Change the World

My friend Tony Hunt recently posted this review of Greg Sharzer's No Local: Why Small-Scale Alternatives Won't Change the World. This prompted some conversation that led to the thoughts I rehearse below. First, a few caveats. 

One, I haven't read Sharzer's book; I'm responding only to the review, and then only to some of the sentiments therein. I want to make that distinction now so as to not have to perform narrative gymnastics to make that clear as we go. 

Two, I'm not stumping for locavorism, though I'm sympathetic, nor even necessarily for localism as such. There's a time and a place for that, and people better suited to make that argument. And let me be clear that I think there are good points in the review and the book looks interesting: this is not a demo job. [Also, "Foodies and locavores unite: you have nothing to lose but your fast food chains" is a great line.]

In fact, I agree with the book's subtitle, to some extent. Maybe small-scale alternatives won't change the world. I suppose one could be cheeky and suggest that one particular small-scale alternative centered in first-century Jerusalem seems to have left a pretty significant mark, but one could also argue that it left such a mark all the more indelibly after it decided that living in the world but not of it didn't preclude being in charge of most of it. Let's call that one a wash. 

At any rate, while I wouldn't go so far as to say that small-scale alternatives have no effect, especially if we think beyond the metrics of immediacy, I wouldn't claim it as a tool for grand social change as such. And I'm not exactly the sort of localist defined in this review: I'm not particularly a locavore (though we have a garden and chickens), nor do I see localism as a means of manipulating the capitalist system, as the review implies ("Localism says we can change how we act within capitalism. If consumers don’t like a commodity, they can demonstrate their commitment to a better one: for example, choosing to buy a Fair Trade cup of coffee"). Whatever localism might obtain in my thinking is, like my anarchism, artifactual: not an end in itself but a by-product.

But let me cut to the chase. Here are two articulation of what seems to be the review's thesis: "However, while small–scale alternatives can survive and occasionally flourish, they won’t build a new, equitable society" and "But if the goal is stop ecological degradation and runaway growth, then the stakes are higher, and localists need to ask whether small projects will create long–term change." Those are perfectly legitimate observations, given certain premises.

One of the goals of the book, at least according to the review, is to help would-be localists understand how capitalism actually works and face the possibility that their localism unwittingly plays into a neoliberal agenda. I can't see this as a bad thing, necessarily, especially given what seems to be a commitment to a larger leftist program. To the extent that Sharzer and his audience share a commitment to "build a new, equitable society" or "stop ecological degradation and runaway growth" this is a completely legitimate move, even a smart one.

But I don't share that commitment. I question the premise that building a new, equitable society as such is our proper telos. First, it should be, for Christians, that a genuinely new ("If anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation") and truly equitable ("no slave or free, Jew or Greek, male or female") society has already been given to us, not realized in revolution but revealed in the Cross. The new society is not "out there" to be built by our hands but already among us as a gift, but that we would only live into it.

Building societies of the kind suggested by this review requires tools that have been placed out of our reach if we take the Cross seriously. To the extent that the Fall has anything at all to do with the neolithic turn, with our attempt as a species to seize our own fate, with the rise of civilization and the tendency toward centralization in the places where we undertook such a seizure in earnest, then society-building is but more of the same, a recapitulation of what got us into this mess in the first place.

Just as the world looks different when you have a gun in your hand, it looks different when you wield the tools of society-building. It looks different when you presume to be in charge of it in some way, or of part of it. It looks different when you take upon yourself, intentionally or not, the crushing burden of making history come out right. 

To say that local commitments won't help to stop ecological degradation and runaway growth is like saying that pacifism won't stop the hypothetical home intruder: it posits an agreed-upon threat and then constructs the argument as a choice between a well-meaning but ineffective idealism and The Way Things Really Get Done, and assumes those are our only options.

It also would seem to presume that the avenues of power available to effect these kinds of change are themselves neutral, that they would not form and shape us in a particular way, that they would not get away from us or spin off unintended consequences, or that some properly constructed "we" is uniquely capable of taking hold of the reins in just the right way. It's not, then, a very sophisticated view of power, or powers -- but of course neither Sharzer nor his reviewer can be expected to bring to bear the kinds of theological resources I am presuming.

I realize that this is not a very satisfying leftism, if it counts as one at all. My "ecclesial postanarchism" (if I'm going to call it something) doesn't posit a team that one can be on in the hopes of winning the war for the fate of society. I am sympathetic to the left, particular if we read a proper leftism as being critical of capitalism; if capitalism is not the primary cancer that is destroying us, it is at the very least one of its more pernicious symptoms.

At the same time, the sober reality is that whatever comes after capitalism will just end up being what came after capitalism. It will address the limitations and liabilities of capitalism and introduce its own. It will engender its own resistance. I'm skeptical that it will be less imperial, all things considered -- it is difficult to imagine anything less than a counterimperialism being adequate to the task. It is in this spirit that Sharzer's book makes sense, and I appreciate that. 

