Browsing by Author "Rowe, C Kavin"

This dissertation argues that, for Luke, universal witness belongs within a broader claim about the identity of Israel’s Messiah. Framed by Luke 24:46-48 (and Acts 26:22-23), the book of Acts narratively construes the unfolding universality of the Christian movement as the unfolding of the universality of Jesus’ Lordship. The “Lukan Commission,” rooted in a prophetic promise, prefigures the role of Acts in narratively unfolding the identity of Jesus as πάντων κύριος (Acts 10:36).

Universal proclamation of salvation in Acts—implicitly by Jesus and explicitly by his witnesses—narratively realizes the universality of Jesus’ Lordship. Luke’s second volume reconfigures the narrative sense of “presence” and “activity” on the basis of Jesus’ exaltation to heaven and Lordship by the Spirit (cf. 2:17-36). Especially as the “word” spreads beyond Jerusalem and the Jewish people, the Lord Jesus’ influence on the unfolding of universal witness becomes pronounced.

Though the apostles receive Jesus’ commission, their outreach is generally restricted to Jews in Jerusalem. Not until the Cornelius incident (Acts 10:1-11:18) does the universal vision of Jesus’ commission (Luke 24:47; Acts 1:8) intersect with apostolic witness, which is why Luke gives the episode almost unparalleled emphasis (cf. 11:5-17; 15:7-11). In this respect, the event proves paradigmatic for Luke’s coordination of christological identity and universal witness, establishing Jesus’ messianic identity as “Lord of all” (10:36). The full scope of Jesus’ identity is what participants in witness must discover in their encounter with the (ethnically) “other” (ἀλλόφυλος).

This theological breakthrough lies behind Paul’s outreach in the Diaspora and finds expression in the makeup of the Syrian Antioch community (11:19-26; 13:1-3), itself the basis for Paul’s outreach to Jews and Gentiles everywhere. In endorsing Antioch’s ministry, Peter, James, and the Jerusalem believers “model” for unbelieving Jews the proper interpretation of the salvation of the Gentiles in relation to Israel’s hopes (Acts 15). Jesus’ identity as universal Lord helps explain Paul’s “turn” to the Gentiles (13:46; 18:6; 28:28) less as a result of Jewish rejection than as a fulfillment of the Messiah’s work as outlined in scripture (1:8; 13:47; 26:23). The receptivity of Gentiles to Paul’s preaching provokes Paul’s Jewish audiences even as it models proper receptivity to the universality of Jesus’ Lordship. The present study confirms that for Luke mission is in part a means for expanding the witnesses’ comprehension of the scope of Jesus’ Lordship in light of God’s work among the Gentiles. Luke’s focus on the response of Jewish believers to this emerging reality in Acts reconfigures notions of χριστός in light of the (narrative) expansion of his identity as πάντων κύριος.

This dissertation examines those scenes in Acts where members of the church are banished, exiled, or displaced from the city, such as Acts 8:1, 13:50, and 16:35-39. It argues that Luke-Acts presents the church as a community of political exiles who have been exiled or banished from the cities of the Roman Empire. This narrative displacement prompts a response or solution, which in Luke-Acts is found in the community itself. Unlike other early Christian texts, which spoke of the church in exile from heaven or awaiting a city to come, Luke-Acts portrays the church itself as this “new city” that becomes a refuge for the displaced believers. Furthermore, exile or homelessness in Luke-Acts is not a problem requiring an otherworldly solution, but a part of the new way of life engendered by the proclamation of the gospel—it is a core part of following the way of Jesus, who himself is exiled from Nazareth in the gospel of Luke.The primary methodology I employ is literary criticism, by which I mean a careful, contextualized reading of Luke-Acts that attends to the form and content of the entire narrative. My reading of Acts is also a contextualized reading, by which I mean a reading that seeks to understand Acts in its late first-century context. This is especially important when talking about exile, since the study of exile in the New Testament has primarily focused on Israel’s exile without an adequate understanding of the socio-historical and literary reality of exile in the first century. To remedy this, I primarily read Luke-Acts alongside the consolatory literature of Plutarch, Musonius Rufus, and Favorinus. These texts address the problem of exile from different perspectives, but they all address the common themes of the loss of one’s homeland, the loss of possessions, and the loss of free speech or παρρησία. By reading Acts alongside these texts, which provide their own alternative visions of political belonging in the face of exile, I show how Luke-Acts envisions a new form of political belonging in local communities centered around the gospel.

