Thinking More Politically and Eschatologically about Apologetics

An engagement with World Upside Down: Reading Acts in the Graeco-Roman Age by C. Kavin Rowe

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When I wrote the chapter “Ecclesial Apologetics” for my forthcoming book Understanding Christian Apologetics, I grounded my biblical defense of ecclesial apologetics in the first epistle of Peter. I chose that portion of Holy Scripture primarily because the phenomenon I was describing seemed simplest and clearest in 1 Peter. And yet, two or three other books of the New Testament also crossed my mind as possible foundations for my defense of ecclesial apologetics.

One of these texts was the Acts of the Apostles.

I recently finished reading C. Kavin Rowe’s outstanding World Upside Down: Reading Acts in the Graeco-Roman Age. This book confirmed my earlier inclination that the Acts of the Apostles has significant implications for the notion of ecclesial apologetics. Even better, Rowe’s work spurred me to think more deeply about the church as the present evidence of a kingdom that is yet to be fulfilled.

What Was Luke Defending in Acts?

Since the work of C.A. Heumann in the early eighteenth century, one tendency in New Testament studies has been to read the Acts of the Apostles as an apologetic for harmonious coexistence between the church and the Roman Empire. Paul Walaskey argued in the 1980s that Acts was not an apologetic defending the church to the Romans but an apologetic defending the Roman Empire to the churches. Still, the same basic set of assumptions remained, that Acts was meant to promote the possibility of harmony between the church and Rome.

C. Kavin Rowe takes a different perspective. Against earlier interpreters of the Acts of the Apostles, Rowe contends that Luke was not promoting harmony with the empire but crafting a narrative intended to form an alternative culture.

To accomplish this goal, Luke simultaneously presented Christians (1) as persons who would not challenge Rome on Rome’s own terms yet also (2) as participants in a rising culture that would inevitably clash with the prevailing civic order. By actualizing this new political reality through a new culture and not through a revolution or coup, the church was rejecting the entire Roman premise of power and constructing an alternative way of conceiving reality itself. Thus Luke’s focus wasn’t primarily the Roman Empire or even about the church’s relationship to the empire. His focus was the formation of a wholly new genus of political reality.

In its attempt to form communities that witness to God’s apocalypse, [Acts] is a highly charged and theologically sophisticated political document that aims at nothing less than the construction of an alternative way of life—a comprehensive pattern of being—one that runs counter to the life-patterns of the Graeco-Roman world. His literary work is thus… a culture-forming narrative. (4)

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The Church as Alternative Political Reality

The church’s politics is, in the Acts of the Apostles, “the particular, embodied shape of God’s revelation to the world in the Lord of all, Jesus Christ” (4). According to Rowe, three primary practices concretely expressed this new political reality:

1. confession of Jesus as Lord,

2. missionary efforts that reached the ends of the earth, and

3. the regular assembling of this political body as the church.

A community that pursues these practices represents a life in which the world has been turned right side up, which will inevitably appear upside down to every competing culture.

It seems to me that these dimensions of the church’s political life are, in the New Testament, grounded far more deeply in the church’s ethics and sacraments than Rowe seems to consider. It was not missionary efforts alone but baptism in particular that marked men and women at the ends of the earth as members of a new community (Matthew 28:19), and the regular assemblage of the church was centered around a communion meal that shaped the community’s political culture (1 Corinthians 11:17–12:30). Nevertheless, Rowe is right to recognize that the habitus of the early church was political and that it pointed to a world turned right side up—which inevitably meant that the powers of the present age were being flipped upside down.

What Luke did in the Acts of the Apostles was “to redescribe theologically the cultural collapse that attends the Christian mission as the light and forgiveness of God” (89). Christianity did transform the social order. And yet, Christianity didn’t so much aim at reforming the social order as it directed communities toward a new social order that did not fit on any human political continuum. This new social order changed the world by modeling a different political reality altogether.

A new social order, by its very nature, requires the formation of countercultural communities—which is one of the reasons why the church came to be considered subversive. “Absent the necessity to establish communities of Christians, Paul could have hawked his strange spiritual wares without much worry” (103). And yet, this new way of life was never an individual philosophy but always an intrinsically communal way of being in the world. “The Christian mission’s proclamation of good news was simultaneously a summons to church” (126).

Neither the church nor the kingdom that these churches represented was purely spiritual. When Justin Martyr declared, “You, having heard us speak of a kingdom, unjustly suppose a human one but we speak of one that is with God” (“Καὶ ὑμεῖς, ἀκούσαντες βασιλείαν προσδοκῶντας ἡμᾶς, ἀκρίτως ἀνθρώπινον λέγειν ἡμᾶς ὑπειλήφατε, ἡμῶν τὴν μετὰ θεοῦ λεγόντων,” Apologia A 11.1), Justin was not suggesting that the kingdom is merely spiritual. He was recognizing that, because the church is an alternative political reality, the kingdom in which the church participates refuses to challenge to Rome on Rome’s own terms. To place the church on the world’s political continuum and to engage the powers of this world on their own terms is to render “untrue practically the claim that Jesus is Lord of all” (173). The divine kingdom is not only spiritual but also social and spatial and physical, which means that the church is a public reality by which Christ himself is tangibly present in the world. Thus, “ecclesiology is public Christology” (173).

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Thinking More Ecclesially, More Eschatologically, and More Politically about Apologetics

C. Kavin Rowe hints at the ways in which the clash between Christianity and the Roman order was apocalyptic in nature (4). I think he’s on the right track, but I also suspect we can go even further.