I sometimes quip that I'm not smart enough to know how 300 million people are supposed to live together on two billion acres (to speak only of the U.S. context) and I'm suspicious of the entire enterprise. The reality on the ground, of course, is that we're already part of that attempt, regardless of how spurious I consider it. 

I'm no more in a position to call a halt to the entire project than I am in to be in charge of it. As such, there are innumerable concrete actions we might take in the name of justice, or love, or faithfulness --actions that recognize the realpolitik of our present circumstance and yet refuse to accord it ontological ultimacy or epistemological priority. 

Some of those actions, no doubt, will have a "localist" or micropolitical character. Some might take the shape of temporary or tenuous alliances with larger projects in the interest of a shared vision of the good. The goal is not the pursuit of an elusive ethical purity but the cultivation of a particular patience and the realization of a kind of political humility. 

To seek to change the world is to presume to know how the world should change, and how best to change it. It is to pretend to the knowledge of good and evil -- something that our mythology tells us has always been a bad idea.

TIB: Rise and Walk

Acts 3:1-10

In Luke's world, working miracles is a sign of authority. The ability to do something amazing is a signal of credibility and importance. It would be along the lines of having academic or professional credentials in our day; people with such credentials are presumably experts in their field of study or occupation. They might not be, but such credentials are our culture's way of attributing authority. Even a person without such laurels might be given something like an honorary doctorate as a way of ascribing to them the credibility and importance we think they deserve. Or they might say "I'm not a doctor, but I play one on TV" -- this means nothing, of course, but it attests to the spirit of the thing.

Peter's healing of a beggar at the temple gate, then, is a way of saying the Peter deserves to be heard; not surprisingly, this incident is followed by a Petrine sermon, one remarkably similar to the one that he preaches in Acts 2. It is impossible to know how much of Acts is compilation versus composition on Luke's part. The healing/sermon combo in Acts 3 could be part of an oral tradition or an earlier source from which Luke is drawing. He could be combining elements from different places. Given the similarities between the sermons, this could be a variant of the Acts 2 message, which Luke has paired with a healing story as a narrative device. Or it could have simply happened, and gotten preserved in oral tradition or reconstructed by Luke on the basis of eyewitness accounts. It's not like we will ever know exactly where these stories came from.

Peter is, in effect, the new Jesus. Though his message is undeniably about Jesus, it is also a continuation of Jesus's own message, and his miracle-working is also very reminiscent, serving a similar purpose in the narrative. Jesus healed people; Peter heals people. Jesus preached repentance in light of the coming Kingdom; Peter preaches repentance in light of the coming Kingdom. Jesus is not here, but he's returning; Peter is here, to tell you so.

Peter preaches with and in the authority of Jesus, which means there is a kind of circularity here: Peter preaches about Jesus in the name and authority of Jesus, whom we are expected to believe is the Messiah because Peter tells us so in the name of Jesus. And why should we believe Peter? Because he just healed a guy, 'nuff said. This is the only thing that points outside Peter's argument. It's similar to citing a source or quoting a recognized authority.

Peter's (or Luke's) appeal to authority is no more or less bogus than our appeals to authority. It's different, to be sure, reflecting the different world in which Luke lives. Sometimes a healing story serves as a kind of parable in and of itself, like John 9 for example. Other times, like this one, the story really just tells us something about the healer or miracle-worker in question. The point is not, exactly, that Jesus or Peter could heal people. The thing-in-itself is not really the thing at all. This is why, even though we've all done it, it's pointless to wonder why Jesus just didn't heal everyone and be done with it. Broad theological speculations notwithstanding, such questions simply miss the point.

As such, then, the healing of the lame man in Acts 3 is -- I don't want to say it's not important -- not important. It doesn't tell us much except by way of giving us a concrete example of Peter's wonder-working power. Enter lame man, Peter heals lame man, Peter makes another stump speech for Jesus. End of story. The lame man is like a Red Shirt -- the expendable unknown crew member in a Star Trek episode -- except instead of getting killed, he gets healed, which is a lot happier but still doesn't do anything for his acting career.

There is, however, an interesting tidbit almost buried in here. Peter and John were headed to the temple at the hour of prayer. Why, exactly, were they doing this? Let me suggest two reasons: One, they were headed to the temple to proselytize. This is plausible, especially since that's exactly what they end up doing. (Or at least Peter does. For all that I admire about Luke's writing skill, he lacks facility with multi-character dialog. John is pretty much just furniture in this story.) I don't like this explanation as well as the other one, which is that they were headed to the temple to pray because they were Jews in Jerusalem.

It doesn't matter if Jay and Silent Bob actually did this or if it's just something Luke created to set up Peter's sermon. The upshot is that the idea of Penn and Teller heading to the temple at 3 in the afternoon apparently didn't strike anyone as odd, and it seems reasonable to assume that the early Jesus followers remained temple-attending Jews until they became a liability to Jewish community as a whole, or until the Temple was destroyed. Jesus' disciples were not spinning off a religious alternative to Judaism so much as they were cultivating a political alternative to Roman imperialism.

