Luke clearly sought to accomplish several goals in his account of the origins of the early church. The preceding discussion shows that different contemporary interpreters perceive different possible agendas in his writing, both explicit and also the implicit values of conflicting grand-narratives in Luke’s environment.
Like the author of Luke-Acts, the modern reader also brings to the reading of this work his or her own view(s) of the world, biases, agendas, and participation in the often implicit grand-narratives of our own time. By attending to these possibilities, we may discover in reading Acts our own values and also our own inconsistencies, for as Louis Althusser has warned: “there is no such thing as an innocent reading, we must say what readings we are guilty of” (Althusser, 14).