Learning to Speak Christian. Stanley Hauerwas
to recognize the nature of that claim is not the least bit surprising, for a great deal of Luke’s account is given over to showing the multifarious ways in which the message of the early Christians could be misunderstood by their contemporaries, often violently so (although, as we have seen with Stephen, and as we shall see below, it is also when their message is perfectly comprehended that violence can ensue). Rowe’s method of enumerating the distinctive contours of Christian mission, and hence its relation to the prevailing political structures of the period, is to unpack what he considers to be a profound, even constitutive tension at the heart of Acts. This tension (or “dialectic,” as Rowe calls it) comprises not an accidental or inadvertent but a necessary dimension of Luke’s theological and political vision, which means that the point is not so much to resolve it as to understand how exactly it is produced, and to exactly what ends. Here is the tension as Rowe presents it:
On the one hand, Luke narrates the movement of the Christian mission into the gentile world as a collision with culture-constructing aspects of that world. From the perspective created by this angle of vision, Christianity and pagan culture are competing realities. Inasmuch as embracing the Christian call to repentance necessarily involves a different way of life, basic patterns of Graeco-Roman culture are dissolved. The pagans in Lystra, Philippi, Athens, and Ephesus are understandably riled: the Christians are a real threat.
On the other hand, Luke narrates the threat of the Christian mission in such a way as to eliminate the possibility of conceiving it as in direct competition with the Roman government. Of all forms of sedition and treason, Luke says, Christianity is innocent. Paul engenders considerable upheaval as a part of his mission, but time and again—in Corinth, Jerusalem, Caesarea, and Rome (so the reader understands)—the political authorities reject the accusations of his opponents: Paul is dikaios [righteous, or innocent]. The Christians are not out to establish Christendom, as it were. New culture, yes—coup, no.54
Nowhere, Rowe suggests, is this dynamic more visibly at play—and, consequently, the complex political disposition of Acts more explicitly elaborated—than in the manner in which Luke recounts the charges brought against Paul and Silas in Thessalonica (Acts 17:1–9); indeed, it is clear that an elucidation of what transpires in that city will be the fulcrum around which the thrust of Rowe’s argument stands or falls. The scene opens with Paul in the Jewish synagogue at Thessalonica, trying to persuade his audience (“as was his custom”), composed of both Greeks and Jews, that “it was necessary for the Messiah to suffer and to rise from the dead” (17:2). Here again we are given a glimpse, one of countless such glimpses in Acts, not only of the fundamentally Jewish self-understanding of the community to which Paul belongs, but of the ways in which that community is seriously countercultural in relation to the prevailing forms of Judaism.55 The rejection of messianic violence as a means of national liberation in favor of a suffering and servant Messiah, the expansion of the elect community to include uncircumcised Gentiles, and, most contentiously for some, the ascription of divine identity and lordship to the human Jesus—all this comes together to constitute a minority people amongst a minority people, a subculture within Israel that hermeneutically redefines Israel.
However, it is not only in relation to Israel that Paul and his fellow Christians are deemed a subversive force; they must, crucially for Luke, defend themselves against allegations of sedition against the empire as well. Envious of their initial missionary success (Luke reports that some of the Jews “were persuaded and joined Paul and Silas, as did a great many of the devout Greeks and not a few of the leading women”) and determined to rid Thessalonica of the Christian disturbers, a group of Jews organized a mob and attacked the house of Jason, presumably the local host of the Christians. When their search for Paul and Silas proved unsuccessful, they dragged Jason and some other believers before the city authorities, alleging, “these people who have turned the world upside down have come here also, and Jason has entertained them as guests. They are all acting against the decrees of Caesar, proclaiming that there is another king, Jesus” (17:6–8). The people and the magistrates were “disturbed,” we are told, and the hearing rather abruptly concludes with Jason and the others being released on bail.
Much turns on how this scene is read, on where the narrative stress is seen to lie and on the sort of evidence that is brought to bear. Depending on one’s orientation, the events in Thessalonica can be—and have been—taken to confirm the suspicion of a Lukan apologetic on behalf of a harmless church vis-à-vis the Roman order, or, alternately (and far less commonly), the view that Acts’ political imagination announces an emphatic summons, not to direct revolt, but to a form of life that insinuates a thoroughgoing antagonism with regard to the present powers. Interestingly enough, exegetes from across the interpretive spectrum have long regarded these few verses as providing a window into the proper construal of Luke-Acts as a whole, with the central question being whether the accusation against the believers is to be understood as a false charge—thereby buttressing Luke’s ostensible concern to demonstrate that Christians are innocent of the charges of stirring up trouble—or whether the hostile crowd, as Hays puts it, “rightly discerns something true about the impact of the gospel in the Roman world.”56 Conventionally, the critical reception of the episode in Thessalonica has tended to gravitate toward the former perspective; as has been maintained by New Testament scholars such as Hans Conzelmann—whom Badiou likely has in mind when he speaks of Acts as “a retrospective construction whose intentions modern criticism has clearly brought to light,”57—Luke’s project is to portray the Christians as docile subjects whose loyalty to the state is called into doubt only when the Jews manage to rouse the populace with baseless accusations against the church.58 And, as a way of narratively preempting any further misgivings, it is argued, Luke places the most familiar, popular charge against the Christians—namely, that there is “another king” to whom they are subservient—onto the tongues of the Thessalonian mob, only to subsequently, unambiguously write this possibility out of the picture. Fortunately for the Christians, this dominant line of reasoning wants us to believe Luke is trying to suggest, the Roman authorities have the good sense to see through the jealousy-inspired tricks of the Jews and, therefore, to release Jason and his friends without further delay.
However Luke’s vision of the church’s mission, of becoming witness, and, ultimately, the social and political coordinates of the messianic community is finally to be understood, it must come down to this: Is Jesus a king who claims a definitive allegiance that supersedes the jurisdiction of all other kings? Based on what we have already related of Rowe’s defamiliarizing account, it will come as little surprise that what he discovers in Luke’s writings is a resounding, unmistakable “yes.” What’s more, and here against the more politically progressive readings of Christian witness, Jesus does not challenge Caesar’s status as lord (kyrios)—as if, Rowe says, Jesus were somehow originally subordinate to Caesar in the order of being. Instead, because “of the nature of his claims, it is Caesar who is the rival; and what he rivals is the Lordship of God in the person of Jesus Christ.”59 It is Caesar, not Jesus, who bears the burden of proof—Caesar, not Jesus, who would attempt to pretentiously, idolatrously usurp the title of “king” for himself. Here we cannot wander into the dense thickets of Rowe’s exegetical strategy, or, indeed, into each of the myriad references he mobilizes in order to make his case, so two particularly apt passages, both located within Luke’s previous volume, will need to suffice. At the very beginning of his Gospel, Luke’s readers are made aware that Jesus is destined to reclaim the sovereignty that the emperor has seized for himself when the angel Gabriel declares that “the Lord God will give to him the throne of his father David, and he will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end” (Luke 1:32–33). With ascriptions such as these interspersed throughout each of Luke’s texts, it is scarcely possible, Rowe avers, “that a Christian reader in the late first or early second century would not know that Christian claims about Jesus’ identity as the Christ entailed royal claims as well, or that the advent and resurrection of Jesus was the coming of the Kingdom of God.”60
The second example is even more striking. Luke’s account of Jesus’ post-baptismal temptation in the desert is in many respects similar to Matthew’s, but there is one point at which Luke quite drastically goes beyond him. After showing Jesus all the kingdoms of the world, the devil says,