The Acts of the Apostles speaks often about the social work of the Church through recurring concepts such as koinonia, mercy, hospitality and philanthropy. This paper deals with the ways that the Book of Acts promotes harmony in conditions of diversity (such as religious, cultural, or political pluralism). Several texts will be compared and interpreted to draw a clear picture of the Church’s call to serve the world and to witness Christian Faith in words and deeds. The world can be healed with the power of the Divine Word. This does not happen only by preaching and teaching, but also by acting and caring for the needed and the poor. The theological narrative of Acts shows how the Christian faith - the Way, as Luke likes to call it - grants a new understanding of reality and calls people to break the rules of worldly wisdom and to behave according to the wisdom of the Kingdom, where the principles of social relation are redefined through the lens of the Resurrection.
Download Free PDF View PDF
Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society
While the book of Acts is frequently appropriated as a model for church growth within the Christian community, the theme of church growth within the narrative of Acts has seldom been analyzed in a sustained way. The present article investigates the ways in which the book of Acts depicts the numerical growth of the church and the expansion of the Christian mission, identifying five strands of material in Acts which bear directly upon the literary depiction of church growth within the narrative. The article concludes with some reflections regarding the theme of church growth in Acts and its implications for those who seek to appropriate Acts for the growth of the church today.
Download Free PDF View PDF
Within the “Acts” of the apostoloi there are theoretical and practical exemplars which the contemporary church may pattern to navigate a pathway to fruitful evangelism and sustainable growth. The exemplars discussed here, though not exhaustive, may serve as models for an operational framework. They are: reliance upon the Holy Spirit; christocentric preaching; fellowship; fasting and prayer; mission-orientation; appointed servants; training and delegation; nurture and retention; and provision for material needs.
Download Free PDF View PDF
This study for the sake of space will limit its scope to the book of Acts. We will look at Paul’s missionary theology and practice as seen through Luke’s writing in Acts. Thus this paper will be a sort of biographical sketch of Paul’s development of a biblical theology of mission. There are two questions I aim to answer in this paper. First, what impact do we see that Paul’s Jewish background had on his missiology? Second, and related to the first question, we will look at what Paul’s mission and method to find out what they were. Through an overview of Luke’s account of Paul and his mission, we will see that Paul was sovereignly prepared and chosen to be a witness to the nations by preaching Jesus as the Christ and planting churches that would carry on the mission in their local context.
Download Free PDF View PDF
ST VLADIMIR'S THEOLOGICAL QUARTERLY
Download Free PDF View PDF
Download Free PDF View PDF
This work examines early Christian self-definition and response to the world, according to the book of Acts. The author argues that early Christian self-definition and mission are intertwined. In other words, early Christian identity was at the same time the nascent faith's response to the world of paganism and Judaism. This book examines the historiography of Acts, the history of Redemption, the socio-ethnic and theological dimensions of earliest Christian self-definition, and the concepts of conversion, identity and mission. The work's specific contribution lies in its exploitation of Luke's distinctive use of the conversion of Saul of Tarsus, given its paradigmatic function in the Acts narrative, to "legitimize" a new Christian self for the early Christians, set in critical relation to the drama of their (Jewish) heritage. The author submits that this posture of the world is determined by Luke's understanding of the experience of God's new redemption in Jesus as the defining factor in the identity of Christians.
Download Free PDF View PDF
The present study aims to investigate Luke's theology of God in the accounts of the mission to the Gentiles in Acts. In Acts, God is portrayed as the cause of the mission. It is God who inaugurates and guides the Gentile mission. For Luke, God who acts is God who has fixed the times and seasons. The mission is described as part of God's times, past, present and future. It is mission by God. The Gentile mission is also mission about God. The "cause" of the mission becomes the content'. This fact is not widely recognised by studies in Luke-Acts. God' is prominent in the speeches in the Gentile mission narratives of Samaria (8: 4-25), Caesarea (10: 33- 43), Lystra (14: 8-18), Athens (17: 16-34) and Ephesus (19: 21- 41). We examine these narratives to analyse the speeches in their immediate contexts provided in the narrative itself. Except in Ac. 10, Luke's contexts contain details concerning Gentiles" belief and worship of god/goddess/gods which in Lu.