It's true that Luke's narrative looks ahead to the inclusion of the Gentiles, but Luke's is not some simplistic replacement theology, or supercessionism. For now, regardless of Luke's agenda, and perhaps even irrespective of mine, we can make the observation that Christians in Jerusalem were observant Jews, or at least, wherever Luke is from, that idea is plausible enough to be the backdrop for a healing narrative.

Back to the story. I've heard sermons that try to make a lot out of the healed man's response -- the jumping and leaping and praising God and all that. Usually, the point is that we should emulate his enthusiasm. Sometimes the point is that this man just got his legs healed; we, receiving the very salvation of our souls, should be even happier. But really, what person, having just been healed of a crippling disease, wouldn't jump and leap simply because they could? And what can you do after you've been saved?  Die and go to heaven?

You first.

TIB: Bag of Hammers

Acts 2:37-47

"Baptism!" George Clooney's character in O Brother, Where Art Thou? says derisively after learning that his traveling companions have had their sins washed away, "You boys are dumber'n a bag of hammers." This line was especially funny to my friends and me because of our religious heritage.

I grew up in the Church of Christ, where standard doctrine is that if you want to go to heaven, you have to get wet. And not just a little wet: full immersion. If we were Greek we might tell the story of Achilles as a cautionary tale. We found this line hilarious, so much so that we bought one of our fellow disaffected CoC'ers a bag of hammers for her birthday. We made it a decorative thing -- they were some sort of cute little craft hammers -- and for all I know she still has it on her wall.

Peter tells his contrite crowd that to appease God they must be baptized, and we have no reason to suspect that he had anything but a good dunking in mind. Curiously, however, going to heaven when you die is neither mentioned nor clearly implied. It doesn't seem to be an issue. Peter, I'm sure, probably believed in some kind of conscious afterlife, so that's still on the table, but it doesn't seem to be what the whole baptism schtick is about, or at least it doesn't exhaust it.

My guess is that it served as a marker of being part of the eschatological community, a blood-on-the-doorway kind of thing. If the Day of the Lord is coming, and especially if you just killed the Messiah, you might want to get your affairs in order. But this isn't a get-out-of-hell-free card; it's making sure you end up on the right side when judgment rains down.

Moreover, they would almost certainly have heard this in a communal context: Israel's collective sins would be forgiven, and God would finally deliver them from exile. The promise, he tells them, "extends to your children and those who are far off..." which suggests that even people who didn't get wet -- dare I say it? -- would nevertheless be beneficiaries of this act of contrition.

We may or may not get more of this idea in Acts, but I think there's reason to believe that the early believers saw themselves as part of a divine plan to save everyone -- kind of like one of those Star Trek episodes where the crew of the Enterprise has to prove to some alien race that humans are worth keeping around. There's nothing new under the sun.

But what does this new community look like? Luke tells us, actually: "They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers." This, too, is a Church of Christ mainstay, only we seem to interpret as a fragment of a 1st-century church bulletin: "Apostles' teaching" is preaching, "fellowship" (the word in Greek has financial overtones) is the offering, "breaking of bread" is communion, and "the prayers" means that somebody (and by "somebody" we meant a man) prayed over each of these stages. There was an opening prayer, an offering prayer, a communion prayer, a prayer before (and sometimes after) the sermon, and a  prayer to cover the awkwardness of no one coming up for the invitation, which may or may not have doubled as a closing prayer.

Things aren't quite like that at our church today, for some good reasons and some bad ones, and I'm obviously poking a little fun. The gist is that I grew up thinking that Acts 2:42 describes things that we have to do on Sunday in order to get church right. I think this misses the point, especially if we take a closer look at the rest of this chapter of Acts, which describes them sharing their resources (holding all things in common, in fact), especially food, and spending time together.

Where the New Testament describes the assembly, they're eating, sharing, and making decisions together. In fact, the only time one of the words commonly translated as "worship" gets used to describe the assembly, it's an unbeliever doing the worshiping (specifically, falling prostrate in response to the open prophesying of the gathered community).

In a way, Acts 2 is Luke's version of, or extended commentary on, the Great Commission: "...make disciples of all nations..." -- check -- "...baptizing in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit..." -- check -- "...and teaching them to do all I have commanded" -- check. Simply put, there's no way, textually, that we can make Acts 2:42 something different from 2:43-47.

To say they devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching is to say that they were committed to doing the things the apostles taught them. These are things the apostles learned from Jesus, so we can see this latter part of Acts 2 not only as unpacking of of 2:42 but also as an earnest attempt by the post-Pentecost community to keep Jesus's commandments. It's not exhaustive, certainly, but it is instructive.

"Fellowship," then, means more than taking an offering; it means a deeper level of sharing than, say, 10% of one's income. This was not compulsory (my conservative friends can rest easy that this is not a defense of state socialism) but neither was it rugged individualism or mere "charity" (a very good word that has taken a lexicographical beating, but that's for another day).

