World Upside Down: Reading Acts in the Graeco-Roman Age

Written by C. Kavin Rowe Reviewed By Michael J. Thate

C. Kavin Rowe, Assistant Professor of New Testament at Duke University Divinity School and recent winner of the John Templeton Prize for Theological Promise, continues to demonstrate an unusual display of theological wisdom, wide reading in the vast haunts of secondary literature, and a rather shrewd sense regarding the complex issues surrounding the rise of early Christianity. These competencies are on full display in his recent work, World Upside Down, a book that is, among other things, as much about the early Christians as the Romans saw them as well as the Romans as seen by the early Christians. Fundamentally, however, World Upside Down “is about the inextricable connection between an irreducibly particular way of knowing and a total way of life” (p. 3).

What characterizes the work is its refusal to fall into the gullies of sullied and fraudulent dichotomies. Rowe’s “critically constructive reappraisal of Acts’ ecclesiological vision” follows neither the dominant trend of seeing Acts as a tract for harmonious existence with the imperial machinery of Rome, nor the currently in vogue counter-imperial readings. Instead, Rowe reads Acts as Luke’s “attempt to form communities that witness to God’s apocalypse” and “construction of an alternative total way of life” that “runs counter to the life-patterns of the Graeco-Roman world.” Acts, for Rowe, is thus a “culture-forming narrative” (p. 4).

After an introduction that situates the project (“Reading Acts”), the first substantive chapter is entitled, “Collision: Explicating Divine Identity.” Rowe suggests “the clash of the gods ultimately determined the shape of the collision between (emerging) Christianity and paganism” (p. 17). The “narrative outworking” in Acts of the earlier claim established in Luke “that the salvation of God comes through Jesus Christ as an apocalypse to the gentiles” would have been viewed as a rival vision by those in the Graeco-Roman world. Rowe highlights Acts 14, 16, 17, and 19 as demonstrations of “a profound incommensurability between the life-shape of Christianity in the Graeco-Roman world and the larger pattern of pagan religiousness” (p. 50).

Dikaios: Rejecting Statecraft” builds upon the findings of the previous chapter with the perspective of outsiders and their construal of Christianity as seditious or treasonous. By sampling Paul’s trials before Gallio, Claudius, Lysias, Felix, and Festus, Rowe sees Luke’s program gliding along the tension of the competing realities of Christianity and Graeco-Roman culture, while narrating “the threat of the Christian mission in such a way as to eliminate the possibility of conceiving it as in direct competition with the Roman state” (p. 5). This “rejection of insurrection does not simultaneously entail an endorsement of the present world order” (p. 88), however; no, Acts “redescribes theologically the cultural collapse that attends the Christian mission as the light and forgiveness of God” (p. 89). As Rowe repeats throughout the book, “New culture, yes—coup, no.”

“World Upside Down: Practicing Theological Knowledge” locates the origin of the tension created in the previous two chapters in Luke’s narration of three core and mutually interdependent ecclesial practices: “the confession of Jesus as Lord of all,” “the universal mission of light,” and “the formation of Christian communities as the tangible presence of a people set apart” (p. 92).

The concluding chapter, “The Apocalypse of Acts and the Life of Truth,” wrestles with the “serious questions regarding the place of [Acts] in religious/political thought today” (p. 139). Rowe brings Charles Taylor, Jan Assmann, Alasdair MacIntyre, and several other theorists into dialogue with the heart of the book’s constructive proposal and argument: “Acts offers a coherent vision of the apocalypse of God. Because this vision is nothing short of an alternative total way of life, the book of Acts narrates the formation of a new culture” (p. 140). Indeed, it is the very identity of God that “receives new cultural explication in the formation of a community whose moral or metaphysical order requires an alternative way of life” (p. 146). On pages 162–76, Rowe concludes with five reflections on the potentially troubling questions evoked by the truth and politics in relation to the universal vision narrated in Acts.

With nearly ninety pages of endnotes—reading the eight-hundred-plus notes are well worth the inevitable paper cuts you will accrue in the constant flipping back and forth between text and endnotes—the untranslated German, Greek, French, and Latin scattered throughout the main body of the text, and the interaction with complicated bibliographies, World Upside Down is a challenging read. But the challenge is well worth it. There is so much happening in these pages that a slow and careful read will provoke sustained thoughts on a variety of subjects of ecclesial interest ranging from Christianity and culture to issues of tolerance and political theology.

My criticisms, questions really, are only three and entirely petty. First, I suspect a development of chapters two and three could well be extended to the issue of Luke as historian. Whereas, for example, the legitimization of the Julio-Claudian dynasty might guide Virgil’s “eschatology” in the Aeneid, Luke’s history is guided by the profound novum of resurrection. In other words, there are hermeneutical commitments at work in Luke that set him apart from other historians of antiquity. Rowe, of course, does this in a host of ways, but a sustained treatment would add to his thesis. Second, it strikes me that Acts must be read in light of Luke’s wider restorationist concerns (cf. Acts 15:16). Rowe has constructed a forceful and compelling reading of Acts within a Graeco-Roman milieu, but I couldn’t help but wonder how the whole picture fits together. Luke, for example, seems quite interested in the Samaritan ingathering (Luke 9:51–55; 10:28–37; 17:11–19; Acts 1:6–8; 8:4–25; 9:31; cf. Isa 49:6). It is this restored community (of scattered Israel) now centered on Christ and opened to the Gentiles that is the cultural explication of God’s identity to a watching Graeco-Roman world. Third, and particularly aimed at the final chapter, there is a rather pronounced evolution in the ecclesial situation of Acts and that current in the twenty-first century. Again, Rowe knows this and alludes to it in various places, but how can a text from a marginal community written in the shadow of the Roman imperial machine speak to an age where the church has, in effect, conquered (become?) Rome? In some cases, it would seem that the polemical edge of Acts could be turned against the contemporary church itself.

But these are minor and petty issues, more akin to wishing the author back on stage to say more. With many promising years ahead of him, we will no doubt hear much more from this young juggernaut.


Michael J. Thate

Michael J. Thate
Durham University
Durham, England, UK

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