God (in) Acts

The Characterization of God in the Acts of the Apostles

Christine H. Aarflot

• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781532693496, 9781532693502
• eBook ISBN: 9781532693519
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Criticism & Interpretation

The Acts of the Apostles reveals a God at work. However, what do God's actions reveal about God's character? This question drives the present study, whose ultimate goal is to discover what portrayal Acts constructs of God through God's actions. Aarflot demonstrates how Jesus's ascension and the development of the gentile mission prove key to Acts' distinctive portrayal of God. The study explores what happens to the characterization of God when Jesus's character comes to resemble God through the ascension, noting in particular the effect of ambiguous language that might refer to either God or Jesus on the portrayal of God. It also considers how Acts depicts God through actions in Israel's past in relation to the narrative present. This is done by looking at how God is characterized at decisive moments of Acts' plot. The resulting observations are ultimately synthesized in a final chapter presenting the portrayal of God in Acts. The results of the study have implications for the discussion of the impact of Christology on theology, and furthers the discussion of "God" in the New Testament by delineating a constant, yet developing image of God, and solidifies previous research's observations on the centrality of God's actions to Acts' narrative.

Chapter 1: Introduction

1.0 Problem and Purpose

Who is God? The Bible may be read as one or several accounts of experiences of an acting God, a God whose agency brings God into contact with humanity and constitutes a history of God’s saving works. Regardless of whether one conceives of the Bible as presenting several, multifaceted images of God, or one unified image, each book of the Bible adds to what has become the canonical witness to God in the church.1 To explore the Bible’s discourse(s) of God is, therefore, to enter into dialogue with texts that still inform people’s understanding of God today. At a fundamental level, this is what the following study aims to do in looking at the characterization of God in The Acts of the Apostles.

The Acts of the Apostles is the only book “in the New Testament to narrativize how the God of Israel becomes the God of all.”2 It thus offers a valuable foundation for studying one of the New Testament’s presentations of God.3 Acts reveals a God at work. Indeed, as we shall see, God’s actions are of such central importance to this book that a more fitting name might have been “The Acts of God.”4 In Acts, God is presented as the agent of Jesus’s resurrection (e.g., Acts 2:24; 3:15; 4:10; 5:30; 10:40; 13:30, 37; 17:31),5 as being behind the promises to Israel and the early church (e.g., 1:4–5; 2:30, 33, 39; 7:5; 13:23, 32; 26:6–7), and as a helper in the apostolic mission (e.g., 2:47; 15:7–9). God frequently becomes a starting point in the apostles’ proclamation to both Jews and gentiles (2:17; 3:13; 5:29–30; 7:2–3; 10:34–36; 13:17; 14:15; 17:22–24), and is the initiator of the mission to the gentiles (Acts 10:1—11:18).6 In short, God’s past and continued works are portrayed to be of the highest significance to the activities of the followers of the Way and the spread of the gospel. At the same time, the one whom we here call “God,” and who in Acts appears under the various designations of “Lord” (κύριος, δεσπότης), “God” (θεός), “highest” (ὕψιστος), and “Father” (πατήρ), frequently acts through others, and is not always easily distinguished from Jesus, who is also called “Lord” (κύριος) in Acts. In sum, it is quite clear that God is at work in Acts. At the same time, because God’s actions are often mediated, and God and Jesus not always easily distinguished from each other, the text invites the active participation of the reader in discerning where and how God is at work.

