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ОглавлениеWith Charles Pinches
Beginning Explorations
Christians are people expected to bear witness to what makes them Christian. Indeed, to connect witness to Christianity is commonplace. But as with many theological commonplaces, we can miss the significance of the grammar of a faith that demands that Christians witness to what they believe. The complexity of these matters is evident by the way the grammar of the last sentence betrays our contention about witness. Christians do not witness to what they believe, but what they believe must be a witness. Why should the God Christians worship require witnesses?
In fact, believer and non-believer alike often assume that any god worth believing in should not depend on witnesses to be made known. So if the God of Israel who raised Jesus from the dead requires witnesses, then this suggests that what Christians believe about this God must be false. Yet we will argue that if the God we worship as Trinity, and worship is the right word, could be known without witnesses, that would indicate that such a God, the Christian one, actually does not exist. No doubt this is a strong claim to which we cannot do full justice in what follows; yet we hope to say enough to suggest why the claim matters and what might be some of its important theological implications.
One robust metaphysical point that relates to the connection between witness and truth is simply that all that is, the vast expanse of creation in all its complexities and intricacies, did not have to be. And of course, we are part of this “all.” We are created, contingent beings that did not have to be. Only God exists by necessity, as Christians (along with certain others) claim. But Christians believe further that the God that exists by necessity is known only through contingent creatures. “Witness” names the truth that the only way we can know the character of the world, the only way we know ourselves, the only way we know God is by one person telling another.1
We believe an exploration of the relation between God, truth, and witness2 is appropriate in an essay that seeks to honor Fergus Kerr. We hope it helps illumine his work, in particular his understanding of Thomas. As Kerr observes in After Aquinas: Versions of Thomism, Thomas thought arguments for God’s existence were necessary not so as to convince hypothetically open-minded atheists, or even to persuade “fools,” but rather “to deepen and enhance the mystery of the hidden God. . . . Far from being an exercise in rationalistic apologetics, the purpose of arguing for God’s existence is to protect God’s transcendence.”3
Kerr develops this extremely important point by noting that Thomas’s arguments for God’s existence are expressions of his understanding of God’s simplicity. Divine simplicity makes clear that we cannot know what God is; rather, we can only reason to God from the existence of the world that did not have to be. Indeed, from this perspective, arguments for God’s existence are actually a way to resist idolatry, presuming as they do that those things about which we do have knowledge — that is, that which exists but requires no explanation — are best known as “effects.” According to Kerr, the notion that all that is testifies as “effect” expresses that all that is is created. In short, all that is witnesses to God by acknowledging that all that is is created.
Kerr thinks rightly that his understanding of the character of Thomas’s “proofs” expresses his affinity with Alasdair MacIntyre’s arguments in Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry: Encyclopaedia, Genealogy, and Tradition against the epistemological turn in modern philosophy.4 With MacIntyre, Kerr argues that the epistemological turn skewed readings of Thomas after Aeterni Patris.5 Joseph Kleutgen6 and other Thomists misread Thomas as responding to the Cartesian problematic to defeat skepticism. But this fundamentally distorts his position. It assumes that the Summa exemplifies a great system wherein the arguments are so tightly interrelated there can be no “externality.”7
Quite to the contrary, what Thomas meant to do was truthfully describe God’s world, in all its contingency. Indeed, one of the fundamental callings of the theologian is to read the world as God’s creation. As one of us has suggested, a suitable image for Aquinas at work in the Summa is that of an expert forester whose eye is trained to mark leaf and branch, bark and span.8 He draws distinctions, notes likenesses, groups in one way, then the other, all so as to draw toward a fuller and more truthful vision of what the forest is.
The image of Thomas as a forester, moreover, suggests how important is contingency in his work.9 Aquinas saw quite clearly that “accidents which are altogether accidental are neglected by every art, by reason of their uncertainty and infinity.”10 We need to know which accidents not to neglect. Put another way, if all that is bears the character of “accident,” in order to find your way through a forest of such contingent truths you will have to know which ones count to tell you what you need to know. The Summa is Thomas’s attempt not only to display the forest but also to negotiate a path through it without getting lost in the details.
