Chater Five--Conclusion

CHAPTER Five

Conclusion

In a fundamental sense, this study emerges from three simple questions posed at the outset of Chapter One concerning the temple in Luke-Acts. Why did Luke devote so much attention and space to the Jerusalem temple in Luke-Acts? How does it make sense within the larger narrative? And, what was Luke hoping to communicate thereby to a largely Gentile audience? The questions themselves are quite basic; they are the sort that might arise after reading Luke-Acts for the first time. Lukan scholars have offered a variety of responses to such questions, at least to the first question and at times simply to the observation that Luke has devoted a great deal of attention to the temple. Indeed, some of the most detailed answers to the first question have rarely touched upon the issues which are posed by the second two questions. Does this understanding of the temple make sense within the narrative itself? Would this answer really be relevant to Luke’s Gentile readership? We contend that each basic question, simple in and of itself, is essential to an adequate understanding of the temple in Luke-Acts.

In Chapter One we reviewed some of the previous answers that Lukan scholarship has offered concerning the role of the temple in Luke-Acts. In this regard, it was noted that there is still little consensus even concerning Luke’s fundamental orientation toward the temple. Does Luke have a positive orientation toward the temple, a negative orientation, or is he ambivalent? Indeed, these remain the three major positions in this ongoing debate. Our own reading of Luke’s narrative found it difficult to embrace any of the positions of these groups. That is to say, when reading Luke-Acts one notices a mingling of both positive and negative images concerning the temple, but not in a manner which reflects ambivalence. Luke appears to be presenting a coherent, sustained interest in the temple over the course of Luke-Acts which combines both positive and negative images. Hence, we have argued that the positive, negative, or ambivalent options yield by previous studies were an inadequate representation of the coherent manner in which the temple functions in Luke’s narrative. Moreover, we maintained that these widely varied and ambiguously characterized scholarly assessments of Luke’s temple theme are more indicative of previous methodological inadequacies for getting at these sort of questions rather than any Lukan ambivalence or ambiguity. What is needed is a more appropriate approach and method.

On the one hand, a more profound engagement of the multivalent and interrelated symbolism of sacred space and the role of the temple as a social institution is called for. On the other hand, in addition to this more thorough appreciation of sacred space, a more refined methodology is required to account for how Luke has engaged and appropriated this socio-religious institution for his own purposes within his narrative. The only way to adequately account for the narrative function of the temple in Luke-Acts is to take seriously the temple’s significance as a socio-cultural institution and the thorough deployment of its symbolism in his narrative. What is required is a framework which explicitly addresses the relationship between meaning and significance in a social world and meaning and significance in a narrative world. To this end we proposed a methodological framework appropriated from Robert Wuthnow’s Communities of Discourse which was sensitive to the mutual influence of social and discursive forces.

Figure 1

Methodological Framework

Moreover, we found Wuthnow’s concept of the problem of articulation to be conceptually helpful for understanding the manner in which Luke employed both positive and negative temple images as a coherent feature of culturally innovative discourse.

What we found in our investigation, then, is that the present methodological framework and Luke’s temple theme are mutually illuminating. That is, on the one hand, the complexity of Luke’s engagement of the temple can be more adequately accounted for in the present methodological framework. On the other hand, the significance of the Jerusalem temple underscores the mutually dependent categories of the methodological framework. The temple’s role as a premier institutional context in the social world of the first century, the prominence accorded this institution within the social horizon of the text of Luke-Acts, and the important function that it plays in organizing many of the discursive fields we find within the narrative create a subtle and complex interplay between these conceptual levels. They enhance the symbolic richness of Luke’s narrative.

The balance of Chapter One, then, was devoted to a general theoretical overview of the nature and symbolism of sacred space which helped clarify several of our central theses. First, we related how Luke is engaging the Jerusalem temple within a traditional understanding of such a sacred space as an axis mundi or sacred center which signifies the cosmological center of the world. An axis mundi is characterized as having both vertical and horizontal axes. The vertical axis marks a point of juncture between the layers of the cosmos and functions as an axis of revelation and divine communication. The horizontal axis of the axis mundi underscores sacred space’s capacity to structure and orient social life, including the radiating matrix of relative purity and creates social maps which segregate along lines of ethnicity, gender, purity and status.

At this point we clarified how these concepts help elucidate a central thesis of our investigation. We maintain that Luke is consistently and positively emphasizing this vertical dimension of sacred space in each of the temple sections of Luke-Acts. In both Luke and Acts positive images of the temple as a place of revelation, divine communication, and instruction are advanced in the narrative. Nevertheless, the content of these revelations consistently functions to undermine the socially segregating capacity of the horizontal social axis of sacred space. Within Luke’s narrative, these revelations function to point beyond the institution itself and to undermine it predetermined notions of insiders and outsiders.