In 2021, congregational life in America feels troubled. The residue of vitality in vacant Sunday school classrooms, dated worship bulletins, antiquated committee structures, and worn pew cushions reminds churchgoers of the ways congregations once successfully capitalized on the intersection of industrialization and an evangelical spirit. However, today, the world has changed. Traditional churches that mirror a now-shuttered factory across town struggle under the weight of dated, worker-dependent, industrial expressions of congregational life. These congregations feel trapped, which inhibits innovation and steers churches toward the same fate as those factories across town. Some believe that what local churches need is a way to cultivate innovation. To do this, congregations need the tools and a pathway that leads to innovative breakthroughs. Design thinking is a process built on an accessible set of tools that can provide teams in any field the steps necessary to cultivate innovation. For the church, and specifically local congregations, innovation cannot happen in a vacuum. Churches have histories and traditions, most of which root themselves in a tradition connected to the book of Acts. As churches cling to specific traditions, they often maintain practices as traditionalism, which begets a shallow expression of tradition. In these instances, faithful innovation is necessary. However, to innovate for the sake of innovation alone represents a shallow expression of innovation. The church needs to hold together tradition and innovation in ways that give life to a shared life rooted through embodied traditions. Faith by Design explores and exploits intersections between the embodied traditions outlined in Acts and the modern pathway to innovation described in design thinking. By adapting the approaches, tools, and practices of design thinkers and then exploiting these processes' intersections with the stories of the early church in Acts, the congregations can discover and design a renewed sense of life and vitality. Faith by Design invites congregations to explore the design thinking process and practices within the rich Christian tradition in ways that will help cultivate the conditions necessary for the emergence of renewed practices and behaviors which beget life, vitality, and hope.  

In 2021, congregational life in America feels troubled. The residue of vitality in vacant Sunday school classrooms, dated worship bulletins, antiquated committee structures, and worn pew cushions reminds churchgoers of the ways congregations once successfully capitalized on the intersection of industrialization and an evangelical spirit. However, today, the world has changed. Traditional churches that mirror a now-shuttered factory across town struggle under the weight of dated, worker-dependent, industrial expressions of congregational life. These congregations feel trapped, which inhibits innovation and steers churches toward the same fate as those factories across town. Some believe that what local churches need is a way to cultivate innovation. To do this, congregations need the tools and a pathway that leads to innovative breakthroughs. Design thinking is a process built on an accessible set of tools that can provide teams in any field the steps necessary to cultivate innovation. For the church, and specifically local congregations, innovation cannot happen in a vacuum. Churches have histories and traditions, most of which root themselves in a tradition connected to the book of Acts. As churches cling to specific traditions, they often maintain practices as traditionalism, which begets a shallow expression of tradition. In these instances, faithful innovation is necessary. However, to innovate for the sake of innovation alone represents a shallow expression of innovation. The church needs to hold together tradition and innovation in ways that give life to a shared life rooted through embodied traditions. Faith by Design explores and exploits intersections between the embodied traditions outlined in Acts and the modern pathway to innovation described in design thinking. By adapting the approaches, tools, and practices of design thinkers and then exploiting these processes' intersections with the stories of the early church in Acts, the congregations can discover and design a renewed sense of life and vitality. Faith by Design invites congregations to explore the design thinking process and practices within the rich Christian tradition in ways that will help cultivate the conditions necessary for the emergence of renewed practices and behaviors which beget life, vitality, and hope.  

ABSTRACT

In The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn observed,If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?” Jesus is clear that what comes from our hearts defiles us, and that our propensity for sin against God and others is deep inside us. Stereotypes that polarize run deep, as do attitudes from which bad behavior develops. Racism and attitudes of white supremacy are much in conversation within the church today. Books on racism, its causes, and its consequences abound. By comparison, there much less exploration of why the sin of racism exists and what causes it. Complacency about racism and white privilege afflicts the laity and the clergy alike within the American church, and its complacency in fulfilling the commandments to love God and to love our neighbors as ourselves lies at the root of racism. Another word for this complacency is acedia, the root sin at the heart of racism and the role it plays in racism. This topic is relevant to my own ministry because I am white and part of the systemic racism in American culture, and because the church in which I serve is the Episcopal Church, which is predominantly comfortable and white, and I serve in a congregation and diocese that mirror that reality. The longer I study and contemplate acedia, the more clearly I see the turn away from God and God’s creation that defines the source of our “lack of care,” our acedia, at the heart of our racism. Racial reconciliation is difficult for the church, and the church is affected deeply by the lack of reconciliation found there. The presenting problem is the need for racial reconciliation in the church and the church’s difficulty in accomplishing it. This thesis offers a history of racism and a thorough consideration of acedia and its part in racism and white supremacy. Reconciliation, per 2 Corinthians 5:14-21, is explored, as are other texts from the New Testament that pertain to the issue of reconciliation and relationships between people of differing ethnoracial groups. The work on racial reconciliation of Ibrahim Kendi and Jonathon Augustine is explored. The root problem of acedia is considered in light of the scriptures and the work of contemporary authors. Finally, the spiritual disciplines that are effective in dealing with acedia are offered, as well as a mechanism for racial reconciliation based on one’s work overcoming acedia.