This is how the whole of the Summa, not only its second part, can count as ethics — just to the extent, that is, that Thomas means to show throughout what it means that we are human beings who are the “principle of our actions.”11 We are beings capable of truth because we are capable of actions that require that we say what we have done — which we cannot do truthfully unless we know the world we act within. The repertoire of descriptions as well as their interrelation is complicated, requiring care and attention if we are not to be self-deceived. And this means we must describe all that is properly, namely, as God’s creative and redemptive work.
This is a tall order, for what could be more vast and varied than the contingencies of the created world? Yet, as Kerr notes, Thomas believed (and showed) that we can proceed with a certain confidence. Unencumbered by Cartesian doubt, “for Thomas, human beings are created in God’s image and likeness, and, more particularly, are born such that our own minds are connaturally open to the world that reveals itself to us and even reveals itself as created.”12 Since the created world includes us, knowing it means knowing ourselves — as created, as in God’s image, and as sinners.
A key point for Kerr is that modern philosophers have become entangled in the “Enlightenment’s mechanistic conception of causation.”13 Read back into Thomas, “first cause” is assumed to be something other than the personal God Thomas worshiped. But as Kerr notes, Thomas’s view about cause was much more subtle and supple, rooted in Aristotle and, in fact, in the quite sensible pre-modern notion that “cause” was carried in its meaning by what it is for us human beings to cause something. Summing up, Kerr notes that “God as First Cause is already [for Thomas] God as freely self-communicating goodness, and as final cause attracting created agents to their proper end or telos.”14
Cause and agency, then, are fundamentally related notions, both in God and in us. Here we find ourselves once again at the beginning of the prima secundae, where ethics “officially” begins and where Thomas launches his inquiry into the truth about human actions. Such inquiry is a kind of “science,” although different from what we usually call by that name, since it is not only about the so-called “natural world” but also about us as we live in it. Indeed, this is why it is rightly about all of “creation,” since it does not assume that “natural” and “human” world are radically different entities.15 But as just implied, the “science” becomes decidedly more complicated with the inclusion of human actions.
For instance, as Elizabeth Anscombe argued in Intention, human actions fall under a variety of descriptions, which means truthful inquiry can proceed in a variety of directions.16 Moreover, often it is not possible to give the description of an action, because to know what is the case or what has been done requires that the action be placed in a narrative that is still ongoing. This means the process through which we discover what has happened or what we have done requires that we reason practically — which of course we cannot do well without all the virtues.
We hope these points display our deep sympathy with Kerr’s attempt to “overcome epistemology” — just to the extent that the epistemological project was an attempt to escape contingency by supposing theoretical reason could entirely substitute for the work of practical reason. We also share his use of Ludwig Wittgenstein to “overcome epistemology.” Though we do not make extensive use of Wittgenstein in the account of witness that follows, it owes much to his work. Indeed, much of what we say is a sort of commentary on Wittgenstein’s remark that “a language-game must ‘show’ the facts that make it possible. (But that’s not how it is.)”17 Put differently, we think it is crucial for understanding the grammar of theology that we recognize that language is not one thing and the world another.
“Witness,” then, as we believe, is required by the Christian faith, does not sit atop the world as if it is an epiphenomenal layer of words that help us cope “morally” or “spiritually” in a reality otherwise ruled by the endless bump and grind of “cause” and “effect.” To witness is to speak the truth about the world as God’s, that is, the God of Israel, the same God who raised Christ from the dead — of which we are witnesses. This may make witness seem like a simple, formulaic thing that simply rehearses one alleged truth. Yet, to the contrary, we hold that proper attention to witness is essential if we are to avoid the sort of reductionism that assumes that some deeper account of “meaning” is necessary to support what we say as Christians. By rejecting such “deeper accounts” we do not mean to imply that Christians cannot be wrong in what they say; indeed, we invite objections to how we speak about the world — without supposing that fielding them demands that we speak a language more determinative than that we have learned as Christians.
In this way, witness requires the faithful display of Christian speech sufficient to test what is said in the light of how it is said. Such a testing, moreover, cannot be separated from the character of those who speak. Indeed, to speak Christianly means that the speakers’ lives must correspond with what they say. The very grammar of Christian speech presumes that those who use the language have a character commensurate with it.