The most basic sharing was the "breaking of bread." This has eucharistic overtones, of course, especially by the time Luke and Acts are being put into somewhat final form, but we cannot limit this to the eucharistic rite itself. They ate together, as a means of sharing each other's company but also a means of sharing their food. Luke will have more say about this in upcoming chapters, so I won't belabor the point, but: they shared their stuff.

Finally, "the prayers" included (without necessarily being limited to) the singing or chanting of the Psalms, something that would have been familiar to them from the synagogue tradition. A communal act. Common prayer. The analog in our day would not be merely the utterance of a prayer in front of the congregation by a male representative, but singing songs together. You know, since we don't chant psalms.

[Should we? I don't know. Some early Calvinist groups famously (or notoriously) forbade the singing of anything but psalms in their assemblies. In our day, it might be an interesting way to re-school ourselves in Biblical language, a check against the vapidity of Jesus-and-me evangelicalism. At any rate, I think those responsible for writing and selecting songs for the assembly should take much greater care in attending to the lyrics, to the words they are putting in the mouths of the worshiping community. If the answer to "What language can I borrow?" is "80s love songs," perhaps we're missing something. Not that I'm prejudiced; some of my best friends are 80s love songs.]

So: we are baptized into a particular kind of community with particular practices. It's less a metaphysical transaction than initiation into a people. I do enjoy the symbolism of baptism, of death and rebirth, of the cleansing waters. We're baptized "in the name of the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit," the meaning of which is not, if I'm honest, immediately apparent. It's a nod to the Trinity, sure, but I suspect we're missing something here, some original context that might well be unrecoverable. If the passage where this phrase occurs is an interpolation of a later baptismal formula, which I find plausible, then any "original meaning" was lost before the words got put into Jesus' mouth.

What I like to think it means, which I'm not sure is supportable by the text itself but is at least consistent with the ecclesiology of the book of Ephesians, is that we are baptized into the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, that we are immersed in the divine Name, swimming in the eternal Logos, bouyed by the amniotic waters of the Spirit from before time began. That we breathe the very breath of God and become the Body of Christ.

And maybe -- just so they don't take themselves too seriously -- we should give the newly baptized a bag of hammers.

TIB: Peter Addresses the Crowd

Acts 2:22-36

In the latter part of Genesis, Joseph is rejected by his brothers, and yet not only does he become the hero of the story, the very means by which he is rejected is also the means by which he effects his brothers' salvation. It's like tragedy in reverse. Peter seems to allude to this in his message to the crowd at Pentecost. First, he offers a précis of the situation: Jesus, a Jewish prophet whose wonder-working was a divine endorsement, has been executed by the Gentiles at the behest of his own people. Peter asserts that this was God's plan all along, similar to Joseph telling his brothers "What you have intended for evil, God has intended for good," because it turns out that this is how the Messiah would come to them.

The situation on the ground, I think, is that Jesus threatened the tentative peace between the Jews and their Roman overlords, and the expedient thing, the way to protect that tentative peace, was to have him done away with. There are more dramatic and more rhetorically charged ways of putting this, but that's the basic premise. No one need be particularly evil or capricious for this to take place; in fact, it's a fairly mundane operation of the sociopolitical machine.

Peter tells them that God has raised Jesus up, and that this is not just some miraculous event -- this, too, is a fulfillment of prophecy. Here he does another of Peter's Interesting Psalm Interpretations. He takes Psalm 16, which in context is a proclamation of David's confidence in God's protection. The language is a bit hyperbolic: David trust that God won't let him die. It's like saying "Long live the King" or "God save the Queen" -- that sort of thing. I don't think, in context, it's saying more than, say, Psalm 23 is, though it's not saying less, either. God will protect the righteous. This is the hope of Israel.

Peter reads this as saying that God's chosen servant will never die. David died, ergo David was not the chosen servant. One of his descendants would be. It's not that odd that Jesus would be killed and come back, because he's the Messiah. See what David says here? That's what this Psalm really means. So the bad news is, you killed the Messiah; the good news is, God raised him up and seated him at God's right hand and you can be in on the ground floor of the new regime. Only, by the way, you'll rule by serving and you don't get to kill Romans. Sorry. The Cross wasn't so much a tragic mistake as a new paradigm.

There's a subtext here that doesn't come out so much in this passage but bears attention nonetheless. David died and  therefore can't have been the Messiah -- the son of David would be. The son of David would build the temple that David could not because David was a man of war. But it's also not Solomon, who built the temple that got destroyed. That didn't last, so it's not him. And it's not any of the Hasmoneans, or Herod, whose various efforts to rebuild or restore the temple have messianic overtones. That's not going to last, either. These are men of war, ruling by the sword in the ways of the world. The true son of David is Jesus, who is not a man of war, and who is (and/or is building -- there's a lot of stuff there we don't have time for) a temple not made by human hands.

Then Peter tells the crowd, whom he's working into a penitent lather, that "God has made him both Lord and Messiah, this Jesus whom you crucified." This is an interesting turn of phrase, especially from the pen of Luke, who gave us the traditional Christmas story. Oh, sure, Matthew got the Magi and all that, but he's not the one who gets quoted in the Charlie Brown Christmas special. So why does Peter say that God has made Jesus Lord and Messiah? Wasn't he born that way? Wasn't Jesus the rightful claimant to the throne by virtue of his divine parentage and Davidic lineage?

