ACTS
JAROSLAV PELIKAN
BrazosPress
Grand Rapids, Michigan
© 2005 by Jaroslav Pelikan
2:42 TPR And they were persisting in the doctrine of the apostles and in fellowship, in the breaking of bread and in prayer.
While it is, strictly speaking, accurate to observe with Jacob Jervell that in Acts “Luke does not speak of the Christians primarily as ‘church,’ but as a people,”31 so that he can have James say that “God first visited the Gentiles, to take out of them a people for his name” (15:14) where one might have expected church, it does not do violence to the text of Acts to make “the church” a major doctrinal theme running through the entire book (→2:1; →2:42; →4:32; →5:29a; →9:4–5; →15:28; →22:27).
Among the four identifying marks of the church as listed in the catalog of the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed, “one, holy, catholic, and apostolic,”32 unity comes first. In the formula of Saint Cyprian of Carthage, which he took to be based on the “common mind [that] prevailed once, in the time of the Apostles,” as this “common mind” was documented in the opening chapters of Acts, “God is one, and Christ is one, and His Church is one; one is the faith, and one the people cemented together by harmony into the strong unity of a body.”33
This verse is, in the first instance, intended as a descriptive statement, in keeping with the historiographical design of the entire narrative, written for the situation of the Christian community some decades later. It explains both “the internal state and the external position of the church of Christ”:34 that although even after the resurrection and “the gospel of the forty days” (→1:2–3) there were still large gaps in theological perception (→18:24–26a) among those who adhered to “the Way” (→11:26), the ascension of Christ had not left his followers “desolate” (ὀρφανούς) (John 14:18); but by the gift of the Holy Spirit “they were persisting” and maintaining a continuity with him and with his apostles in this communion of saints. But theologically, it is also prescriptive, as an itemized list of the criteria by which the church in any age would both preserve and manifest its continuity with the apostles.
Such a continuity with the apostles was both necessary and potentially controversial. When it is said that these first-generation believers “were persisting” (ἦσαν … προσκαρτεροῦντες), such a periphrastic use of the participle with a verb that even by itself can be taken to mean to “continue” or “persevere”35 refers to what Luke Timothy Johnson calls “continuing and consistent patterns of behavior.”36 Continuity is also the theme of the visit of Barnabas to Antioch, as Luke reports: “He exhorted them all to remain faithful to the Lord with steadfast purpose [τῇ προθέσει τῆς καρδίας προσμένειν τῷ κυρίῷ]” (11:23). Challenges to this apostolic continuity came from opposite directions: from those who insisted on a continuity in the observance of the law of Moses about diet and circumcision (→10:15) and a few decades later from Marcion of Pontus, who accused the church of wrongly maintaining an excessive continuity with Judaism and thus of having disrupted apostolic continuity with Paul, the only genuine apostle.37 As described here by Luke, the continuity with the apostles was preserved in these four areas:
1. Apostolic “doctrine” (διδαχή). Central to this “doctrine of the apostles,” whether or not it was already embodied in a more or less stabilized oral creed (→8:37), was, as this chapter had made clear earlier (→2:31), the witness to the resurrection of Christ, together with the confession (→4:20): “I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God” (8:37 TPR AV ). Not only from the ambiguous language of the apostles’ witness in this chapter (2:36) and elsewhere, but from the candid admission in a later chapter that someone who was “well versed in the scriptures” and had been “instructed in the way of the Lord” nevertheless needed to have a sister (Priscilla) and a brother (Aquila) “expound to him the way of God more accurately” (→18:24–26a), it is evident that, during the three centuries between this time and the Councils of Nicea (325) and Constantinople (381), the confession of this apostolic doctrine would require further clarification, though without changing in its substance. This paradoxical phenomenon has been called, since John Henry Newman’s Essay of 1845, “the development of Christian doctrine.” A major historical force in bringing it about was theological controversy (→15:2), together with the deeper study of the Scriptures (→8:30–31).
