Browsing by Subject "Acts of the Apostles"

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.  

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.

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.