Perhaps it's nothing. A bit of linguistic ambiguity. But we have hints of this in other places, like Romans 1, where Paul tells us that Jesus was declared to be the Son of God by his resurrection, which fits what Peter is saying here. Or Mark's gospel -- which lacks a birth narrative (and might lack a resurrection narrative in its original form) -- in which God says "This is my son" at Jesus' baptism. Or in Hebrews, where God says (quoting a Psalm that we'll see later in Acts) "You are my son; today I have become your Father." On one hand, we have Jesus being born the son of God; on the other hand, we have texts in which this is conferred upon him either at his baptism or upon his resurrection/ascension.

I don't want to make a lot of hay out of this. The broad gist of things is that these texts are claiming that this crucified man is, beyond appearances to the contrary, the long-awaited Messiah. The cross, intended as an instrument not just of torture and execution but also abject humiliation, has been turned into triumph and exaltation. What was intended for evil God has used for good. That claim gets narrated in different ways, like the different voices in a fugue; they have different entrances and are given slightly different treatments, but they contribute to the cumulative effect.

The way Peter describes it -- "God has made him both Lord and Messiah, this Jesus whom you crucified" -- couches things in terms of a divine judgment rendered, a rebuttal to human reckoning. They dispensed with a volatile charismatic leader for the sake of the good of all and unwittingly kill the messiah. It's a twist that would make O. Henry proud. The twist of the twist -- the inversion of tragedy -- is that this is soteriological after all; the fact that killing off the guy who turns out to be the Messiah isn't the tragic end of the story is also a rebuttal to human reckoning.

There's a tautness to the narrative here: the operations of violence and state power that Jesus ultimately renounces are those that kill him. One of the arguments against violent retaliation -- that we might unwittingly make things worse because we know not what we're actually doing -- is played out in the central narrative of this new people God is fashioning. It is part cautionary tale and part myth of origins. Like Joseph, Jesus saves his people through the very mechanism by which they attempt to dispatch him. Unlike Joseph, Jesus does not sidle up to worldly power to get this done, but rather embraces the power of the Cross.

TIB: Pentecost

So we're up to Pentecost, and Pentecost is huge. Often considered the "birthday of the church," it is, in the book of Acts as well as Christianity as a whole, an important story in terms of the group's sense of identity. It is a bit like the Exodus in that while the earlier stuff is clearly important, Pentecost is pivotal.

Chapter 2 takes flight with the rushing wind and the miracle of tongues. It's hard to tell, even taking the text literally, what's going on here. Are the apostles/disciples speaking different languages or are the various people groups hearing things in their own language? The text actually suggests both, and I've heard it both ways. I'm not sure it matters. Those for whom speaking in tongues is important lean toward the former; those who get freaked out by that sort of thing seem to prefer the latter. We'll just let them duke it out.

In some groups, glossolalia is such an important sign of one's salvation that the pressure to perform -- and thus the temptation to fake it -- must be incredible. Emily Dickinson rather famously refused to play along during a revival at college, which left lingering questions about her orthodoxy and her commitment. For many charismatics, speaking in tongues is a sign of God's favor as well as a portent of the end times.

For cessationists, one or both of these interpretations is problematic, rendering the glossolalia experience either dubious or diabolical. For me, the experience is plausible enough, but I am leery, for various theological and philosophical reasons, of attaching too much interpretive meaning to it. St. John of the Cross was skeptical of any kind of ecstatic manifestation (what he called "consolations") as inherently meaningful. "So you had a vision," he might say. "Whoop-de-do."

For Peter and company, however, or at least for Luke's readers, several powerful and significant interpretive frames were both available and plausible. The meaning of the story -- that is, the significance of the claim -- is threefold. One, it is a reversal of Babel; that which was scattered is being gathered back together. Two, this suggests that the ingathering, the eschatological harvest, has begun. The exile is effectively over: God has forgiven the sins of his people and redemption is nigh.

Third, and perhaps less obviously (or less consciously), glossolalia may have been a means of bypassing normal avenues of rhetoric -- avenues that were only available to the well-educated (which is to say, rich). Luke's gospel is the easiest to interpret in light of a "preferential option for the poor" and we should not expect Acts to be much different. So we have here, and in some of Paul's letters, the possibility that glossolalia afforded the poor and disenfranchised access to persuasive speech. Plus it had a certain amount of socioreligious cachet, in that the Oracle of Delphi received prophecies in the form of glossolalia.

Anyway, a bunch of Galileans are waxing eloquent in various languages, or at least people from various parts of the empire believe they're hearing their native tongue, and the crowd that has gathered thinks the Galileans in question are drunk. Because, you know, drunk people are always going around speaking foreign languages. Peter's rebuttal is classic: they can't be drunk because, after all, it's only nine o'clock in the morning. This is an answer only a drinker would give. I'm not saying he was a lush, just pointing out that it is not the possibility of being inebriated that he contests but the timing.

