on the second episode, Kavin Rowe notes that
considered from a pagan point of view — that is, any Graeco-Roman perspective outside the specifically Christian rationale for mission — the Christian mission must inevitably appear strange. It is not simply that the death of one Jew at the hands of a Roman governor would not even make the news, or the idea that all of time should be thought in relation to this Jew rather than the emperor, or his followers’ belief that the Jew was alive again, or the conviction that what was “wrong with the world” was directly related to humanity’s worship of the god of Israel, as strange as these things would doubtless appear. It is rather, to be conceptually more precise, that there was no preexistent category or tradition of inquiry within which the phenomenon of Christian mission could be rightly perceived. . . . Festus’ perplexity . . . was the proper epistemological posture of someone who thinks the Christians are literally crazy.30
As Rowe’s book title indicates, Christian witness in Acts turns the pagan world “upside down” — which also means that very often the witnesses and the Christ they carry will appear simply crazy to the likes of the Roman governor Festus. For Rowe, Festus’s description of Paul as “crazy” is indicative of and integral to the pattern of Acts. Far from being an apologia for the Greco-Roman (as opposed to the Jewish) way — as some scholars have alleged — Luke’s story repeatedly displays what Rowe calls the “collision” between Christian mission and the pagan world it encountered. Using Charles Taylor’s notion of the “social imaginary,” Rowe shows how the new Christian vision challenged the metaphysical order in which the typical practices of the Greco-Roman world made sense.
Sacrificing to the gods, soothsaying, magic, the use of household shrines, and so forth all gain their intelligibility as practices within a moral or metaphysical order that underwrites the reality in which it makes sense to do these things. . . . [A]ccording to Acts, sacrificing to gods, soothsaying, magic, and so forth, do not “make sense” for the early Christians. The reason is not hard to find: the wider predicament in which these practices made sense has disappeared. Thus the collision between the Christian mission and the larger Mediterranean world is both extraordinarily deep and “thick” for the reason that it entails multiple layers of sense-making, that is, a social imaginary.31
The witness that is the Christian gospel is hardly harmless. Rowe calls it “a deep threat to preexisting foundational ways of life in the Mediterranean world.” As Paul brings the news to Lystra or Philippi or Athens, his visits presage what Rowe calls “cultural collapse.”32 But the threat comes not in a swarm of military might, nor, for that matter, in a barrage of innovative political ideas. It comes rather as theology. “The possibility of cultural demise [of the pagan world] is rooted in the counter-cultural explication of the break between God and the world. . . . Because ‘God’ in Luke’s sense corresponds not to a particular point within the widest of human horizons but to that which constitutes — makes possible and stands over against — the entirety of the human horizon, the call to (re)turn to God carries with it an entire pattern of life.”33
The truth to which Paul and others witness in Acts is comprehensive: it renarrates the whole of human life, indeed, all that is, in the light of the God who is — now fully known through Christ. This requires a change in the way we live, according to Rowe a change in the “entire pattern of life.” This also displays why the theology is embodied precisely in the ones who arrive with the news of it; they witness to the new vision and also inhabit it. So both what they say and who they are represent a potential threat. As such, it and they may be violently rejected, as the growing connection in the New Testament between witness and martyrdom reminds us. So those who arrive with the news may also be called to give their lives for it. Yet whether they live or die, for the gospel to take root and grow — and so challenge, even bring the demise of, the cultures it encounters — it must be brought by people who both speak and practice it. Christian faith is not a disembodied set of ideas or theories; it is not intuited or received by osmosis. The Kingdom grows person to person; it is brought through witness. Once again, the reason is theological: the God Christians worship is no general truth that can be known apart from those who have been called into his Kingdom. So if the Kingdom is to grow, these ones must travel, bearing witness.
This is why Paul thinks the feet of those who bring the gospel are so beautiful (Rom. 10:10). If they had not walked, the gospel would not have come. Moreover, they come not simply as carriers of a package they can leave on the doorsteps of cities and villages throughout the Mediterranean world, for the locals to unwrap on their own. Rather, as Luke’s story shows, we cannot know Jesus without those, like Paul, who were called by him. And the same remains today: there is no Christ without those who are still being called. To reiterate, the fact that such witnesses are required arises from the fact that the witness is to a life that defies generalization. It is a life that was and is seen, heard, even touched.
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