Some years back I was invited to Rustenberg in South Africa to preach a series of sermons during Pentecost. In preparation for that series, I landed upon one of my favorite quotations about the Holy Spirit and made it central to the sermon series. I found the quotation to be from my doctoral supervisor at the University of Nottingham, James D. G. Dunn:
The Spirit of God “transcends human ability and transforms human inability.”
When I wrote down the quotation in order to use it as an important reminder in each of the sermons, rather than recording the source of the quotation carefully, as I would have done if writing a book, I jotted it down in the margin of my notes for the first sermon. Unfortunately, that page got wet, and the citation went invisible behind a smear of the ink from my fountain pen. Later, when I was writing a book in which I wanted to use that quotation again, I spent a couple hours combing through one Dunn book after another and then spent more time in one of them, convinced as I was that it came from Jimmy’s big fat book on Paul’s theology. It was not to be found, and it was frustrating because I had put the line to memory (not that I didn’t have to pause at times to make sure I got it right).
My last effort to locate the precise spot was to write to Jimmy and see if he could recall where he had written the line. His response:
Good question, but one I can’t recall. I said quite a lot along the same lines in Jesus and the Spirit, and probably also in my early ExpT pieces on “Rediscovering the Spirit” (1972, 1982), which come from our time together in Nottingham, when it is likely that you heard me on the subject. Sorry I can’t be more help.
His response still makes me chuckle, for if the author can’t remember his own lines, how could I? I gave up, hoping I could somehow rediscover the source as I continued to work on the writing project. One day I was wandering through my commentaries on the book of Acts when I saw Jimmy’s little commentary. It triggered a memory that I may have found that golden quotation in this book, and within a few minutes, on page 12, I found the citation. I now give it in full, because for me this statement represents both the theology at work in the book of Acts and the kind of scintillating insight one finds in Dunn’s commentary:
The prominence of the Spirit in Luke’s narrative from Pentecost onwards makes clear beyond doubt that for Luke the mission of the church could not hope to be effective without this empowering from God (the Spirit of God) which transcends human ability and transforms human inability.
So true. The Spirit empowers us to do well beyond what we could do on our own, and what we are already gifted at God’s Spirit transforms to the glory of God.
On my shelves of books about Acts I have three humungous sets — a four-volume commentary, a five-volume study of Acts, and another five-volume set. I have more than one two-volume commentaries on Acts, but in this little commentary by Dunn you have insight, measured judgment about history and theology and context, and suggestions that take the preacher to the heart of what the book of Acts can mean for us today. I always begin any study of any passage in the book of Acts by pulling off Jimmy’s commentary. I go to the others when I’m done, but often enough I get all I need in Dunn.
Each time I read in this commentary I recall incidents over a “cuppa” in Jimmy’s office at Nottingham when he would go over my thesis project line by line, or his e-mails to me about the thesis when he had moved on to Durham, or one dinner after another we have shared at the Annual Meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature. Funny how such a small commentary can contain so many memories. But that’s because in his The Acts of the Apostles you will hear the voice of one of our generation’s greatest scholars and Christian mentors of scholars who now populate the globe, which is precisely what the book of Acts propels us to be!
Scot McKnight
Julius R. Mantey Professor of New Testament
Northern Seminary