No, he argues, they are not drunk. Rather they are the heralds of an eschatological message: "This is that which was spoken by the prophet Joel," Peter tells them, and then proceeds to quote the passage in question. I dare you -- I double-dog dare you -- to read Joel 2 and tell me with a straight face that anybody could extrapolate Acts 2 out of that. We need Peter to say "this is that" because we weren't going to come up with it on our own. Sure, the basic idea is that this sort of spectacular event is a sign, but Acts 2 is not about young men dreaming dreams and old men seeing visions.

The implication of Peter's interpretation is that the Day of the Lord is upon them. This is good news, because the Day of Lord involves forgiveness for Israel. This is also bad news, because the Day of the Lord also involves, well, locusts and stuff. But ultimately, Joel tell us, "Everyone who calls upon the name of the Lord will be saved." That's the NIV -- the NASB says "will be delivered" and "there will be those who escape," which I think is a clearer meaning.

In both Greek and Hebrew the words we translated "salvation" are generally ones that mean being rescued from some sort of calamity. It doesn't mean "go to heaven when you die" so much as it means escaping the locusts -- or, depending on context, being smart enough to get the hell out of Dodge when the Romans descend on Judea. Same thing, really.

Those who see the events of the Jewish War -- notably the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem -- as eschatological culmination have this going for them: their interpretive rubric is consistent with Peter's. In fact, I would go so far as to suggest that some of the eschatological material in the New Testament could be a way in which post-temple Christians were saying "this was that."

Whether legitimate prediction or later attribution, the desecration of the temple and the Coming of the Son of Man are clearly linked in the words of Jesus. If Roman aggression seems a strange thing to which to attribute apocalyptic inbreaking, the crucifixion is a strange way to coronate a Messianic king. Everything about Jesus is a kind of inversion, and there is a certain consistency here.

One thing that is unvoidably problematic is that this leaves us with a picture of God sending the Romans to bring judgment upon his people. It's not that there isn't Biblical precedence for this assessment, it's just that if such an interpretation seems available to a Jesus or even a Josephus, both of whom were first-century Jews and thus no more open to accusations of antisemitism than Jeremiah might have been, the claim sounds awkward on the lips of a twenty-first century American.

Some of the broader political context is helpful here. It's not that God had brought judgment on the Jews or the temple per se so much as a divine referendum on the Hasmonean claims to messianic status that prompted the rebuilding of the temple in the first place. The true Messiah comes as a different kind of king to build a different kind of temple. Part of the New Testament witness is to the settling of the debate over the legitimacy of the Hasmonean project: God answers in the negative. Thank you for playing.

Peter's invocation of the prophecy in Joel is part of a larger rhetorical strategy that declares Jesus to be the Messiah, full stop. Whatever Jesus is or was or did, that's what the Messiah was supposed to be or do. This is that. To the extent that Jesus doesn't meet people's expectations for a Messianic king, it's the expectations that need to change.

The declaration of Jesus as Messiah confirms the path of the Suffering Servant as the messianic paradigm. The declaration of Jesus as Messiah confirms the people of God in their diasporic identity over against expectations of imperial triumph. The declaration of Jesus as Messiah claims as normative the way of the Cross.

However we might connect the theological dots, I don't think that eschatological hope means that Jesus is going to show up again as a conquerer lobbing off the heads of the impious. Those who are disappointed, then and now, are simply expecting the wrong sorts of things, either because we fail to grasp how the language was used, or because we fail to grasp the extent to which early Christian thinking inverted imperialistic assumptions and thwarted triumphalistic expectations.

The Irritable Bible: Choosing Matthias

[Before moving on, an addendum to my introductory disclaimers: I am approaching these texts from the perspective of composition, which I teach, and cultural studies, which is an approach I learned as an American studies major. In terms of biblical studies or Ancient Near Eastern studies, I am at best an informed layman; as such my grasp of guild-specific concerns is naturally limited. I am also reading through a theopolitical lens deeply influenced by the work of John Howard Yoder as well as postanarchist discourse, particularly the work of political philosopher Todd May.

I'm not attempting historical reconstruction or undertaking a quest for "what really happened." I'm not sure there is such a thing. I'm more interested in what is called the "rhetorical situation": how does the text construct its audience? What kinds of appeals are at play here? What does it reveal or assume about its own cultural context? What kind of discourse community might produce (or reproduce) such a text? And so on. If at times I get a bit indulgent -- well, that's just part of my confession.]

Acts 1:12-26

The choosing of Matthias is not what I would call a critical text. Matthias himself doesn't even show up anywhere else -- not just in Acts, but the whole Bible. He's a one-off. If Acts were an episode of Star Trek, he'd be wearing a red uniform and he'd be dead before Pentecost.