Download Free PDF View PDF
Appeared in the 2010 issue of Vox Reformata the Australasian Journal for Christian Scholarship
Download Free PDF View PDF
Enough points of the second missionary journey of Paul cause the surprise to the listener/reader of the Acts. Several times both the Holy Ghost and the Apostle of the Nations react according to the common data unexpectedly. Today in the era of globalization and the crisis these paradoxes can be useful for the re-evangelization of Europe and the re-discovery of the Gospel message. KeyWords: Adjustment, " markers " of national identity and faith, integration and transformation PAUL OF ACTS AND THE STRATEGIC OF HIS MISSION The multifaceted crisis in South Europe in the third millennium, which certainly is not only economic, gives Christianity the possibility to evangelize again his gospel. The following lines are concerned with interesting points of Paul's second missionary journey, as it is described by Luke in Acts, which tend to be ignored by readers but they maybe be productive for those who want to function as ministers of the word (Lk 1, 2). In the first chapter I focus on the events of this journey which possibly surprised the first listener of the work and in the second on Paul's adjustment on the special conditions in Athens during his stay in the city. ΙI. THE SURPRISES OF A JOURNEY TOWARDS THE END OF TIMES 1. The second journey is signified by the apostles' stormy mobility in the East Mediterranean ring. While the Deuteronomist and the Prophets proclaim the nations' pilgrimage to Jerusalem and the only temple of Israel where the light rises (Isaiah 60, 1. Zech 14, 7), Acts describe the reverse centrifugal movement from Jerusalem to the nations. The end of this movement is already defined in the introduction of the Acts with the proclamation of the Resurrected Christ: you shall receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you shall be witnesses to Me in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth (1, 7-8 see Is. 49, 6) 1. 'Mother Church of Zion' does not expect the others to fall down in front of her feet. Nevertheless, it is she who radiates her 'children' in a globalised world. The whole book of Acts is an application and the development of the punch line in Matthew's Gospel: Go therefore and make disciples (!) of all the nations (28, 28). 2. The occasion to start his missionary journey among the gentiles is given to Paul by the dispute between him and his mentor Barnabas (15, 37-39). The reason for this dispute was insignificant: the participation of the apostate John Mark in their missionary group which constituted always of at least three persons. Mark has departed from them from Pamphylia, and went not with them to the work (15, 38. comp. 13, 13) obviously not only because he was exhausted from the first journey in Cyprus, but probably because he did have objections about the acceptance of the nations in the Ecclesia. It is astonishing that a parallel quarrel is cited by Luke at the beginning of the church's 'exodus' of Jerusalem (Kap. 6). It is the complaint (γογγυσμὸς 6, 1) that burst out between the Hebraic Jews of the Church of Jerusalem and the Hellenists (i.e. Greek speaking Judaeo-Christian from abroad) 2. The problem was not only for the feeding of the widows of the latter, as Luke mentions. There were also deeper reasons 3 for this complaint which relates itself with the attitude towards the law and the temple as it is formulated by Stephan in his very important for the 1 The end of the earth wasn't identified with Rome but with Spain/ Gadeira (Rom. 15. 24, 28). See E.E. Ellis, The Ends of the Earth, Bbr 1 (1991), pp. 123-132. According to Strabo (3.1.8), Γάδειρα͵ πορθμῷ στενῷ διειργομένη νῆσος ἀπὸ τῆς Τουρδητανίας͵ διέχουσα τῆς Κάλπης περὶ ἑπτακοσίους καὶ πεντήκοντα σταδίους· οἱ δὲ ὀκτακοσίους φασίν. ἔστι δ΄ ἡ νῆσος αὕτη τἆλλα μὲν οὐδὲν διαφέρουσα τῶν ἄλλων͵ ἀνδρείᾳ δὲ τῶν ἐνοικούντων τῇ περὶ τὰς ναυτιλίας καὶ φιλίᾳ πρὸς Ρωμαίους τοσαύτην ἐπίδοσιν εἰς πᾶσαν εὐτυχίαν ἔσχεν ὥστε καίπερ ἐσχάτη ἱδρυμένη τῆς γῆς ὀνομαστοτάτη τῶν ἁπασῶν ἐστιν. ἀλλὰ περὶ μὲν ταύτης ἐροῦμεν͵ ὅταν καὶ περὶ τῶν ἄλλων νήσων λέγωμεν. 2 Joachim Gnilka, Die Nazarener und der Koran: eine Spurensuche (Freiburg im Breisgau; Basel; Wien: Herder 2007), p. 37-42. 3 Ben Witherington II, The Acts of the Apostle. A Socio-Rhetorical Commentary (Michigan/Cambridge 1998), pp. 240-2.
Download Free PDF View PDF
