is attributed by Acts to that Spirit with which the apostles were baptized and empowered to speak (Ac 1:5,8; Ac 2:33; Ac 4:8,31). Reception of the Spirit marked entry into the group of believers attracted by this preaching (Ac 2:38; Ac 8:15-17; Ac 9:17; 1Ac 5:8; Ac 19:5-6). The Spirit directed missionaries to promising areas (Ac 8:29,39). In particular, the Spirit directed Peter to the house of Cornelius and guided in detail the admission and baptism of the first Gentiles (Ac 10:38, 44-47; Ac 11:12,15). The Spirit gave the impetus for Barnabas and Paul to set out on a mission that would convert whole communities of Gentiles (Ac 13:2,4). A most important decision was made in early Christian history when Peter, Paul, and James agreed to admit Gentiles without requiring circumcision. It was phrased in these terms: "It has seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us not to burden you" (Ac 15:28). The Spirit prevented Paul from taking a detour that would have delayed his planting Christianity in Europe (Ac 16:6-7). Paul's decision that he must go to Rome is a resolve in the Spirit (Ac 19:21); and when Paul bids farewell to Asia, the Holy Spirit has been provident by making presbyters who are overseers (bishops) of the flock (Ac 20:28). Thus every essential step in this story of how witness was borne to Christ from Jerusalem to the ends of the earth is guided by the Spirit, whose presence becomes obvious at great moments where the human agents would otherwise be hesitant or choose wrongly. {69}

Strengths and Weaknesses

I have concentrated on two dominant factors in the ecclesiology of Acts: on continuity from Israel through Jesus to Peter and to Paul, and on the intervention of the Holy Spirit at crucial moments. Both these factors would have been enormously helpful in enabling the church or churches that read Luke/Acts to survive, once the apostles had died. Indeed, as I noted, the deaths of Peter and of Paul did not even merit a mention by Luke. The culmination of Acts' story of Peter's career came when he confirmed Paul's circumcision-free ministry to the Gentiles (Ac 15); Paul made a farewell speech to the presbyter-bishops of Ephesus passing on the care of the flock to them since they would see him no more (Ac 20:25-28). The chain of continuity shows a meticulous plan of God leading toward the victory of Christianity over the whole earth. Individuals play an assigned role; but when they pass away after having played the role, to the eyes of faith they confirm that the plan will take care of the future as well as it has taken care of the past.

Pride for Gentile Christians

Luke has built into his sketch of a divinely prepared continuity some elements that could give Gentile Christians a sense of pride. In a world where many Greco-Romans despised religions from the East as superstitious sects, it was important for Christians to know that their religion had a distinguished pedigree. Luke goes out of his way to mention Roman emperors and governors in relation to the birth of Jesus and the beginning of his ministry (Lk 2:1-2; Lk 3:1-2). Luke also stresses Roman officials in relation to Paul's travels, especially the journey to Rome which takes place because of Paul's appeal to the emperor (Ac 13:7; Ac 18:12; Ac 23:26; Ac 25:1-2,12). Belief in Christ is a religion that touches the political figures of the great world, even if indirectly. It may have begun in Jerusalem, but God's plan led it to Rome; and the empire is its destiny. To have had a significant past helps to give confidence about the future; and Luke supplied Christianity with a history that gave it that confidence. If the Paul of Acts says that he is "a citizen of no mean city," the Christians who read Acts came away with a pride that they were adherents to no mean religion.

In reassuring the Lucan churches about survival, even more important would have been Acts' portrayal of a Holy Spirit that inter- {70} venes at crucial moments when even the leaders needed help. The idea that on their own the Christian leaders would not have known what steps to take were it not for the dramatic (and even intrusive) guidance of the Spirit relativizes the importance of the apostolic generation. Peter and Paul were great instruments of the Spirit, but other instruments can and will be provided. The Spirit that brought faith to the Gentiles and brought Paul to Rome continues and will help the church in moments of need. For Christian self-understanding, how important through the centuries has been the idea that the Holy Spirit will not let the church down! When Christians encountered error and stupidity that seemed to threaten survival, how often have they exclaimed, "Thank God there is a Holy Spirit to pull us through, despite church leadership." Again and again in church history, when something marvelously unexpected has happened, Christian faith has discovered there the Spirit guiding the church. Acts' magnificent insight that the Spirit was at work in church history has been an enduring legacy in Christian self-analysis ever since.