Although Satan has a prominence in Luke greater than any other canonical gospel, his role has been largely unappreciated and neglected by scholars. Understanding the character of Satan is key to grasping Luke’s narrative and theology, and provides a window into understanding Luke’s apocalypticism and conception of human agency. This dissertation explores Satan’s role in the Gospel of Luke and Acts of the Apostles using redaction and narrative criticism and situating Luke in the context of Second Temple apocalypticism and its developing conception of Satan. In constructing his narrative, Luke gives prominence to Satan as Jesus’s primary antagonist and the source of the plot’s conflict. At the start of Luke’s Gospel, Satan holds authority in the world, afflicting humans with bondage, which Jesus destroys and displaces with the kingdom of God. After Jesus’s initial confrontation with Satan in the temptation narrative, which Luke constructs as the first event of Jesus’s adult life, he engages an offensive against Satan through exorcisms and healings. Jesus enlists his followers in the conflict with Satan by bestowing his power upon them, and ties the preaching of the gospel to the arrival of the kingdom of God, which entails the displacement of satanic authority. Luke’s most distinctive contribution is to introduce Satan into the passion narrative. Satan enters into Judas to initiate the passion, and Judas’s destruction by a gruesome death indicates the power of God triumphing over him as Satan’s agent. Luke depicts Peter’s denials as a sifting by Satan, from which he returns through the prayer of Jesus to strengthen the church in Acts. Luke shows Paul as the enemy of God persecuting the church, converted by God’s power to exercise power over the devil in his ministry. In a statement that is programmatic not only for Paul but for the whole church and indeed Luke’s entire narrative, Paul says that he was given the mission by Jesus to turn people “from darkness to light, from the authority of Satan to God” (Acts 28:18).

Understanding Luke’s use of Satan reveals that he is a thoroughly apocalyptic writer, though not writing in the form and language of a literary apocalypse, containing both cosmological and forensic forms of apocalyptic eschatology. As seen in the story of Judas, Luke views humans as moral agents responsible for turning either to God or Satan in the apocalyptic conflict underlying his narrative, while at the same time subject to both divine and satanic influence. To describe Luke’s view of moral agency, one taxonomy would characterize it as “externally impaired, but the impairment can be overcome.” However, Kathryn Tanner’s critique of modern forms of theological discourse that place divine and human agency in a competitive relationship exposes an intrinsic difficulty in such a taxonomy. Luke does not see human agency or responsibility decreasing because of divine or satanic influence, and in fact human agency is increased as divine power increases. Humans bear responsibility for aligning with Satan’s power, but since Satan is a creature, his agency is in competition with human agency, and collusion with him leads to personal destruction. The influence of Satan does not mitigate human responsibility for aligning with him, but compounds it.

To say that the first Gospel is about Jesus is to state what any reader knows from the most cursory glance at Matthew's narrative. Yet the scholarly discourse about Jesus' identity in Matthew reveals a fundamental confusion about how to articulate the identity of Jesus vis-à-vis "God" in the narrative. Not infrequently, for example, scholars assert that Matthew portrays Jesus as the "expression" or "embodiment" of Israel's God, but those same scholars - often leaving opaque the theological content of such descriptors - assert that Jesus is not therefore to be "identified" or "equated" with God; Jesus is "less than God," God's agent "through" whom God works. The result is a significant lack of perspicuity regarding the proper articulation of Jesus' identity in Matthew's Gospel.

