Luke Timothy Johnson - Prophetic Jesus, Prophetic Church: The Challenge of Luke-Acts to Contemporary Christians

Luke Timothy Johnson

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The need for prophecy is stated succinctly by the book of Proverbs 29:18: "Without a vision (or, `without prophecy'), the people perish." Prophets are the human beings who speak to their fellow humans from the perspective of God and, by so speaking, enable others to envision a way of being human more in conformity with God's own vision for the world.

Humans chronically and desperately need prophetic visions. Without them the world runs all too smoothly on the basis of programs and politics formed exclusively by human reason - and human reason severed from God's saving word tends to become simply a kind of cunning. Without prophetic challenge, the world quickly becomes structured along the lines of expediency and self-interest.

There probably has never been a time when at least some Christians did not long for the voice of prophecy that could challenge the usual assumptions and accustomed practices in the world (and in the church itself) and could jolt people into new insight and empower them with new energy. Our age is no exception. We need prophecy. The church today particularly needs to hear the voice of prophecy in order to carry out its own prophetic mission.

For prophets to arise, however, their imaginations also need to be shaped and energized. Prophets do not have magic access to God's way of seeing and speaking. The sight and speech of prophets need to be formed - and have always been formed - by the words and deeds of earlier prophets. The ancient visions provide symbols that can be reinvigorated by new experiences of God in the world.

I have written this book precisely as an effort to stimulate such pro phetic vision for the church today. My argument is straightforward and has three parts. First, when the New Testament composition commonly designated by scholars as Luke-Acts (the Gospel of Luke and the Acts of the Apostles) is read as a literary unity, it reveals a prophetic vision of both Jesus and the church. Indeed, the church of Acts is, if anything, even more radically prophetic than Jesus in the Gospel. Second, as part of canonical Scripture, the voice and vision of Luke-Acts has a prophetic function for the church in every age. It does not simply report past events; it imagines a world that challenges the one that humans in every age construct on their own terms. Third, if we in the church today choose to heed Luke's challenge, we shall need to think of the church in more explicitly prophetic terms and find ways of embodying and enacting God's vision for humans.

Some readers of this book will notice a family resemblance to a book I wrote some years ago, Scripture and Discernment: Decision Making in the Church (Abingdon, 1996). Luke-Acts also inspired that effort and was the source for the model of decision-making as theological process that I proposed for the church's consideration. The present work, however, elevates the argument about the prophetic character of Luke-Acts to another level. My interest here is not simply the discovery of a narrative exemplar for a single dimension of the church's life so much as a scriptural vision for the life and mission of the church as such - a life and mission grounded in the prophetic ministry of Jesus Christ. Consequently, although readers will find in these pages the same emphasis on the living God working in human lives through the Holy Spirit, the scope broadens to include an overall sense of how the church, through the power of the Holy Spirit, can continue and extend Jesus' prophetic work in the world.

As a professional New Testament scholar, I have some interest in showing the consequences of a thorough-going literary reading of LukeActs as a compositional unity, but this book is entirely directed to readers within the faith community. It began as a series of presentations to ecclesial groups, notably the clergy conference of the Indiana Archdiocese and the Mile-High Scripture Institute in Denver, as well as classes in Emory University's Candler School of Theology and in Notre Dame University's Summer Theology program. Responses from these groups encouraged me to think that this approach would be appreciated by others as well. I am particularly grateful for the imaginative ways that students at Candler and Notre Dame employed Luke's prophetic vision as a lens for analyzing specific ecclesial situations in the present. Michael Thomson of Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company has been patient and constant in his support of this project. And, as in everything I have written, my most heartfelt and tender gratitude is to joy, whose own witness to God has always been, for me, prophetic.

Scripture references are based on the New American Bible translation 1986 by the Confraternity of Christian Doctrine (CCD), with occasional modifications in light of the Greek.

When Luke the evangelist completed his two-volume narrative in the late first century and wrote a short prologue to his patron Theophilus explaining his reason for writing, he could not have imagined the strange future facing his composition. He could not have foreseen that an account written for the assurance of contemporary Gentile members of a new Mediterranean cult would become part of the sacred Scripture of a world religion based on and extending the texts of Torah derived from Judaism. He could not have imagined that the process of making his composition part of the New Testament canon would separate the two parts of his single story, so that his account of "what Jesus said and did" would appear with the other Gospels, while his account of what Jesus' witnesses did and said would serve to introduce the letters of Paul. He could not have believed that this canonical separation would lead in turn to the reading of the two parts of the narrative in isolation from each other (and their author's literary intention), in a centuries-long history of interpretation that considered "the Gospel of Luke" as another version of the "good news" with those offered by Mark, Matthew, and John and considered "the Acts of the Apostles" as the first history of the church.

But all this did happen, and the consequences have been momentous. The full effect of Luke's literary achievement and the full power of his theological imagination have seldom if ever been appreciated in the long history of New Testament interpretation. Before the modern period, biblical compositions were hardly ever read in terms of their respective "voices" - they were read as repositories of divine logia; human authorship was acknowledged but seldom truly computed. The Gospel of Luke and the Acts of the Apostles were mined separately for what they could teach about God and the path of discipleship. An engagement with the discrete canonical witnesses was not the prevailing principle of interpretation, but the assertion of their harmonious teaching.