Jonny Baker alerted me to Luke Timothy Johnson’s latest publication Prophetic Jesus, Prophetic Church: The Challenge of Luke-Acts to Contemporary Christians (Eerdmans, 2011). I was then delighted to see that Nijay Gupta has written a very positive mini-review, which captures something of my excitement as I flicked through my copy. I’ll look forward to reading it in full in due course.
Here’s an excerpt from Gupta’s review (including quotes from Johnson - in italics):
“…Luke-Acts is designed in such a way as to demonstrate Jesus as a prophet in Luke, then the early apostolic church carries on Jesus’ prophetic ministry in Acts, and this is a model for the church today to continue this prophetic ministry…
… Basically, using the OT models, a prophet is marked by “being inspired by the Holy Spirit, speaking God’s word, embodying God’s vision for humans, enacting the vision through signs and wonders, and bearing witness to God in the world” (p. 4).
Here is where Johnson is stepping out and being radical: “Luke shows the church in Acts to be even more radical than the prophet Jesus” (4). Part of what Johnson is getting at is that Acts is not just a second part of a book of history. It has a prophetic voice which calls out to the church.
The first readers of Luke’s narrative would perhaps not have seen his story as nostalgic recollection of a time past but rather as a summons to an ideal that might be in danger of being lost, not as a work of bland historiography but as a thrilling act of utopian imagination, less a neutral report of how things were than as a normative prescription for how things ought to be (5)…
…Part of the reason Johnson writes this book is to rehabilitate scholarship on Acts. Everyone likes the Jesus of the Gospel of Luke, but Acts has a history of representing a magisterium-church, a fossilization of the vision of Jesus. Johnson, by directly linking Acts with Luke, shows how radical Acts really is by un-muzzling its prophetic voice. Johnson captures Luke’s vision for the church in this way…
…What would make a church prophetic in Luke’s view is its total dedication to responding to the call of God in every circumstance, more than to cultivating institutional self-interest…Whether small or large, simple or complex, local or universal, the essential character of the church must be the desire to answer to the living God (70)…
…. The single greatest countercultural act Christians perform is to worship together and proclaim that Jesus is Lord. To cease from the constant round of commerce and consumption, to resist the manipulation of media that insists that working and possessing defines worth, and to proclaim with the body language of communal gathering that Jesus, not any other power, is Lord is to enact the politics of God’s kingdom and to embody the prayer ‘your kingdom come.’ (124)…”
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