this way, witness requires the faithful display of Christian speech sufficient to test what is said in the light of how it is said. Such a testing, moreover, cannot be separated from the character of those who speak. Indeed, to speak Christianly means that the speakers’ lives must correspond with what they say. The very grammar of Christian speech presumes that those who use the language have a character commensurate with it.
This is a key reason why theology and ethics cannot be separated; indeed, theology is first and foremost an exercise in practical reason.18 Again, this is not to say that theology is about anything else than the truth. But the truth it is about involves us as creatures of God, made in God’s image, even if fallen. So we cannot speak this truth without it having worked truthfully in us. Speaker and what is spoken cannot be separated if Christians’ claims about God and God’s world have the purchase of truth. “Witness” is the crucial grammar that upholds and enfolds these claims.
Of course, such claims beg for further explication. Yet this cannot come merely at a theoretical level. Indeed, if witness is only spoken of theoretically, it empties out. More than explanation, the character of witness requires concrete display, as we hope to do as we retell the story of the witness of the first Christians. Such stories are not optional, not only because witness is always specifically given in place and time but also because the first witnesses display something about how Christian witness will go. Moreover, they give us means for practical judgments. This is doubly important since the ways in which Christians subvert their witness to Christ proliferate as they take up forms of “practical reason” that skew political prudence. To glimpse what we take as the ethical and political implications of our account of witness, such subversions will need attention, which we give briefly in the final section of this essay. As we hold, such subversions almost always have to do with abandoning witness for some more apparently powerful way of speaking — a point Kerr’s work has helpfully prepared us for. Here the political suppression of witnesses, that is, the attempt to make witnesses voiceless, will also be briefly considered. This is particularly important if we remember that the fundamental form of witness by Christians is called martyrdom.
Witness Exemplified: Explorations from the New Testament
Witness is required by those of us who would count ourselves Christians because the God we worship is not a general truth that can be known apart from those who worship him and have been called into his Kingdom. It is not accidental that Jesus calls disciples so that they might be witnesses to him. Discipleship and witness together constitute Christology; Jesus cannot be known without witnesses who follow him. Discipleship and witness together remind us that the Christ we follow and to whom we bear witness defies generalization.
The witness of the disciples, moreover, has a definite shape. In the tenth chapter of the Gospel of Matthew Jesus summons his disciples, gives them explicit instructions, and then sends them to the lost sheep of Israel.19 They are to go as witnesses to Jesus in whom the Kingdom of Heaven has come near. And they have work to do: cure the sick, raise the dead, cleanse leapers, and cast out demons. Furthermore, they are to receive no compensation for their work, nor are they to travel weighed down by money or clothing. They should not be deterred by those who do not respond to their mission, but rather they should see such rejection as an invitation to go to others.
These instructions indicate the character of the witness given throughout the New Testament. The disciples of Jesus are sent out as bearers of news; they have received a message to spread, but they themselves are also the exemplification of what they have to say. However, this is not really their doing. That is to say, whatever actions are theirs as faithful disciples, and to whatever degree their lives bear truthful witness, this is always also the result of a gift they have been given. This is why the news or story they have to tell turns out always to be inseparable from what has happened to them. The story they tell is about them insofar as they testify in the telling to what has happened to them. But it points past them, or through them, to the God they believe they have met in Christ Jesus.
To be sure, as they tell their story the disciples often provide inadequate witnesses to Jesus, but the inadequacy itself is also a kind of witness. They have been called to live lives that point to Christ — lives that are unintelligible if the one they follow is not the Son of God. Sometimes the pointing is off direction. But this is revealed precisely as the intelligible Christ is unveiled and their inadequacies are marked in relation to him. Like the sleeping disciples in the garden or Peter warming himself by the fire, even their failures are given focus in relation to Christ to whom they witness. The disciples’ very identity is tied up in what they witness to. In this way Christian witnesses are unlike those “witnesses” who might appear in a court of law to testify dispassionately to events they may have seen or heard, like bits of facts that have no bearing on their own lives and that they pass over to judge or jury to do with as they please. Instead, they are more like people who have witnessed a horrible accident that cannot be forgotten; it lives with them daily, shaping the contours of their lives henceforth.20
Yet the witness of Christians does more than carry forward from what has happened; it also carries back from what will happen. The disciples of Jesus are called to be witnesses to the reality of a new age, a new time, constituted by his life, death, and resurrection. Apocalypse is the name given to describe the inauguration of this new beginning. The story of Jesus is the story of a new creation, the telling of which cannot but challenge the reigning stories that legitimate the practices of the old age. This is present not in overcoming force or power but rather precisely in witness. Indeed, that witness is the form in which the new age is revealed indicates why what has happened requires that a people exist who exemplify the new reality. The existence of the church is itself the determinative (although not the only)21 witness to an alternative politics to that of the old age.22
The new politics is a politics of speech — and so also of act. But it begins in the speech of the church, which is a story we Christians believe is not just ours but everyone’s. As such it cannot but be a complex story with many subplots. Nevertheless, it begins simply in a meeting with the Christ. This story is told in hope that it will be received, that those who hear it will be able to recognize how all that is exists as a witness to God. Spoken as witness, its purpose is not definitive; it does not end all arguments but rather opens space for them to appear. Here is the story — now what do you think? Indeed, witness is a first step in introducing arguments we need to have, ones that could not have been discovered until each particular witness was offered.23
While witnesses expect they will be heard, they also know that sometimes they will not. Genuine witnesses to the Christian gospel are fully aware that it can and might be rejected. Indeed, to be a “witness” in the New Testament is also to be a martyr — or, better put, the term “martyr” is the New Testament Greek term for witness. Of course, “martyr” subsequently came to mean that one died in the act of witnessing — although it was not so narrowly circumscribed for the first Christians.24
The Book of the Acts of the Apostles uses the term “witness” twenty-three times.25 This frequent use is fitting since the book’s task is to describe what the first followers of Christ told others about him. Yet the usage is not generalized; witness is not so much treated as a concept as it is displayed in a story. Moreover, the Book of Acts is a narrative that carries its story not principally, as the Gospels do, by following the story of one person, but rather by focusing on first one act and then another of a crowd of witnesses. Those who witness understand themselves to have been uniquely claimed by Christ. Indeed, the witnessing we hear in Acts frequently takes a highly personal form: this is what happened to me, or us, as we encountered the Christ. These encounters are then drawn up into the whole story, becoming pillars of support. Following on the Gospels, Christ remains the center of the narrative in Acts, yet now through these others who witness to him. As their stories are told, they point to his. However, and crucially, the details and particularities of the stories are not obliterated in the pointing, nor are the characters whose stories they are.
As Kavin Rowe suggests, “readers do not have to labor long in the book of