As we shall soon see, several scholars have made a note of the centrality of God in Acts. Fewer scholars, however, have asked for a more comprehensive image of God in Acts. In fact, in Centering on God (1990), Robert L. Brawley asserts that a search for a so-called epitomization of God’s character in Luke-Acts would be a futile venture:

To inquire into the character of God is an effort to fix that character. But it remains elusive. For one thing, it is complex. . . . For another, with all the complexity there are gaps that render God’s character indeterminate. Thus, all efforts to epitomize the character of God in Luke-Acts will be frustrated.7

The character of God in Acts is, as Brawley notes, indeed complex. In Acts, there is a dialectic between the “omnipresence” of God’s character, whose hand may be seen behind the development of the Jesus movement, and the emergence of God’s character through specific events. An investigation into the characterization and portrayal of God in Acts can therefore never hope to fully epitomize that character, but must make its investigation in the tension between the “actor behind the scenes” and the concrete actions mentioned or narrated in the story. Yet I would argue that this search nevertheless remains worthwhile: In seeking to understand how the text speaks of God lies the potential for both (re)new(ed) understanding and confrontation with our own preconceptions of whom this God is presented as.

Among recent scholars on Acts, Daniel L. Marguerat is one of two who have explicitly sought to examine the image of God in Acts.8 He notes that while previous research has enumerated the characteristics given to God in the Lukan narrative, it has not paid sufficient attention to the narrative form through which the image of God is constructed.9 The present work takes these observations as its point of departure. It aims to further the scholarly conversation on God in Acts by answering the following question: How is God portrayed through God’s actions in the Acts of the Apostles? In answering this question, I offer a narrative-critical analysis that aims to pay attention not only to what is said about God in Acts, but also to the unique manner of how and where God’s character is presented through God’s actions, so as to bring out a portrayal of who this God is.

Two things in particular make the image of God in Acts distinctive: 1) the impact of Jesus’s character on the characterization of God, and 2) the development of a gentile mission. As the following survey will demonstrate, previous scholarship has done much to bring God and God’s actions in Acts to the fore. However, even though it is frequently noted that the God of Israel becomes the “God of all” in Acts, surprisingly little attention has been paid to the question of how Acts itself presents God through God’s actions in Israel’s past in comparison with how this God is depicted in Israel’s present. The present study seeks to remedy this neglect.

While our main question seeks to discover how God is portrayed through God’s actions in Acts, two further questions shape the focus of our investigation: 1) In what ways do the actions and characterization of God in the story-time relate to the actions of God spoken of in Jesus’s life and ministry and Israel’s more distant past? and 2) How does Jesus’s ascension into heaven impact the characterization of God? Through its analyses of the characterization of God through God’s actions, this book demonstrates how the answers to these questions are key to the distinctive portrayal of God in Acts. We will return to these questions towards the end of this chapter. First, however, we will situate the study in relationship to previous research on God in Acts.

1.1 Research History

The present study stands in a tradition of New Testament research focusing on God. In the last four decades, a number of articles and monographs have responded to Nils Alstrup Dahl’s famous claim that God is the neglected factor in New Testament theology.10 Upon analyzing the situation, Dahl suggested that there are three main reasons why “it is hard to find any comprehensive or penetrating study”11 on this theme: a dominating Christocentric perspective on the New Testament, the existence of few thematic formulations about God in the New Testament, and the fact that God is only referred to “in contexts that deal with some other theme.”12 Scholars who seek to write about New Testament theo-logy today still face these challenges.13 However, Dahl’s original claim that God is neglected in New Testament theology no longer rings true.14 In the years following the publication of Dahl’s article, a number of scholars have sought to redress the situation and recover “God” as a central topic in New Testament research.15 The result has been a growing appreciation of the importance of t...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Chapter 1: Introduction
• Chapter 2: Method and Material
• Chapter 3: The God of the Last Days (Acts 2:1–41)
• Chapter 4: The God of Glory and Heaven: Stephen’s Speech and Vision (Acts 6:8—7:60)
• Chapter 5: “Who are you, Lord?” (Acts 9:1–19; 22:1–21; 26:1–23)
• Chapter 6: God’s Impartiality (Acts 10:1—11:18; 15:1–21)
• Chapter 7: The Faithful God: Paul’s Proclamation in Pisidian Antioch (13:13–52)
• Chapter 8: God as Savior at Sea (27:1–44)
• Chapter 9: The God of Power and Wonder
• Chapter 10: The Portrayal of God in Acts
• Bibliography