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Book review: The Challenge of Acts by Tom Wright

by
24 January 2025

Lively lecture material is now a book, says Henry Wansbrough

NEITHER N. T. Wright, author of major original theological research such as The Resurrection of the Son of God or The Climax of the Covenant, nor Tom Wright, author of the popular series . . . for Everyone (including two slim volumes, Acts for Everyone), needs any introduction. The current volume springs from a series of lectures first delivered in Oxford in 2023 and elaborated in Houston, Texas, during that summer. It is typical of the author’s informal and cheerful spoken style; the reader experiences him challenging, correcting an imaginary audience, almost singing the occasional musical illustration.

Clearly the product of wide learning, the book is not itself a work of scholarship, but, as it claims, a challenge. There are brilliant nuggets, such as the bracketing of Acts at beginning and end by emphasis on the Kingdom of God restored to Israel or the critical sketch of the Church at Corinth, “arrogant, puffed up, casual, chaotic, soft” because they avoided persecution, or the claim that worship of the gods then was like electricity today: no household could function without it. But the real joy of the book is its confident, free-ranging suggestions for further explorations: e.g. a new Temple theology.

One infuriating feature (I suspect for American ears) is the elimination of the words “Jew” and “Jewish” in favour of the often inaccurate and inappropriate “Judaean”. Another is the soft-pedalling of historical criticism: Luke is a historian of his own time, using the conventions of historians of his own time. For example, the speeches are not from a shorthand record, but from Luke’s judgement of what would have been appropriate to the occasion.

The treatment is divided into presentations of sections of Acts, consisting of three or four chapters at a time, the only extended treatment being of Paul’s speech before the Areopagus. Here, it is argued that Paul outflanks the philosophers and the Athenian myth of the Eumenides precisely by introducing the resurrection as an action of the unknown God whom the Athenians unknowingly worship, not a god of retaliation endlessly repeated, but a God of love. The last few pages of the book, on “Four Great Themes”, form a fittingly inspiring conclusion to a stimulating and provoking challenge.

Fr Henry Wansbrough OSB is a monk of Ampleforth, emeritus Master of St Benet’s Hall, Oxford, and a former member of the Pontifical Biblical Commission.

The Challenge of Acts
Tom Wright
SPCK £13.99
(978-0-281-09058-7)
Church Times Bookshop £12.59

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