Browsing by Subject "Gospel of Luke"
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Item Open Access Jesus Among Luke’s Marginalized(2017) Miller, Jeffrey E.Many first-century Jewish leaders considered the marginalized outside the reach of God’s mercy. But Jesus seemed to challenge this social and religious value. This study explores the paths to restoration for society’s outcasts in the Gospel of Luke, whether their outside status was the result of sinful “conduct” (prostitution, tax-collection, etc.) or a culturally-defined “condition” (blindness, leprosy, nationality, gender, etc.). I attempt to show that Jesus drew a distinction between the “conduct marginalized” and the “condition marginalized” and sought to meet their needs differently based on their proper classification. Jesus addressed the specific needs of these outsiders which avoided over-condemning on the one hand and premature restoration on the other hand. He did not regard the condition marginalized beyond the pale of redemption; he did not regard the conduct marginalized beyond the possibility of repentance. Both were worthy to hear the message of the gospel.
The Gospel of Luke provides unparalleled resources for my investigation. This Gospel emphasizes society’s outcasts more than the other Gospels, especially Gentiles, lepers, the poor, and women. According to Simeon, the Christ child will be responsible for the rise and fall of many in Israel (Luke 2:34) reversing the status imposed by culture on the powerful and the weak alike. Jesus’ warning that those who exalt themselves will be humbled while those who humble themselves will be exalted is repeated twice only in Luke’s Gospel (14:11; 18:14). Jesus inaugurates his public ministry by citing Isaiah’s liberating promises to the poor, the captives, the blind, and the oppressed (Luke 4:18). The dinner table in Luke 14 is occupied by the poor, the crippled, the blind, and the lame, while the entitled powerful “will not taste of my banquet,” Jesus says (Luke 14:16-24). Jesus tends unconditionally to invite these outcasts to gather to him on the “outside” (away from Jerusalem, away from Jewish leaders, etc.). Instead of perpetuating the condemnation of the condition marginalized, Jesus seems to invite their restoration by confronting the myth that some sin lies at the root of their condition.
At the same time that Luke elevates these condition marginalized, he also places a greater stress on “repentance” for the conduct marginalized than we find in the other Gospels. It is Luke’s Jesus, after all, who famously adds “to repentance” in 5:32 to the expression, “I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners” in Matthew 9:13 and Mark 2:17. It seems that some outcasts are victims of societal injustice while others are suffering the consequence of marginalization as a result of their own choices. To further complicate matters, we find Jesus dining with “tax collectors and sinners” throughout the Gospel of Luke. This table fellowship is noted and condemned by some Jewish leaders who find Jesus too welcoming. But Jesus rejects the insult that he is a “friend of tax collectors and sinners,” along with being labelled a glutton and a drunkard. Instead of unconditionally accepting the conduct marginalized, Jesus invites their repentance for community restoration.
Many additional questions are raised in the process of this research: Does the Gospel of Luke allow us to classify the marginalized as “conduct” or “condition” and, if so, who might fit into those categories (alternative category labels might be “active” and “passive” marginalized—as in those who actively contributed to their marginalization through their behavior and those who were passively marginalized through no fault of their own)? Do these categories still exist today? How much cultural luggage is involved in the station of the first century’s outcasts? Was Jesus more accepting of people than his followers are today? Did Jesus consider himself a friend of tax collectors and sinners, unconditionally welcoming them? Did he use table fellowship as a means to drawing sinners into a relationship with himself? Is it culturally objectionable to refuse anyone inclusion today, as it seemed culturally objectionable to welcome everyone in Jesus’ day?
The path to restoration for society’s outcasts in the Gospel of Luke ran through Jesus. How they were restored by Jesus, however, seemed to take on different forms depending on why that person was marginalized in the first place. This study concludes that those who were marginalize through no fault of their own (condition outcasts) were unconditionally redignified by Jesus, whereas those who were marginalized due to sin (conduct outcasts) were offered forgiveness in exchange for repentance. Jesus did not hesitate to classify people as sinners. Those who thus repented were celebrated with large meals fitting those found who were formally lost. Furthermore, Jesus directly confronted self-righteousness and those who were guilty of oppression. If we seek to model ourselves after Jesus, we may require a measure of correction that aligns us with this portrait of Jesus presented in Luke’s Gospel.
Item Open Access Satan in Lukan Narrative and Theology: Human Agency in the Conflict between the Authority of Satan and the Power of God(2019) Monnig, Matthew SAlthough 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.
Item Open Access You Will Have Joy and Gladness: A Narrative Analysis of the Conditions that Lead to Lukan Joy(2020) Newberry, Julie NicoleContributing 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.