Nickolas A. Fox - The Hermeneutics of Social Identity in Luke-Acts

O ne of the more intriguing omissions in New Testament scholarship has been the question of the performance of Jesus core personnel (the Apostles and other significant leaders in the early church). To be fair, Marks brutal attention to the failures of the disciplesreplicated to a significant extent in the other Gospelshas received a fair amount of attention on the level of narrative criticism. However, scholars have typically refrained () from drawing the obvious, yet painful theological lessons from this state of affairs and () from pursuing rigorously the remarkable storyline of the Acts of the Apostles in which the latter are, to be frank, astonishingly ineffectual and for the most part quite simply absent!

Nick Fox does not set out to rectify this situation as such. He does, however, end up offering an examination of the speeches in Acts that advances the above-mentioned discussion considerably. How so? Part of the answer is found in his particular approach (Social Identity Theory); another in his attention to the role of God-fearers in Acts, that is, a loosely defined group of potential and actual Gentile believers whoby definition!start at the opposite end from the Apostles. Whereas the latter were fellow-Jews, coached by Jesus to carry the gospel forward into the Roman empire, it is actually the former that succeeded in doing so, alongside other minor characters. That expression captures well the contrast between the actual achievers in Acts (including Gentiles) and those who were supposed to achieve (Jesus Jewish disciples as the major characters in the Gospels)but who failed almost comprehensively, with a few exceptions in the very early chapters of Acts (eleven of the Twelve) and Peter, albeit only in the first half of Acts. To be clear, whereas Fox neither focuses on the Apostles failures to show up when and where most needed, nor on the evangelistic role of the God-fearers per se, both of these are implications of Acts that serve well to frame the relevance of his discussion, not least because the manner and circumstances of their inclusion calls for the implied audience to capitalize on said inclusion for purposes of joiningand thereby advancingthe story of Gods kingdom throughout the Roman empire.

The question, then, becomes, what can Social Identity Theory (SIT) contribute to the theological concerns surrounding the social storytelling of Acts? SIT has increasingly entered the field of New Testament studies. Since LukeActs engages so vividly the role of God-fearers and perceived outsiders in the early Christian re-centering of Gods people around the person and faith of Jesus, Lukes two-volume work has been among the first in the New Testament to attract the attention of SIT. By developing and using a modified version of SIT, Nick Fox addresses directly Lukes decentralizing of ecclesial formation in the wake of the early Christian proclamation of the risen Christ. While others (Joel Green, Holly Beers, Luke Timothy Johnson) have noticed this phenomenon in LukeActs before, a fuller treatment of Lukes particular narrative strategies pertaining to the inclusion of outsiders was needed. The outward movement inherent in Lukes concept of Gods people far transcends the merely geographical (Temple, Jerusalem, land) and personality-based (Apostles and other leaders in Jerusalem) and encompasses nothing less than the surprising inclusion of the minor characters who are now the SPIRITually empowered ones to transform the very core of what it means to be communities of Gods people beyond Israel.

Thorsten Moritz, PhD