Jennings, Willie James |Acts: A Theological Commentary on the Bible
Acts: A Theological Commentary on the Bible
Willie James Jennings
Hardback: WJK Books, 2017, 272 pp.
The traditional name of the biblical book of Acts is “Acts of the Apostles,” but as Willie James Jennings emphasizes in the introduction to this commentary, the main character of this narrative is the Holy Spirit, not the Apostles. He writes: “Although it is the story of the Spirit of God, Luke does not play off human agency against divine agency. God moves and we respond. We move and God responds. Nevertheless this is God’s drama, God’s complete exposure. Cards are on the table and the curtain is drawn back, and God acts plainly, clearly, and in ways that are irrevocable. There is no going back now. A history is being woven in front of our eyes that we cannot deny, or we deny only at our own peril”(1). This commentary is one of the most striking books in recent memory in its depiction of what God is up to in the world through the Holy Spirit, and how humanity follows the lead of the Spirit. Jennings summarizes the early Christians interactions with the Spirit, in a manner familiar to those acquainted with the Live the Word project:
The deepest reality of life in the Spirit depicted in the book of Acts is that the disciples of Jesus rarely, if ever, go where they want to go or to whom they would want to go. Indeed the Spirit seems to always be pressing the disciples to go to those to whom they would in fact strongly prefer never to share space, or a meal, and definitely not life together. Yet it is precisely this prodding to be boundary-crossing and border-transgressing that marks the presence of the Spirit of God (10-11).
Readers should not be intimidated by the description of this book as a commentary. It is neither technical nor dry. The Belief series to which it belongs, is a theological commentary oriented toward the interpretation of the text, and not primarily an exegetical one that dives deep into the nuances of the text itself. Instead, Jennings offers a captivating tour through the adventures of the apostles, with frequent pauses to explore what the text might mean for us in the contemporary world.
Radical Kinship
The primary theme of Acts, as Jennings interprets it, is radical kinship. We are drawn by God toward those people whose culture and practices are foreign to us, in what Jennings calls “the revolution of the intimate” (27). This pulling together of peoples begins at Pentecost, where Christ’s followers in Jerusalem are empowered by the Spirit to speak foreign languages that others that are gathered with them can understand. The divide of language is being erased by the Spirit, and as disciples begin to speak other languages, they are pulled into a desire for those who speak these languages that were once foreign. “The gesture of speaking another language is born not of the desire of the disciples but of God,” writes Jennings, “and it signifies all that is essential to learning a language. It bears repeating: this is not what the disciples imagined or hoped would manifest the power of the Holy Spirit. To learn a language requires submission to a people” (29). In submitting to a people and beginning to speak their language, a desire to know them and to be joined together with them is born.
Perhaps the central story about radical kinship in Acts (and one that is central to Jennings’s reading of the book as a whole) is the story of Peter in the house of Cornelius (10:1-11:18). Although, as good follower of the Judaic law, Peter initially resists the invitation to go to the house of Cornelius, the Roman centurion, and to eat with him there. Eventually though, Peter relents. Jennings observes:
Peter obeys, but now that obedience must take flight with the Holy Spirit into an uncharted world where the distinctions between holy and unholy, clean and unclean have been fundamentally upended. Yes, this is a moment when old word of God connects to new word of God, a moment where purity is expanded to cover what had been conceived as impure, but more crucially this is a moment of struggle for Peter to allow his vision of faithfulness to God and the covenant with Israel to expand. Is it possible to be faithful to the God of Israel in a new way? God has brought Peter inside this question and presses him toward its positive answer. This is a risky time, second only to Good Friday and Holy Saturday, in which God risks with Peter and Peter risks with God. … The risk here is found not in believing in new revelations but in new relationships. The new word that God continues to speak to us is to accept new people, different people that we had not imagined that God would send across our paths and into our lives (108).
Indeed, this is a crucial New Testament story: God invites the followers of Christ into new relationships of radical kinship with those who were foreign to them, and at the same time presses them into understanding their Christian faithfulness in a new way that emphasizes this radical kinship.
Table Fellowship
It is primarily around the table that this sort of radical kinship is cultivated. Recall that God’s invitation to draw Peter to the house of Cornelius came first in the form of a dream of a sheet coming down from heaven with both clean and unclean animals on it, from which Peter was invited to eat. It was only after this dream that Cornelius’s men show up and invite Peter to come with them. Peter’s story is difficult for us, as modern people, to understand, as we generally understand animals in commodified ways that would be foreign to the peoples of the first century. Jennings writes:
To see animals was to see peoples. To touch and eat an animal was no thoughtless act. For many peoples, their elders would have to seek permission from the animals to eat them in due season, and with the eating, something would have to be returned to the earth to balance what was taken and who was taken. …The space of eating was also the space of living that wove together the bodies of earth creatures in shared recognition of one another in ways ignored only by the very foolish. Thus to eat the animals that were associated with a people was to move into their space of living, a space of people and animals. To take hold of their animals was to join them and imagine the flourishing of life through participating in the community of creatures that surrounded their bodies. A sheet of animals descended from heaven, and the Creator of the world granted to Peter permission to eat. In so doing, God placed Peter in the midst of the world and said to him, “Join it, join them” (106-107).
Christ’s disciples whose life together in the wake of Pentecost was shaped by the practice of breaking bread together (Acts 2:42), would be called and stretched by God to sharing meals with Gentiles, as a means of joining with them and proclaiming the radical kinship that had been inaugurated in Jesus.
Active Disciplemaking
The making of disciples, as Jennings understands this practice, throughout the book of Acts, revolves around hearing and submitting to the guidance of God’s Spirit. A disciple is one whose desire is increasingly becoming aligned with God’s desire for humanity and for creation, even if God’s desire initially seemed repulsive to the disciple (see the block quote above in the introduction to this summary). Immersion into God’s desires for creation radically reshapes not only our understanding of food (see the section on table fellowship above), but our understanding of all facets of creation, including money and resources (see Acts 2 and 4), marriage (see the story of Ananias and Sapphira in Acts 5), geography. Geography is especially important to Jennings; he writes: “The church has often failed to see the geographic dimensions of discipleship” (249). Geography too often carves up God’s creation, Jennings argues, erecting walls between people, and reinforcing these walls with tribalist or nationalist mythologies. Acts narrates the story of a people who are learning to be discipled by the Spirit, and although they often resist this discipleship at first, they gradually learn to submit themselves to it, and increasingly find that their desires are coming to resemble God’s desires for creation.
Willie Jennings’s commentary on Acts is a poignant meditation on what it meant for the first century disciples to live the Word after Christ’s ascension, by hearing and following the guidance of the Spirit. And although Jennings primary task is helping us understand these biblical stories, he makes numerous connections throughout the book to the relevance of Acts to our contemporary experience.