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Wall Champions Acts’ Relevance
Salvation and calling
CALLED TO BE CHURCH: The Book of Acts for a
New Day (Eerdmans, 2006) grew out of an
unlikely friendship. From opposite sides of the
theological tracks, its two authors — Robert
Wall, Seattle Pacific University Paul T. Walls
Chair in Wesleyan Theology, a Holiness Wesleyan
with Pentecostal roots; and Anthony B.
Robinson, a pastor in the
United Church of Christ
— have taken on arguably
the most provocative and
polarizing book of the
New Testament outside
of Revelation.
Called to Be Church
took shape during Winter
Quarter 2005, when
Wall and Robinson cotaught
a class on Acts. “We were writing it as
we taught it,” explains Wall. Their book discusses
Acts from two perspectives. First, Wall
interprets the text as Scripture, basing his exegesis
on his acclaimed, book-length interpretation
of Acts in The New Interpreter’s Bible
(Abingdon Press, 2004). Then Robinson
adapts Acts to the issues facing today’s church.
Exploring what Wall calls
the “core thematics” of Acts —
community, the role of the
Holy Spirit, the authority of
Scripture, conflict resolution,
multiculturalism, the redistribution
of goods, how to listen
and watch for God at work in
the world — Called to Be
Church champions Acts’ relevance
in our time. “These are
necessary themes for today’s
church to lay hold of,” the SPU
faculty member contends, “and
they become the prompt to act
in certain ways.”
Wall and his co-author
together argue that Acts is
more about calling than about
salvation. “In Acts, you are
saved and immediately given a
task,” says Wall. “The endgame
is ministry and witness. People
do not get saved to do
nothing except go to heaven.
People get saved to be about
the hard work of ministry. But
a lot of people don’t understand that.
That’s why Acts is in the Bible.”
Taking a stance that has earned Wall “some
heat” from scholarly colleagues, Called to Be
Church suggests that Acts should be read not as
volume two of a two-volume narrative that
begins with Luke’s gospel, but as a bridge
between a fourfold gospel and Paul’s epistles.
“I believe the church under the guidance of the
Holy Spirit put together the Bible to be read
sequentially,” says Wall. “The problem, however,
is that most Protestant Christians start with
the Pauline letters, which cannot be properly
understood outside the context of the fourfold
gospel and Acts.”
One colleague who
agrees with Wall is Richard
Hays, Duke Divinity
School Ivey Professor
of New Testament and
author of The Moral
Vision of the New Testament.
Hays, who will be
the featured guest for a
November 2006 President’s
Symposium at SPU, says, “The narrative
coherence, or narrative linearity, of the
biblical story, and the argument that the
canonical placement of Acts between the
gospels and the epistles is actually theologically
significant, is one of the themes in Wall’s
work that is very important for students to
grasp — and for preachers to grasp as well.”
Editor's Note: Called to Be Church can be purchased at barnesandnoble.com or amazon.com.
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