We have argued that Luke’s understanding of this cultural symbol and deployment of this theme within his narrative evinces profound theological reflection and pastoral concern for his audience. Through employing a process of articulation, Luke is able to locate provision for participation of all peoples in the divine promises to Israel, in its most sacred institutions while at the same time undermining the power by which those institutions functioned as cultural barriers. Hence, Luke exploits the temple’s significance as a hermeneutic focal point for his own, varied, interpretive ends. On the one hand, he locates the message of the inclusion of the Gentiles as emerging from within the very heart of Jewish institutions. Moreover, he repeatedly engages the symbolism of sacred space to legitimate the message and messengers of this good news. On the other hand, the socially stratifying and segregating capacity of the temple’s horizontal axis is invariably undermined in this process and ultimately overturned in the death of Jesus.

In this way we accounted for how (1) both positive and negative images of the temple may function in a coherent and unambiguous manner in Luke-Acts and how (2), despite its inherent exclusionary and marginalizing nature in regard to non-Jews, the temple may serve a positive function for Luke’s Gentile audience.

However, a final point asserted in Chapter One was that since the temple already lay in ruins, its primary importance for Luke and his Gentile audience is its significance as an enduring ideological structure, rather than its role in the past or potential for such in the future. This is to say, long after its physical demise the temple endured as a symbolic structure which mediated a stratified and segregated world view, capable of transference and embodiment in other contexts. This has continuing relevance for the self-perceptions of Luke’s audience, how they understand their place in the history of salvation as well as how believers comport themselves in relation to one another. Hence it is this enduring ideological structure which remains central to Luke’s focus.

In Chapter Two we employed our method and theoretical emphases to illuminate the complex interrelationship between setting, plot, and characterization in the Lukan Infancy Narrative and how these established a critical yet pervasive subtext vis-à-vis the temple even in apparently positive and irenic passages. We also took account of the role of the Lukan Infancy Narrative in shaping readerly expectations and creating certain readerly competencies regarding this critical perspective on the temple in the narrative as a whole. We argued that Luke achieved this by replicating on a narrative level the temple’s function as a “focusing lens.” From this perspective we were better able demonstrate how the Infancy Narrative functioned as a metonymy for the larger narrative, thereby providing interpretive focus on Luke’s temple theme.

Provided with a greater awareness of the multiple, socio-religious systems which are inscribed within the structure of the temple, we were better able to account for Lukan motivations in choosing to locate the beginning of his narrative at the symbolic and spatial heart of Judaism. By attending to the role of sacred space in Luke’s narrative we were able to understand the prominent transposition between the beginning and end points of the story lines of John and Jesus in relation to the sacred space of the Jerusalem temple. Specifically, we maintained that in the way this transposition frames Luke 1-2 it also prefigures the kinds of social transpositions which take place in Luke-Acts. These sorts of transpositions were shown to be already underway in the whole of the Infancy Narrative by surprising incursions of the divine in marginal settings and to marginal people and by Spirit-inspired utterances. These were simultaneously attended by negative depictions of imperception  and unbelief on the part of those at the sacred center.

In Chapter Three, against the background of the nature and function of sacred space, we were better able to account for how the patterns and figures disclosed in the Infancy Narrative continue to shape a reading of the subsequent portions of Luke’s Gospel. In this chapter we demonstrated that the Gospel of Luke does not reflect an ambiguous perspective on sacred space, but, rather, Luke’s engagement of issues of sacred space lend coherence to his work on a number of levels. We were able to demonstrate how, within the diverse contexts and episodes of the middle portion of Luke’s Gospel, Luke engaged the twin axes of the social and revelatory dimensions of sacred space. These axes were engaged differently, yet in a consistent and by no means ambiguous fashion. The intersection of the differing dimensions of sacred space were shown to embody Luke’s twin foci of legitimating an inclusive salvation and critiquing the divisive and segregating structures of sacred space in a balanced process of articulation. We noted how, on the one hand, Luke was motivated to establish continuity with the history of God’s people as well as to legitimate an inclusive salvation and mission. In the passages considered in this chapter this was achieved by a positive emphasis on divine revelation and by Jesus’ occupation of the sacred center for authoritative teaching. On the other hand, by critiquing and undermining the marginalizing nature of the temple’s social axis, Luke continued to remove cultural barriers and lay a foundation for a more inclusive understanding of the people of God which shall ultimately encompass even the Gentiles.

