Learning to Speak Christian. Stanley Hauerwas
crafted as a response and in isolation from which the actions of its protagonists are divested of their original sense.
Which is not to say that the question is original to Acts. For inasmuch as the dominant motifs of that book are prefigured by an assortment of episodes depicted earlier in Luke’s Gospel, as well as the Old Testament, what emerges is an intricate pattern of promise and fulfillment—a salvation history—that by necessity gestures beyond the confines of any single text.36 Conceived fundamentally as a continuation of the biblical narrative, Luke arranges his literary project through a succession of echoes, allusions, and anticipations—some overt, others remarkably subtle—whose implications for the present take shape in their orientation to a past that is itself altered in the course of Luke’s narrative redeployment.37 It follows that the apprehendability of Acts must be built on a prior familiarity not only with the circumstances of Jesus’ life and ministry, passion and resurrection, but with the larger yet startlingly parochial story that, then as now, enables Jesus to be called the Christ: that is, the story of God’s enduring covenant with the Jews. It is no accident, for instance, that whereas Mark’s Gospel places Jesus’ appearance in his hometown synagogue at Nazareth well after his public ministry has already commenced (Mark 6:1–6a), reporting only that Jesus “began to teach” and that “many who heard him were astounded,” Luke moves the episode to the very beginning of Jesus’ ministry and provides a detailed description of what transpires therein (4:16–21). According to Richard Hays, what Jesus’ subsequent recitation from the prophet Isaiah amounts to is “nothing less than a public announcement of his messianic vocation,” for by evoking these texts at the outset of his ministry, Hays writes, “Luke’s Jesus declares himself as the Messiah who by the power of the Spirit will create a restored Israel in which justice and compassion for the poor will prevail.” As the scene in the synagogue continues to unfold, as the crowd is “filled with rage” at Jesus’ suggestion, made by way of a reference to the prophets Elijah and Elisha, that God’s favor would extend to the Gentiles (4:25–30), we are at once clued into how the prophetic tradition has been recast in Jesus’ inhabitation of it and at the same time offered a foretaste of issues that will persist into the final pages of Acts: specifically, those having to do with “the extension of God’s grace beyond the boundaries of Israel and the hostility of many in Israel to this inclusive message of grace.”38
If a key to understanding the signifying power of the inauguration of Jesus’ public ministry lies in its embeddedness in and consummation of the deepest yearnings of Jewish law and prophecy, so, too, does Jesus’ parting address at his ascension resonate with a promise that both presages and exceeds the advent of the apostolic commission. Indeed, it is a promise that spans the entirety of the biblical record: from God’s pledge to make of Abraham the father of a nation that will be a blessing to all nations (Gen 17:1–27) to the angel’s stunning proclamation in the final pages of Revelation (“He will dwell with them, and they will be his people”), the reality of a God who moves in history is consistently shown to be dependent upon the existence of a people whose lives bespeak the truth of his sovereignty and provision. It is, moreover, a promise that is made when, at the beginning of Luke’s first volume and prior to the birth of Jesus, Gabriel appears to Zechariah and announces that his unborn son—John the Baptist—will have as his task to “make ready a people prepared for the Lord” (Luke 1:17).
But a promise, it ought to be stressed, is not a precedent; while it is not the case that “there never was a Jewish mission of any kind prior to Christianity,” it is no less the case, Rowe argues, taking up the much-debated issue of whether precursors to Christian mission were extant in Jewish proselytizing practices, “that what we see in Acts—taken as a whole—finds no counterpart anywhere in the Jewish world prior to the end of the first century.”39 What may appear here to be mere historicist quibbling rather becomes a prelude to a crucial theological point: when Jesus says to his disciples that they will be his “witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth” (Acts 1:8), he is describing for them a mode of being in the world that cannot arise naturally out of any “type” or “model.” Instead, springing as it does from his death and resurrection, what Jesus enunciates at his ascension is the composition of a radically new creation, the very embodiment, socially and materially, of the fact that death no longer marks the boundary of human life, but that, to the contrary, as Rowan Williams suggests, it is through this death that “a new and potentially infinite network of relations is opened up.”40 The resurrection miracle, the miracle of miracles—not because a dead man has been resurrected but because Israel’s messiah has been resurrected—soon gives way to the miracle of a church whose literally limitless mission, as Rowe puts it, “actively socializes the salvific reality that attends Jesus’ universal Lordship.”41
Luke, however, has little interest in “proving” the resurrection—or, better, the proof he offers, the only proof he can offer, is that of a people whose lives (and, in many cases, whose deaths) would be unintelligible had Jesus not in fact been raised from the dead. Put in slightly different terms, Luke is concerned to demonstrate that those who will follow Christ will be unable to “explain” his resurrection. The resurrection will explain them. And it is this impossibility of disentangling the event of the resurrection from the shape of the lives of the people who declare it that defines the witness announced in Acts. Of the apostles—that is, those who have been sent out to witness—depicted in Acts, it is Paul, the primary human protagonist in the book’s second half (the book’s principle actor, of course, is the Holy Spirit), who best exemplifies the necessary interconnection between the resurrection of Jesus and the subsequent biographies of the men and women who are to serve as witnesses to it. Yet it seems strange that, of all people, Paul would be appointed a “witness to all the world of what [he] has seen and heard” (Acts 22:15), for, unlike many of his fellow apostles, he neither knew Jesus during the Messiah’s lifetime nor was he present at Jesus’ resurrection and ascension—nor, for that matter, and again unlike the other apostles, was he there for the arrival of the Holy Spirit on the day of Pentecost (Acts 2:1–4). In short, what he has actually “seen and heard” is, it would appear, far less impressive than we might have expected of this paragon of apostleship. To what, and in what particular manner, is Paul a witness?
Perhaps a brief detour into some prevailing conceptions of witnessing will allow us to better address this question. In his Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, Giorgio Agamben observes that in Latin there are two words for “witness”: “The first word, testis, from which our word ‘testimony’ derives, etymologically signifies the person who, in a trial or lawsuit between two rival parties, is in the position of a third party (tersis). The second word, superstes, designates a person who has lived through something, who has experienced an event from beginning to end and can therefore bear witness to it.”42 Commenting on this double meaning, anthropologist Didier Fassin explains:
In the first case the witness was external to the scene, but observed it: to be more precise, he has no vested interest and it is this supposed neutrality that is the grounds for hearing and believing him, including in legal proceedings. In the second case, the witness lived through the ordeal, and suffered it: it is therefore because he was present, but as a victim of the event himself and hence a survivor, that his word is listened to. One testifies on the basis of his observation, the other on the basis of his experience. The truth of the testis, expressed in the third person, is deemed objective. The truth of the superstes, expressed in the first person, is deemed subjective. The latter has merit by virtue of the affects it involves, the former by virtue of those it eliminates.43
Fassin’s purpose here is to trace the emergence within the domain of international humanitarianism and human rights discourse of what he calls “the key political figure of our time”: namely, the humanitarian worker-cum-“witness” whose aim it is to give voice to the unarticulated or unrepresented traumas visited upon those subjected to various forms of violence and catastrophe. While he does not mention it here (though he does so elsewhere44), the mounting efficacy of this figure correlates with the contemporaneous reimagining of the anthropologist’s task as being fundamentally one of “bearing witness,” such that one well-known anthropologist can suggest, in a formulation