It does strike me as an interesting one, however. First, I find it interesting because even though Paul will become important to the narrative later, Paul is clearly not seen as Judas' replacement. Paul is, in Acts as well as in his own writings, Apostle to the Gentiles, and thus a different breed of cat. Unless Peter was just wrong, rushing ahead to fulfill Judas' spot not realizing that God was grooming Paul for the job -- I've heard that suggested, and it fits to some extent, but that seems like something Luke would make more explicit. Some regard Acts as being a refutation of Paul's apostolate but I think this is stretching things. It seems more likely that the stage is being set not just for Paul's legitimacy but also for Paul's unique role. Luke is a Gentile, and this is probably not insignificant (in fact, it's possible that Acts is not so pro-Paul as it is pro-Gentile, but I'm getting ahead of myself).

It's also interesting because the interpretive principle on which the decision is based would have gotten Peter a failing grade in hermeneutics class. Peter quotes single verses of two different Psalms and interprets them as a specific prophecy about Judas. In context, they are rather generic imprecatory psalms about one's enemies.  There's really nothing in those texts that sets us up for Peter's reading. His use of them here, in such a specific way, is an interesting glimpse into how the New Testament interprets the Old.

A comprehensive examination of this would be interesting indeed (I think it's been done). Very often, the meaning applied to the text by early followers of Jesus is not one that seems obvious from the text itself. Part of the reason for this, I submit, is that they saw themselves in eschatologically portentious times. Big doings were afoot, and everything was potentially laden with esoteric meaning pointing to a teological culmination.

There is a circularity here that is not far removed from paranoia or conspiracy theories: the belief that something significant is going on causes one to interpret nearly everything as evidence that something significant is going on. At the extreme, even countervailing evidence can be assimilated as a kind of verification, or a lack of evidence as proof of a coverup: that's just what "they" want us to think. (In some interpretive circles this is applied to Satan.) I'm not suggesting that Peter or his compatriots were delusional conspiracy theorists; what I am suggesting is that they saw themselves at an important juncture in salvation history. Everything had meaning, and all signs pointed to their place in the grand design.

It seems to have been important to replace Judas and maintain the numerical integrity of the Twelve. Judas was not the apostle of any particular tribe -- as far as I can tell, none of the apostles were directly linked to any tribe, and that level of specificity seems to be largely beside the point. Instead, it is more that the twelve tribes were being symbolically reconstituted in the apostolate, independent of any specific association. In fact, 10 of the tribes -- the northern kingdom, or Israel proper -- were lost to the Assyrians nearly 800 years prior.

This symbolic reconstitution, then, is in some ways a means of bypassing the "Samaritan problem" from one direction, while the inclusion of the Gentiles would render it moot from another direction. Literally gathering Israel back to the land, itself part of the constellation of eschatological expectations, is transcended by way of a socioeconomic rather than geographical understanding of the Kingdom of God. We'll see more of this in Acts 2.

Perhaps Peter's example should lead us to greater tolerance; if he can use prooftexts to justify his leadership decisions, maybe we shouldn't be so hard on those today who do the same thing. What I wonder is: why don't churches that claim to be "New Testament" and insist on literal readings of the Bible make major decisions by casting lots?

The Irritable Bible: The Ascension

In Acts 1, after Luke (whoever he was) tells Theophilus (whoever he was) that his first book was a smash hit and he really should have read it, he puts in a plug for the resurrection: Jesus "showed himself" to the apostles and "offered many convincing proofs that he was alive" -- apparently just showing up after your execution isn't enough for some people.

He tells them of the promised Holy Spirit, and that it is coming, but only if they stick around in Jerusalem. And then a question comes seemingly out of left field: "Are you going to restore the kingdom to Israel now?" In retrospect, somebody really seems to be not getting it. Jesus, the paragon of patience, simply tells them that it will come eventually, and that in the meantime they will receive power from the Holy Spirit. This sounds like a dad who, when his children ask about going to Disneyland, says "we'll see" and then immediately pulls the car into the nearest Dairy Queen. (Actually, this is not fair insofar as the pouring out of the Spirit and the restoration of Israel are much more connected than that in the eschatological thinking of Second Temple Judaism, but that comes later.)

And then Jesus ascends. Basically he floats away into the clouds. This is like a dad who buys his kids ice cream and then spontaneously combusts.

Already I'm going to get in trouble, because this passage raises questions for me that only feed my skepticism. For one, where did Jesus go? Some of the Greeks postulated a round Earth and even calculated its circumference with rather astonishing accuracy, but in Luke's corner of the world people most likely saw the earth as flat, with the heavenly host dwelling just on the other side of all that blue stuff. It makes sense, if you were going to tell a story of ascension, that the whole upward trajectory thing would be the ticket. But if God were to literally whisk Jesus away in some fashion, why go through the trouble of making it look like Jesus was headed to an over yonder that we now know doesn't exist as such? It makes more sense as a story than an event.

Even if God executed this operation in real time, however, the question remains: why? Why did Jesus ascend? More to the literary point, why tell stories of Jesus' ascension? Why claim that this is what happened? The easy, conservative answer is the one Mallory gave about climbing Everest: "because it's there." In other words, the story was told because it happened. This answer has the benefit of being both simple and obvious. I can't say that it couldn't have happened, and I'm not interested in saying it didn't. But -- Occam's Razor notwithstanding -- I think are at least two other reasons.