The present work attempts to bring greater clarity to the articulation of Jesus' identity in Matthew by attending more precisely to two unique linguistic patterns woven deeply into the entire narrative's presentation of Jesus, namely, Matthew's use of προσκυνέω and his paternal-filial idiom. We turn first to Matthew's extensive use of the word προσκυνέω. Such language constitutes an important part of Israel's liturgical-linguistic repertoire - used often, for example, for the "worship" of Israel's God in Deuteronomy and the Psalms - and Matthew clearly shares that theological grammar (e.g., 4:9-10; cf. 22:37). At the same time, προσκυνέω serves as a Christological Leitwort in Matthew's narrative. While the word's meaning of course depends on its context - it need not mean "worship" in every instance - Matthew uses it ten times for Jesus and in all portions of the narrative; it constitutes the most basic (proper) response to Jesus. Matthew's reservation of the word προσκυνέω for these two figures - Israel's Lord God and Jesus - and his pervasive use of it for the latter suggests it may help render more intelligible the expression of Jesus' identity vis-à-vis "God" in the first Gospel.

We begin our study of προσκυνέω, therefore, by surveying its history of usage in Matthew's cultural encyclopedia, which helps sensitize us to the linguistic "training," so to speak, in which Matthew participates. Since the narrative, however, is the actual discourse in which the meaning of words is determined, I then go on to consider the particular contours of Matthew's appropriation of προσκυνέω language in the whole narrative. Not only does Matthew use προσκυνέω frequently for Jesus - unlike Mark and Luke - but more importantly, he employs it repeatedly in Christologically provocative and literarily strategic ways. At the climactic moment of the magi's visit, for example, the magi's action is expressed this way: καὶ ἐλθόντες εἰς τὴν οἰκίαν εἶδον τὸ παιδίον μετὰ Μαρίας τῆς μητρὸς αὐτοῦ (2:11). Likewise, at the climactic moment of Jesus' temptation, those same words reappear in Satan's mouth - ταῦτα σοι πάντα δώσω, ἐὰν πεσὼν προσκυνήσῃς μοι - only to be rebuffed by Jesus in the words of Israel's most basic confession: κύριον τὸν θεὸν σου προσκυνήσεις (4:9-10). I argue that Matthew has carefully shaped these accounts to reflect one another in a number of significant details, such that the reader is left with an apparent incongruity - Jesus receives from the magi what he declares belongs to Israel's God.

Several literary phenomena further confirm that these initial appearances of προσκύνησις are not incidental to Matthew's theological grammar. The sharpness of the incongruity between 2:1-12 and 4:8-10 is intensified cumulatively as Matthew repeatedly deploys προσκυνέω language in a way that re-activates his earlier uses. In his next use of προσκυνέω - after the temptation - the leper falls down in προσκύνησις before Jesus, whom he addresses as κύριε (8:2-4). Along with other important elements, Matthew has added/adapted these words to/from his Markan source as well as "intratextually" reflected Jesus' words at his recent temptation - only the κύριος receives προσκύνησις (see also 9:18; 15:25; 20:20). In such accounts, I argue, the content of the characters' actions remains ambiguous - προσκύνησις need not mean "worship" at the story level - but Matthew has nonetheless made a number of moves at the literary and lexical levels that make his προσκυνέω motif reverberate loudly for the reader in a christologically significant manner; the προσκύνησις offered to Jesus reflects that which Israel offered to its God. Importantly, similar patterns obtain not only in the details and literary settings of various pericopae, but also in the narrative's broader shape.

For instance, Matthew - uniquely among the synoptists - brings three episodes in a row into close correspondence linguistically and thematically, which come together to underscore the question of true and false "worship" (14:33 [προσκυνέω]; 15:9 [σέβω;]; 15:25 [προσκυνέω]). The "worship" of the two "outer" episodes turns explicitly on the question of Jesus' identity (14:33; 15:25), thereby setting in bold relief the "inner" episode that highlights Israel's "vain worship" (15:9). As another example, the magi's action in the narrative's introduction of Jesus is mirrored in its corresponding literary frame - the women grasp the risen Jesus' feet and offer him προσκύνησις, as do the eleven disciples (28:9; 17). What Satan requested of Jesus - only to be refused on theological grounds (4:8-10) - Jesus receives.

Finally, I consider how Matthew closely connects the προσκύνησις offered to Jesus in the narrative's frame with a decisive episode at the center of the narrative, 14:22-33. There, the disciples render Jesus προσκύνησις as "Son of God" (θεοῦ υἱός) after Peter repeatedly addresses him as the "Lord" in whose "hand" is the power to "save" from the mighty waters. I argue extensively that 14:22-33 - both in its literary form and in its sustained appropriation of OT imagery for YHWH - compels the reader to see Jesus, the filial κύριος as the recipient of the προσκύνησις Israel reserved for κύριος ὁ θεός. How Matthew can make this christological move while affirming Israel's basic commitment to the one God, I argue, turns on the filial language that comes to expression in the disciples' dramatic confession. Matthew, that is, reshapes the articulation of Israel's Lord God around the relation of the filial and paternal κύριος.