Triumphal picture

What then are the possible weaknesses of the Lucan contribution to eccelesiology? A triumphal picture is painted in Acts. All setbacks are temporary and quickly turn out for good104 in a Christian movement that is constantly growing numerically (Ac 2:41; Ac 4:4; Ac 6:1,7; Ac 8:12; Ac 9:31; Ac 21:19-20) and geographically (Ac 1:8). On finishing Acts, the reading audience might quite logically have concluded that very soon afterwards the whole world would become Christian, as stated confidently by Paul: "Let it be known to you that this salvation of God has been sent to the Gentiles; and they will listen" (Ac 28:28). The plan of continuity presented in Luke/Acts is oriented toward the bigger and better; it does not prepare for major defeats or for losses that are not recouped. Such an ecclesiology, taken in isolation, will leave Christians perplexed when their institutions begin to close, when their churches are being abandoned for lack of members, and when {71} their overall numbers in the world begin to get smaller. For instance, in America, Roman Catholicism prided itself on ever increasing numbers dutifully recorded each year in the national Catholic Directory. In the late 1970s as the increase began to falter, the question was frequently asked if the church was finished.

Indeed, throughout church history it is fascinating to see how often Christian failures have been explained away because of the principle that the church cannot fail. The loss to Islam of important Christian regions in North Africa and the Near East was accounted for by a type of divine balance sheet. While God was taking these areas away from the church, He was giving her Northern Europe where the missionaries were converting Germanic and Scandinavian tribes to Christianity. If God deprived the Roman Catholic Church of half of Europe through the Reformation, Catholics consoled themselves with the idea that He had given her an even larger number of Catholics in Central and South America. Protestants had their form of historical optimism: the American Colonies constituted a new Promised Land where the corrupt Christianity of Rome would not be tolerated and a pure, reformed Christianity would flourish. The Protestant missionary movement that swept out of America and England in the nineteenth century would ultimately lead to the triumph of Bible Christianity.

Needing to be balanced

To us today, an element of historical manipulation is obvious in all these explanations and dreams; but consciously or unconsciously they were influenced by the program of world conversion sketched in Ac 1:8. The solution is not to reject Acts, despite the perennial temptation to improve the canon. Rather the fullness of the canon needs to be taken seriously if the triumphalism of Acts is not to become impossibly romantic at a time of numerically shrinking Christianity. The OT is also in the canon; and it narrates how God's people shrank from twelve tribes to one, how religious institutions failed (monarchy, priesthood, sacrificial cult), and how Israel learned more about God in the ashes of the Temple destroyed by the Babylonians than in the elegant period of that Temple under Solomon. Placing the long Deuteronomic history of the monarchy alongside the brief history of the Christian movement in Acts may warn Bible readers that God's message to His people is not an unconditioned promise of increasing numbers to the ends of the earth. {72} A similar danger of triumphalism surrounds the role of the intervening Spirit in Acts. It is essential to Christians that the Spirit does intervene in church history and crises, and that some major decisions have been reached with the help of the Spirit, often against the inclination of church leadership. But granting that, can we be sure that the Holy Spirit will always come to the rescue? Does not the picture in Acts lead easily to a deus ex machina concept of the Spirit? Has God really given a blank check so that in every major instance the Spirit will make sure that the church will muddle through? In Rv 3:20 Jesus says, "Here I am. I stand at the door and knock; I will enter and dine with anyone who hears my voice and opens the door." Is it not true that there have been times in church history when no one opened the door, and the opportunity to answer Christ did not come again?

Where is the Spirit active?