For the first reason, imagine I'm a Jewish man in Jerusalem somewhere in the early 30's CE, hanging out in the agora. Let's assume they have some sort of patio furniture. I'm drinking the first-century equivalent of a double redeye (two shots of espresso in a cup of black coffee). Perhaps I'm smoking the first-century equivalent of a Chesterfield, because when I put myself in stories I like to be smoking Chesterfields. And an enthusiastic young Jew approaches me and tells me the promised Messiah has come to us.

I've seen would-be Messiahs come and go, so I'm not immediately impressed. "This is good news," I say coolly as I take a drag of my Chesterfield. "So where is this Messiah, and when is the coronation?" The Messiah -- the Anointed One -- would be king, of course. That's what "Anointed One" would mean, and the word I used for "good news" would, at least in the Greek, have been used to describe the announcement of a new king. We are, in short, talking politics.

My bubbly conversation partner tells me that this new king was executed by the state, a fate not uncommon to insurrectionists and rabble-rousers. "It seems difficult," I suggest dryly, taking a sip of my double redeye, "to lead Israel to renewed greatness when you're dead."

True, this bearer of glad tidings concedes -- but he is risen! He stands there, beaming. I raise an eyebrow: I'm familiar with stories of resurrection, of death and rebirth, of the non-finality of death. It strikes me as odd in a Jewish context -- I'm more of a Sadducee -- but then I remember Judas Maccabeus and his cohorts who, when facing a certain and gruesome death, seemed to earnestly believe not only in the restoration of Israel (described by the prophet Ezekiel as a dry bones putting on flesh) but in their own, personal resurrection. Very interesting.

But now I'm a bit flummoxed by my effervescent interlocutor, because it seems he's evaded my original question: "Where," I say, trying to French inhale and failing miserably, "is this new king against whom the armies of Caesar are powerless -- this Messiah, whom death cannot defeat and the grave cannot keep?"

"He ascended!" comes the exuberant reply.

"Of course he did," I say, stubbing out my Chesterfield and draining the dark, bitter dregs of my coffee. "Of course he did."

I wrote that last bit five years ago, and I'm keeping it because it's funny. I might not be quite so cynical now, but if you think in terms of plot elements Jesus must have gone somewhere after the resurrection because he's no longer around. Having him die of old age is anticlimactic and leaves too much time -- too much biography -- to account for. I suppose he could fade away, like Yoda, but that would be more like ascending anyway. Even if God is writing this story in human history, these things have to be organized in such as way as to be coherent. Moreover, it's not like the idea of ascension, as an element in political propaganda, wasn't in the air at the time anyway, which brings me to my second reason: ascension is linked to resurrection as a claim of Christ's victory over the powers.

These are tropes available in the religious language of Second Temple Judaism. They might be more -- as C.S. Lewis argued, it may be that God was doing literally in Jesus things that we might otherwise consider myth -- but they're at least that. Whatever "really" happened to Jesus [if there is such a thing], this is the way it got narrated. Paul tells us in Colossians 2 that Jesus triumphs over the "rulers and authorities" in the Cross. The Cross is both victory and coronation. Christ's being raised from the dead and seated at the right hand of the Father speak to his vindication, but they also validate the way of the Cross. The Resurrection and Ascension are not God's "just kidding!" to the Cross, but God's deep and abiding cosmic "yes" to cruciformity.

Folks like Crossan argue that neither uniqueness (on the Christian side) nor impossibility (on the skeptical side) were available arguments at the time in regards to these kinds of spectacular claims. Others, like N.T. Wright, argue that this is overplayed, that something had to have happened in early first-century Palestine or the Christian story never would have gotten off the ground. I confess I hedge my bets: the only "something" I can be sure "happened" is that the Christian story did get off the ground. That's enough for me.

It's possible that at the point of origin of these stories the question of literality or historicity is not even appropriate. It's possible that the equation of truth and factuality we tend to take for granted was not on the cognitive map of the early Christians, not because they were intellectual pygmies but because they lived, as I said in the last post, in a different world. We cannot pretend that we live in theirs (the usual fundamentalist assumption) any more than we can assume they live in ours (which is the classic liberal approach).

I'm also willing to say that maybe there's a difference between being honest and telling the truth. Rehearsing my skepticism, as I have done here, is honest. This is what I really think. Proclaiming Jesus as Lord, on the other hand, is telling the truth. The orthodox proclamation is that he is risen, and I can you look you in the eye and offer the liturgical response: he is risen indeed. I may have trouble with the details, but I'm doubling down on that cosmic "yes."

So Jesus ascended. What this means is that we can have confidence in the way of the Cross. It means that Jesus is a king, if a bit of an odd one, and he claims our allegiance. Caesar? Well, Caesar is just an emperor. The real power is somewhere else, and might look different than any of us -- not least the disciples -- would have guessed.

It looks like a cross.