Another new book started

Well, new to me, anyway. About a year ago now (time flies!), Jim Eisenbraun recommended a book to me and I finally got around to reading it in the last month or so. I'll be excerpting from it for the next few weeks...

No longer can Acts be seen as a simple apologia that articulates Christianity’s harmlessness vis-à-vis Rome. Yet neither is it a direct call for liberations, a kind of theological vision that takes for granted the solidity of preexistent political arrangements. Rather in its attempt to form communities that witness to God’s apocalypse, Luke’s second volume is a highly charged and theologically sophisticated political document that aims at nothing less than the construction of an alternative total way of life—a comprehensive pattern of being—one that runs counter to the life-patterns of the Graeco-Roman world.—World Upside Down, page 4

<idle musing>
That's claiming a lot for the book of Acts. Let's see if he delivers...I am attracted to the fact that he doesn't fall into the current fad of "Anti-Empire" rhetoric. Instead, he addresses the whole of culture, which I think is a more accurate description of the Christian life.

Of course, that might be why it isn't the rage...we might have to question how we live and why we do what we do...an abstract "anti-empire" theme is safer : (

Just an
</idle musing>