Theological Themes
Theological Themes
In the middle 1960s, W. C. van Unnik noted that Luke-Acts had suddenly become a storm center in contemporary scholarship. 82 This was largely owing, he noted, to the new interest in Luke as a theologian, sparked by the application of redaction-critical techniques to the gospel. It was the proposal of Hans Conzelmann that led the way, and came to dominate, in the new theological approach to Luke. 83 Conzelmann argued that "Luke” (he did not think that Luke the physician was the author) wrote largely in order to explain to the church of his day the delay of the parousia. For some time after Jesus’ death, the early church believed that Jesus would return in glory to bring an end to this earth in their own lifetimes. At some point, however, as time went by and Jesus did not return, the church came to realize that Jesus would not be coming back in the immediate future. So basic a shift in eschatological expectation demanded a massive reinterpretation of Christian theology.
It is this reinterpretation that Luke provides. The heart of Luke’s scheme is the replacement of the early Christian eschatological expectation with salvation history. In place of a church waiting for the Lord from heaven, Luke offers a historical outline of the course of saving events, divided into three periods: the period of Israel, the period of Jesus’ ministry, and the period of the church. It is this segmentation of salvation history into its separate stages that the very structure of Luke’s two-volume work provides.
Luke writes to encourage Christians in his day to endure the pressures of living as believers in an indefinitely continuing world order. He thus tries to establish a role for the church. He stresses its authority by locating its establishment in apostles accredited by Jesus himself. He provides for its effective working by organizing it, with elders and bishops. This attention to the church, its authority and organization, has come to be called "early Catholicism” (FrOhkatholizismus), because it is seen as leading on to the organized "universal” (catholic) church of the second century.
Reaction to Conzelmann’s proposal has been vigorous and varied. Three points may be singled out as particularly important. First, as Oscar Cullmann and others have shown, "salvation history,” in the sense of a series of stages through which God has brought his salvation to the world, is integral to the New Testament and to the message of Jesus himself. 84 It is not something invented by Luke. Second, it is questionable whether there was at any time in the early church a broadly held conviction that Jesus was certain to come back within a few short years. Those sayings of Jesus in which he is thought to have said that he would return in glory within the lifetime of the first apostles (e.g., Matt. 10:23; Mark 9:1 par.; Mark 13:30 par.) probably do not mean that at all. 85 It can be demonstrated that the early Christians were strongly imbued with a sense of the Lord’s imminence (that Jesus could return at any time) but not that they held to a notion of the immediacy of the Lord’s return (that he definitely would return within a short period of time). The third important response to the scenario drawn by Conzelmann and others is to question the existence of "early Catholicism” in Luke. Luke has not, as these scholars claim, abandoned a doctrine of imminence: the church has not simply settled down into the world but exists in "the last days,” eagerly awaiting the return of Jesus from heaven. 86
While Luke’s salvation history and "early Catholicism” continue to be debated, two other theological issues are attracting more attention and debate in contemporary scholarship. The first is Luke’s social and political teaching. It is well known that Luke’s gospel evinces a special interest in the problems of the poor and the outcasts and that
Jesus has more to say about the economic aspects of discipleship in Luke’s gospel than in any other. Stimulated by the agenda of liberation theology and by a new awareness of the materialistic preoccupations of Western society, scholars have devoted considerable attention to Luke’s teaching on these matters. Many of the studies focus exclusively on the gospel, but several important ones bring Acts into the picture as well.
Perhaps the most debated issue in Luke’s theology in recent years has been his view of the Mosaic law and of the relationship between Israel and the church. The stimulus of the discussion has come above all from the writings of Jacob Jervell. 88 In opposition to those scholars who have seen in Luke-Acts the theme of the church as the new Israel— the new people of God that replaces Israel—Jervell insists that it is repentant Jews who constitute Israel in Luke-Acts and that Gentile Christians belong to this Israel as an "associate people.” In keeping with this stress on the continuity of Israel, Jervell also argues that Luke has "the most conservative outlook within the New Testament” on the Mosaic law. 89 Jewish Christians are required to keep the law, while Gentile Christians must keep the part of the law that concerns them (see the apostolic decree). Jervell’s thesis has met with considerable approval, 90 but also with some serious criticisms. 91His view of the Mosaic law is particularly vulnerable to criticism, several scholars showing that Luke-Acts takes a far more discontinuous view of the law than Jervell thinks. 92