Contemporary Options for Reading Acts: Ideological, Postcolonial, and Postmodern Perspectives

While standard historical and literary approaches have provided important insights into the text of Acts, the theology of Luke-Acts, and important themes and motifs in the narrative, a number of newer “reading perspectives” and interpretive frameworks offer insights into the ways in which narrators both ancient and modern encode their own (and their group’s) priorities, agendas, values, beliefs, and biases into the stories they tell.

Ideological critics help us to understand that the “raw events” of the past are to be distinguished from historical narration about those events, giving them meaning. The writing of history involves perspective, opinion, interpretation, and organization as the historian connects events with a particular purpose in mind. History is not possible without discourse (Dijk, 120–21); “history as a discourse attempts to wrest and provide meaning out of events that inform the development or making of culture, nation building, and processes by which ethnoracial identity is constructed” (S. Matthews, 4). Ancient (and contemporary) historical narratives are perspectival and bound up with views of authority and social order, not always as it is, but as it ought to be. In these ways, historical writings and narratives are ideological—they express vested interests whether consciously or only implicitly. Because “no one can write entirely objective history, we must be ever alert to identify ideology when it plays a recognizable role” in Luke-Acts as well (Lüdemann 2008, 66).

“[As] the basis of a social group’s self-image, ideologies organize its identity, actions, and resources as well as its relations to other social groups” (Dijk, 115). So, ideology is not necessarily negative; all human groups are implicated in it. However, the social, political, and religious impact of ideology becomes more acute with regard to empires and imperial or colonial regimes that seek to promote and impose their values on other nations or peoples. Although military power usually was (and is) used to maintain control, the political and social mechanisms of empire are also extended through social, cultural, religious, and political constructs that promote acceptance and a sense that the hegemony is “natural” (Punt, 192). The Roman Empire provides an appropriate example of the material reality through which ideology is imposed, through the use of images (the ancient mass media)—statues, monuments, coins, and temples (Lopez)—and through inscriptions and literature, especially the imperial patronage of historical narratives that promoted and legitimized the empire and imperial prerogatives. Such propagandistic images and historical literature, whether conscious or unconscious or by means subtle or overt, portray the reality, values, and benefits of empire (as natural or divinely instituted), expressed through a unifying cultural ideal, or in contemporary postmodern nomenclature, through a “grand-narrative” (Flax). In postmodern thought, a grand-narrative (or meta- or master narrative) is “a global or totalizing cultural narrative schema which orders and explains knowledge and experience” (Stephens and McCallum, 1). All aspects of societies depend on these grand-narratives. Therefore, a grand-narrative is a story that encompasses and explains other “little stories” within totalizing schemes (Lyotard, xxiii–xxiv).

At this point, postmodern thought converges with postcolonial and ideological investigation. Not only social groups but also national and imperial regimes produce grand-narratives that universalize, characterize, and promote their politics, worldviews, identities, and values. These grand-narratives inevitably mask contradictions and inconsistencies inherent in a regime’s practice or organization. For example, a grand-narrative is implicit in the statement in the American Declaration of Independence that “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” The ideal stated here is the foundation of American democratic politics, institutions, and society, but we know that it has also masked inconsistencies of racism, slavery, sexism, and classism (among other things). Postmodern examinations attempt to expose and critique such inconsistencies (Flax, 41). Postcolonial analysis engages in “ideological reflection on the discourse and practice of imperialism and colonialism,” recognizing that the shadow of empire stands behind and within the construction of ancient texts (Segovia, 126). An ideological-critical lens is essential to both perspectives because ideological analysis explores the relationship between rhetoric and power (Bible and Culture Collective, 274). Postmodern, postcolonial, and ideological-critical perspectives resonate in biblical studies because the biblical texts were written in the shadow of empire and are at once rhetorical and ideological: that is, they too seek to persuade, they espouse certain values and beliefs, they interpret the meaning of certain events, and they limit and constrain their readers in multiple ways (DeSilva, 678–79). These perspectives allow new angles of vision on Luke-Acts as a historical project.