On May 21, this Thursday, the Church celbrates the Ascension of Christ, and May 31st is Pentecost, the feast of the Holy Spirit, then the following Sunday is Trinity Sunday. Decided I want to spend this high point of the Christian year and then into the "ordinary time post-Pentecost becoming familiar again with volume two of Luke's Gospel. We call it The Acts of the Apostles, but it's the story of the Gospel as it overflows from hearts into communities, then across cultural barriers, racial divisions and national boundaries.
So I'm reading my way through the new commentary on Acts by David Peterson. Now and again I'll include some of the story of the early Church in the occasional blog post. Instead of gazing wistfully at emergent church, I'm going to have a longish think about how the church emerged. I've a feeling the Holy Spirit had more than a little to do with it. The calls to co-operate with the Spirit, to be responsive to those prompts and nudges that knock us off our stride, to think new things and try again what previously "didn't work", to relinquish our grip on ideas we cherish and take into our hands trustfully that newness that by definition is unfamiliar, even untried.
In other words, we are back to questions of risk, impelled and compelled by the Spirit to innovative action, urged to subversive witness, shoved into places and circumstances where imaginative faith finds ways of undermining all those powers that frustrate the telling and living of the Good News. Peterson is a fine scholar and determined to provide reflections that do justice to the underlying theology of a book too easily assumed to be mainly history.
Now. One complaint and one compliment which I'll pass on to the publisher. To do with the indices. Compliment first. The subject index is substantial enough to be very user friendly and a helpful pointer to significant discussions - as it should be. But the author index is so overloaded with citations that you are simply put off even trying to trace them. One writer has one work cited in the Bibliography, yet it is indexed over 150 times. But Krodel's brilliant commentary is cited once so gets one footnote! The standard commentary by the great C K Barrett has over 400 page references, and Witherington has over 300 - and all of them unsorted, a catena of numbers.
Come on!! Stop using computers to generate indices. There's no rationale or selection of the significant references, just a lumping together in consecutive page order of every citation. The result is an exercise in tedium that is simply a guaranteed turn away. Had the indexer taken a bit longer to edit this unsorted blizzarrd of data, by going through the citations retaining the most significant ones, then there might have been a point in the exercise. I want to know what Barrett thinks of the Jerusalem Council, but i don't need to know every time his name is bracketed in a footnote. As it is, the author index reads like the old logarithm tables - remember them? - and they are just as fun to use.
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