This was first emphasized in the deictic shift from Jerusalem to the liminal setting of the wilderness in Luke 3:1-4:13, a context in a dialectic, creative tension with the sacred center. Next, throughout Jesus’ ministry these concerns were also manifest by his overturning of socio-religious conventions which embodied the segregating nature of the temple’s social axis. These same concerns were also noted in Luke’s characterization and Jesus’ critique of characters who embody dispositions and practices reflecting the social axis of sacred space. Outside of Jerusalem this oppositional group was the Pharisees and their scribes. In Jerusalem, this critique and condemnation was directed at the practices and dispositions of the temple leadership. Once in Jerusalem, Jesus was seen to be able to hold forth at the sacred center, preach the good news and silence his adversaries. By doing so, Jesus displaced the temple leadership and predicted the demise of the institution itself which would yield a transformed access to God’s presence for those who were excluded by a temple mediated salvation.

We demonstrated that both of these images were then played out at Jesus’ death with the offer of temple/paradise to the crucified malefactor and the rending of the temple veil, signifying the dissolution of the final divisive social barrier and the collapse of the holiness-purity matrix. With the final scene of the disciples worshipping in the temple, Luke both reiterated the present effects of Jesus death, depicted spatially vis-à-vis the temple and foreshadowed the context of continued conflict in Acts.

In Chapter Four, in the Book of Acts we focused on how these themes initiated in Luke’s Gospel continued in the story of the early church and of the missionary movement outward from the sacred center. The transformation of the sacred center which was effected by Jesus’ death was depicted as being actualized in the ministry of the disciples. First, this was observed in the healing of the temple beggar which paralleled the spatial depiction of an offer of salvation to the criminal at Jesus’ death. Moreover, the fact that the disciples were proffering a similar pattern of salvation both ratified the transformation of sacred space effected at Jesus’ death and legitimated them as God’s authorized agents and Israel’s new leaders.

Nevertheless, the potential for even the early church to begin to embody the dispositions of the social axis of sacred space was also explored in the crisis of the widows and the reluctance on the part of the disciples to move out in accord with the commission of Acts 1:8. Both of these crises were resolved through the catalyst of the testimony and martyrdom of Stephen. Stephen’s speech emphasized just such a movement as characteristic of God’s people in all times. Moreover, Stephen’s rehearsal of the history of Israel also emphasized the persistent undercurrent of idolatry at Jerusalem, particularly in regard to the sacred center. As the story shifts away from Jerusalem, we noted how the entire escalation of conflict which was taking place in Jerusalem was narrated within an inclusio suggesting that Jerusalem had become a center of idolatry reminiscent of Babel. Indeed, as the outward mission repeatedly encountered idolatrous pagans, an interpretive nexus was reinforced with the failure of Jerusalem in this regard. Jerusalem’s rejection of Jesus and the disciples was progressively disclosed as a form of idolatry.

This connection is reinforced by how the riot at Ephesus parallels the riotous rejection of Paul and the suggestion of a Gentile’s access to God’s presence in the sacred center. With the close of this scene we noted the portentous image of the shutting of the temple gates. Even its status as a privileged locus of revelation, that which was underscored in all previous temple scenes, was now observed to be a thing of the past, heard of in the present scene only in the context of a reminiscence of divine commission to flee the sacred center and turn to the Gentiles.

The narrative of Luke-Acts, then, gives evidence of a profound concern with space and its social reconfiguration. Space, we have contended, social space, is a key to Luke’s emplotment. Space and geography are noted only structuring principle on an overarching scale in Luke’s two volumes, it is also an issue on a much smaller scale in the conflicts and confrontations of the story. As we have seen above, the two main groups which Jesus comes into conflict with are intensely involved in and identified with concepts stemming from the configuration of space in its sacred and social dimensions. In this regard, we are in sympathy with E. W. Soja’s reassertion of the social dimension and centrality of space for critical attention.

 Soja draws attention to the eclipse of the concept of “space” in critical theory. That is, the distinction between space as an existential given and the socially organized dimension of space. One characteristic of modern historiography and historicism, Soja maintains, is that it “actively submerges and peripheralizes the geographical or spatial imagination” creating “a critical silence, an implicit subordination of space to time that obscures geographical inter­pretations of the changeability of the social world and intrudes upon every level of theoretical discourse” (Soja 1989, 15). This tradition of modern historiography, we would maintain, has produced an interpretive tendency which overlooks the social dimension of space in ancient historiography as well.

For a reader in antiquity whose interests and social identity were impacted as much by spatial configuration as our own modern predisposition toward being and time would look at things very different. Such a people, as we have seen, may ask questions like, Where is God? And not only mean it in a literal sense, but invest a good deal in its answer. One thing suggested by the preceding study, then, is that a narrative such as Luke-Acts underscores a greater awareness of the social dimensions of spatiality which existed in antiquity as compared to today. Despite Conzelmanns’s central thesis, Luke’s concern is not merely time but space. This is a key to Luke’s plot. To follow this trace is to cut to the heart of Luke’s narrative. In entering the world of Luke-Acts readers partake of a narrative refiguring of space in all its social and sacred amplitude—a refiguring of profound dimensions