Theological and Pastoral
Theological and Pastoral
As we argued above, Luke’s primary purpose is to edify Christians by recounting how God’s plan, coming to fulfillment in Jesus, had continued to unfold in the history of the early church. Perhaps Luke’s most important contribution is precisely this careful linking of the apostolic proclamation of the Word of God with the word that Jesus both taught and fufilled. The "Word of God” thus binds together Luke’s two volumes, 103 as the salvation that the angel first announced on the night of Jesus’ birth on a Judean hillside (Luke 2:10-12) is brought finally to the capital of the Roman Empire. Luke thus presents "the things that have been fulfilled among us” (Luke 1:1) as a continuation of the salvific history of the Old Testament, showing how this history reaches its culmination in Christ and flows from him through the Spirit-led apostles into a new phase, the church as the eschatological people of God. 104 By doing so, Luke gave to Theophilus, and continues to give to every Christian who reads his two volumes, an assurance that faith is solidly grounded in the acts of God in history and that the message we believe is the same message sent from God.
While Luke makes clear the continuity in the message of salvation, he also reveals the progressive unfolding of new implications from that message. The historical veracity of Luke is seen in the way he makes clear the differences between the early Jerusalem community of believers and the later Gentile churches founded by Paul. The earliest Christians, Jews who believed that Jesus was the promised Messiah and that the messianic age had therefore dawned, continued to worship in the temple and were apparently loyal to the law and its institutions. Only by stages did the church move away from this Jewish orientation to a more universal orientation, as God made clear that he was doing a new work in which the law would no longer play a central role and in which Gentiles would share equally with the Jews in the blessings of God. A major contribution of Acts is the way in which the progress of this movement is portrayed, coming to a climax with Paul’s announcement of judicial obduracy on the part of unbelieving Israel and the offer of salvation to the Gentiles (Acts 28:25-29).
Paul is the chief instrument through which this universalizing of the church takes place, and there is no doubt that he is Luke’s hero. 105 Childs has suggested that Luke thus portrays a "canonical Paul,” a figure who does not necessarily match the historical Paul but who can function as the representative apostle for a later age. 106 But it is questionable whether Luke presents Paul as a representative of the future. Rather,
Luke suggests that Paul plays a decisive role in the foundation of a new period of salvation history, and in this sense, his significance is more for the past of the church than for its present or future. And as we have already argued, there is little reason to think that the apostle portrayed in Acts is different from the apostle as he really was.