Two examples will illustrate the strength and weakness of an ecclesiology in which intervention by the Spirit plays a major role. The first example involves the story of ecumenism in this century. It was a Protestant movement traceable in its early days to several organizations that fused to become the World Council of Churches. Various factors affected its growth: two great wars, the disintegrating effects of secularism, the needs of the missions, etc. Even the Orthodox churches began to show interest, and finally adamant Roman Catholic opposition was dramatically reversed at Vatican II. Consequently, in one decade, the 1970s, more was accomplished toward friendly dialogue between Christians of many churches than in the preceding 450 years since the Augsburg Confession. Christians are scarcely romantic when they detect here the work of the creator Spirit, giving the churches an opportunity they never expected and could not have planned. But are we then to assume that the Spirit will bring the work to a triumphal conclusion? If in the next two decades the churches do not seize the opportunity, if a union between two major churches does not take place as a sign of what may be possible, and if consequently Christianity enters the third millennium much more divided than it entered the second millennium,105 is it not {73} possible, and even likely, that the opportunity will never come again? Almost by definition the Spirit surprises, but at times the surprise may be that the Spirit lets God's people pay the price of its failures. Surely the OT story makes that suspicion likely.

Ecclesiologies in tension

A second example of the complexity of the role assigned to the Spirit can bring to a close our discussion of three different forms of ecclesiology in the Pauline heritage, for it involves all three. Vatican II constituted for Roman Catholics almost a parade example of different ecclesiologies in tension. Before the Council Rome sent out to the participants preliminary forms of the documents to be discussed. In particular, the Holy Office, of which the Pope himself was prefect, greatly influenced the shaping of the document that would deal with Scripture: The Two Sources of Revelation. This preliminary document was extremely negative toward modern theology and biblical research, documenting its warnings with references to the modernist heresy at the beginning of the century. In a sense one could regard this as an exercise of the ecclesiology of the Pastorals: presbyter-bishops teaching officially against false doctrine and "itching ears" - an ecclesiology wherein the teaching office is certified by the Spirit at the laying on of hands. A solemn invocation of the Holy Spirit opened the Council; for surely the Spirit would be expected to intervene in such a Council where decisions could have enormous impact on Catholics and, through them, on Protestants as well. This might be regarded as an exercise of the ecclesiology of Acts where the meeting or council in Jerusalem prefaced its decision: "It has seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us" (Ac 15:28). As I mentioned in Chapter 3 above, the chief biblical image known to the Council Fathers and one that might be expected to guide strongly their discussion of the church was the image of the body of Christ, derived from the ecclesiology of Colossians/Ephesians.

What happened when all three ecclesiologies came into play at the Council? The Council Fathers rejected resoundingly the preliminary document submitted to them which reflected the official teaching of the Holy Office. Church teachers stood on the floor of the Council and challenged other church teachers about the very direction of the Scriptures. Spirit-endowed officers envisioned by the Pastorals were in disagreement with each other, and the on-rushing Spirit envisioned in Acts led the majority to correct the trend of the {74} official teaching dominant in Rome before the Council. In the discussion, the Colossians/Ephesians imagery of the body of Christ gradually yielded to the imagery of the people of God in order to facilitate the self-reform of the spotless bride. In other words, the three post-Pauline ecclesiological elements functioned in tension.

After the Council in which the surprising intervention of the Spirit seemed to dominate, the reforms to be put into effect were entrusted to church administrators; and so the ecclesiology of the Pastorals came back into play in a major way. At times the reforms led to excesses, for some within the church exaggerated the changes, so that the end product of the Spirit's working at the Council was as surprising as the working itself. I predicted in Chapter 3 that eventually the Roman Catholic Church, tired of internal disorder and divisive self-criticism, would have to rediscover as prominent the image of the body of Christ in order to preserve the sense of a church holiness that comes from Christ and goes beyond the status of the members. This means that tension between the ecclesiological elements is shifting after the Council as befits the needs of the church. Only in such flux, I would contend, can the strengths and weaknesses in the ecclesiologies of the Pauline heritage come into play and work for the betterment of the church. {75}