2. Apostolic “fellowship” (κοινωνία). In Chrysostom’s reminder, based on this passage, “the fellowship was not only in prayers, nor in doctrine alone, but also in social relations [πολιτεία].”38 With a great variety of other meanings,39 κοινωνία in the New Testament also referred to ἡ κοινωνία τῆς διακονίας (2 Cor. 8:4), a sharing in and an adherence to the apostolic ministry through the laying-on of hands (→6:2–4; →6:6). It is above all in the Pastoral Epistles, 1–2 Timothy and Titus, that this component of apostolic continuity is articulated: a gradually emerging distinction between “the office of bishop” (1 Tim. 3:1) and that of “deacons” (1 Tim. 3:8), an emphasis on “the gift … which was given you by prophetic utterance when the council of elders laid their hands upon you” (1 Tim. 4:14), and the imperative of guarding the “deposit” of faith (1 Tim. 6:20 Vulgate ). At least partly because this view of the apostolic ministry seems so advanced by comparison with the usage here in Acts and in the other Pauline Epistles, many (but by no means all) modern New Testament critics question whether Paul was really, as the texts claimed (1 Tim. 1:1; 2 Tim. 1:1; Titus 1:1), the author of the Pastoral Epistles.
3. Apostolic “breaking of bread” and the other sacraments. The New Testament does not present us with a total sacramental system, which, in fact, took many centuries until it developed in the medieval Scholasticism of the Western church.40 What it does describe are individual actions that were eventually defined as a sacramentum or μυστήριον—in a technical sense that these terms do not possess in New Testament usage, not even in the passages that were later applied to the seven sacraments (1 Cor. 4:1; Eph. 5:32). But the Acts of the Apostles does single out baptism (→22:16) and the Eucharist (→20:7), which between them would also define the terms to which other actions had to conform to be identified as “sacraments,” above all dominical institution (whether such an act of instituting by Christ was explicitly cited in the Gospels or authenticated by tradition).
4. Apostolic “prayer” and worship (→4:24–30). If the definite article here, τῇ προσευχῇ (“the prayer”) in the TPR or ταῖς προσευχαῖς (“the prayers”) in NA 27 , is not “generic” but “individual,”41 which may be more likely with the plural than with the singular, it does appear to suggest the presence, already at this early stage, of more or less fixed texts and liturgical forms: the Lord’s Prayer in a special category, although the variations in its text both within the New Testament (Matt. 6:9–13; Luke 11:2–4) and in the next generations, together with the textually dubious (→20:28a) closing doxology, must fundamentally qualify any claims that the prayers were unchangeable; the eucharistic prayer or prayers, as documented in the Didache;42and such a prayer as the one quoted in a later chapter of Acts (→4:24–30), which at least may be said to follow a standard outline or template, if not a standard text. At the same time, descriptions of prayers and services in Acts provided a historian of the church such as Socrates Scholasticus with evidence that in the area of liturgical observance “many differences existed even in the apostolic age of the church.”43
The interrelation between these four criteria, and particularly between the first two (defined in modern ecumenical usage as “faith and order”; →6:2–4), would dominate all subsequent efforts to understand the unity of the church and the divisions within Christendom, as well as the efforts to obey the imperative of Christ’s prayer “that they may all be one” (John 17:21).
2:43 As Christ had promised it would be, his power to perform “wonders and signs” was communicated to the disciples (→6:8).
2:44–45 The fundamental question to be asked about the primitive “communism” of the early church was not only whether it was universal, but above all whether it was compulsory (→4:32; →11:29).
2:46–47 (→3:25; →20:7). There is no gainsaying the repeated emphasis of Acts on the “number” of “those who were being saved,” and even upon what appear to be precise statistics (with due allowance for the possible workings of number mysticism); but the “catholicity” of the church is not made dependent on the statistics.
AV Authorized (King James) Version
TPR textus a patribus receptus (see Boismard 2000)
31 Jervell 1996, 34; see also Esler 1987.
32 Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed 9 (CCF 1:163).
33 Cyprian, Unity of the Catholic Church 23–25 (ACW 25:65–66).
34 Bogolepov 1900, 405–8.
35 BDAG 881.
36 Johnson 1992, 58.
37 Chr. Trad. 1:71–81.
TPR textus a patribus receptus (see Boismard 2000)
AV Authorized (King James) Version
38 Chrysostom, Homilies on Acts 7 (NPNF1 11:45).
39 BDAG 552–53.
Vulgate Vulgate (see Nova vulgata 1986)
40 Chr. Trad. 3:184–214.
TPR textus a patribus receptus (see Boismard 2000)
NA Novum Testamentum Graece (ed. Erwin Nestle, Kurt Aland, et al.; 27th ed.; Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 1999)
27 Novum Testamentum Graece (ed. Erwin Nestle, Kurt Aland, et al.; 27th ed.; Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 1999)
43 Socrates Scholasticus, Ecclesiastical History 5.22 (NPNF2 2:133).
Pelikan, J. (2005). Acts. Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press.
Exportado de Software Bíblico Logos, 08:33 17 de janeiro de 2018.
Nenhum comentário:
Postar um comentário