Handout for my Graham Stanton Memorial Lecture, ‘“The God of Abraham, Isaac aand Jacob” (Acts 3:13)—Is That All? Learning about God from the Book of Acts’

I’m pleased to share the outline of my Graham Stanton Memorial Lecture, ‘“The God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob” (Acts 3:13)—Is That All? Learning about God from the Book of Acts’. I’ll be giving this during the British New Testament Society meeting in Glasgow, 22-24 August, and I’m making it available here as a Word file and here as a pdf file. The lecture is in honour of Professor Graham Stanton, one of the founders of the British NT Society (with Professor Jimmy Dunn).

Here’s the abstract of the lecture:

James Dunn asserts that Paul has nothing to say about God which cannot be found in the Jewish Scriptures, that his understanding of God is ‘axiomatic’. This paper engages with the book of Acts to see how far that is an accurate picture of Luke’s portrayal of God there: is God only ‘the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob’ (3:13) or is there more to be said? There are a considerable number of mentions of God in Acts, especially in the theologically loaded speeches—significantly more than mentions of Jesus or the Holy Spirit. Accordingly, I shall study a series of case studies: the gateway to Acts (1:1–2:47); the healing of the man at the Beautiful Gate and the speech, Sanhedrin hearing, and prayer which flow from it (3:1–4:31); a sequence about the sharing (or not) of possessions (4:32–5:11); and Saul’s encounter with the exalted Jesus on the road to Damascus (9:1-22). I shall conclude by summarising how God is portrayed, what God does or is done to God, the functions of talk of God, the impact of Luke’s portrait of Jesus and the Spirit on his understanding of God (and vice versa), and the agents and adversaries God has, and thus that Luke’s portrait of God is a significant advance on the portrait he inherits from Scripture.