It is to that filial and paternal language, therefore, that we turn as the capstone of our discussion of Matthew's theological grammar. I contend that the narrative as a whole reflects the basic logic of 14:22-33; to tell the story of Israel's κύριος ὁ θεός is to tell the eschatologically-climactic story of the filial κύριος who rules and saves. I examine closely several passages - and their literary contexts - that serve seminal roles in Matthew's theological grammar, tracing how each brings Father and Son together in mutually constitutive relationship around their identity as κύριος (e.g., 22:41-46; 3:1-17; 11:1-12:8; 23:8-10; 23:37-24:2). I further trace the pattern of Matthew's filial and paternal language, demonstrating the ubiquitous christological shape to Matthew's paternal idiom; the identity of "God" in Matthew cannot be articulated apart from this particular Father-Son relation. Finally, I conclude the study by considering the close relation between Matthew's Emmanuel motif and his filial grammar (1:23; 18:19-20; 28:19-20); the Son is the filial repetition of the Father, his immanent presence among the people whom he saves (1:21; 2:6).

Capitalism and Christianity have been at odds in the application of this system of economics that has been deemed exploitative, manipulative and destructive of people who are not beneficiaries. In essence, the divide between the haves and the have nots in American society makes capitalism the scapegoat for the ills that society finds problematic without immediate remedy. Adam Smith, the father of modern capitalism, is often quoted in support of the capitalism that is currently deployed without an understanding that Smith’s capitalism is not the same as the contemporary capitalism with the negative effects. In fact, Smith wrote of God and deity which bring Christianity and the Church overtly into the conversation. Discussions surrounding capitalism typically present one of two options – accept things as they are with the understanding that things will likely get worse rather than better or change the system of economics to something more palatable. Into this discussion, I introduce a more thoughtful and nuanced alternative, redeem capitalism. Redemption is based on the belief that if individuals can be redeemed then the systems that they participate in, as redeemed individuals can be redeemed as well.

“Witness” is widely recognized as an essential descriptor of Christian life, in large part because of Jesus’ final words to his disciples Acts 1:8, and yet little agreement exists about what practices constitute Christian witness. Despite Acts’ pervasive interest in “witness” as the shape of apostolic life, no one has yet engaged its entire narrative in order to illuminate its portrait of “witness.” This dissertation fills that gap in Christian scriptural scholarship via cohesive and comprehensive narrative analysis that, following Acts’ lead, privileges a theological hermeneutical lens in order present the epistemic and political aims embedded in Acts’ vision of witness. In Acts, apostolic witness originates with God, and God’s character and power comprehensively shape witness as a communal life-pattern of integrated epistemology and politics that repudiates all forms of falsehood and violence and, instead, embraces truth, resilience, and creativity as exemplified in Jesus’ resurrection. Acts’ portrait of witness urges Christians today toward essential practices of truth telling as well as creative and resilient responses to injustice. This twofold exhortation offers both great encouragement and a strong corrective to Christians engaged in contemporary politics in the United States and beyond.

Contributing both to scholarship on Lukan joy and to the recent surge of publications on emotions in biblical literature, this dissertation examines the conditions—that is, the circumstances, dispositions, practices, commitments, and so forth—that lead to joy in Luke’s narrative. Many have recognized that Luke emphasizes the joy motif; my study advances the conversation by asking: What leads to joy, according to Luke?

Working with a carefully circumscribed list of joy terms and narratively sensitive judgments about the presence of unnamed joy in certain passages, I trace Lukan joy’s interconnection with the wider life of discipleship, focusing primarily on the Gospel but with a few forays into Acts. The study is eclectically interdisciplinary, drawing on selected insights from fields such as psychology or philosophy while privileging literary-theological analysis. In light of the role of Israel’s Scriptures in several Lukan characters’ movement into joy, I also attend to issues of intertextuality.

For Luke, I argue, the conditions that lead to appropriate joy include both divine action to bring about joy-conducive circumstances and human receptivity that is bound up with factors such as faithfulness/trust, properly oriented hope, and the generous use of possessions. The latter half of this claim relates to a significant further finding: Lukan joy’s relation to the rest of life renders intelligible joy’s moral weightiness according to Luke—a characteristic conveyed narratively through the portrayal of joy(lessness) as mandatory, praiseworthy, or even blameworthy in particular circumstances.