This is a key reason why theology and ethics cannot be separated; indeed, theology is first and foremost an exercise in practical reason.18 Again, this is not to say that theology is about anything else than the truth. But the truth it is about involves us as creatures of God, made in God’s image, even if fallen. So we cannot speak this truth without it having worked truthfully in us. Speaker and what is spoken cannot be separated if Christians’ claims about God and God’s world have the purchase of truth. “Witness” is the crucial grammar that upholds and enfolds these claims.
Of course, such claims beg for further explication. Yet this cannot come merely at a theoretical level. Indeed, if witness is only spoken of theoretically, it empties out. More than explanation, the character of witness requires concrete display, as we hope to do as we retell the story of the witness of the first Christians. Such stories are not optional, not only because witness is always specifically given in place and time but also because the first witnesses display something about how Christian witness will go. Moreover, they give us means for practical judgments. This is doubly important since the ways in which Christians subvert their witness to Christ proliferate as they take up forms of “practical reason” that skew political prudence. To glimpse what we take as the ethical and political implications of our account of witness, such subversions will need attention, which we give briefly in the final section of this essay. As we hold, such subversions almost always have to do with abandoning witness for some more apparently powerful way of speaking — a point Kerr’s work has helpfully prepared us for. Here the political suppression of witnesses, that is, the attempt to make witnesses voiceless, will also be briefly considered. This is particularly important if we remember that the fundamental form of witness by Christians is called martyrdom.
Witness Exemplified: Explorations from the New Testament
Witness is required by those of us who would count ourselves Christians because the God we worship is not a general truth that can be known apart from those who worship him and have been called into his Kingdom. It is not accidental that Jesus calls disciples so that they might be witnesses to him. Discipleship and witness together constitute Christology; Jesus cannot be known without witnesses who follow him. Discipleship and witness together remind us that the Christ we follow and to whom we bear witness defies generalization.
The witness of the disciples, moreover, has a definite shape. In the tenth chapter of the Gospel of Matthew Jesus summons his disciples, gives them explicit instructions, and then sends them to the lost sheep of Israel.19 They are to go as witnesses to Jesus in whom the Kingdom of Heaven has come near. And they have work to do: cure the sick, raise the dead, cleanse leapers, and cast out demons. Furthermore, they are to receive no compensation for their work, nor are they to travel weighed down by money or clothing. They should not be deterred by those who do not respond to their mission, but rather they should see such rejection as an invitation to go to others.
These instructions indicate the character of the witness given throughout the New Testament. The disciples of Jesus are sent out as bearers of news; they have received a message to spread, but they themselves are also the exemplification of what they have to say. However, this is not really their doing. That is to say, whatever actions are theirs as faithful disciples, and to whatever degree their lives bear truthful witness, this is always also the result of a gift they have been given. This is why the news or story they have to tell turns out always to be inseparable from what has happened to them. The story they tell is about them insofar as they testify in the telling to what has happened to them. But it points past them, or through them, to the God they believe they have met in Christ Jesus.
To be sure, as they tell their story the disciples often provide inadequate witnesses to Jesus, but the inadequacy itself is also a kind of witness. They have been called to live lives that point to Christ — lives that are unintelligible if the one they follow is not the Son of God. Sometimes the pointing is off direction. But this is revealed precisely as the intelligible Christ is unveiled and their inadequacies are marked in relation to him. Like the sleeping disciples in the garden or Peter warming himself by the fire, even their failures are given focus in relation to Christ to whom they witness. The disciples’ very identity is tied up in what they witness to. In this way Christian witnesses are unlike those “witnesses” who might appear in a court of law to testify dispassionately to events they may have seen or heard, like bits of facts that have no bearing on their own lives and that they pass over to judge or jury to do with as they please. Instead, they are more like people who have witnessed a horrible accident that cannot be forgotten; it lives with them daily, shaping the contours of their lives henceforth.20
Yet the witness of Christians does more than carry forward from what has happened; it also carries back from what will happen. The disciples of Jesus are called to be witnesses to the reality of a new age, a new time, constituted by his life, death, and resurrection. Apocalypse is the name given to describe the inauguration of this new beginning. The story of Jesus is the story of a new creation, the telling of which cannot but challenge the reigning stories that legitimate the practices of the old age. This is present not in overcoming force or power but rather precisely in witness. Indeed, that witness is the form in which the new age is revealed indicates why what has happened requires that a people exist who exemplify the new reality. The existence of the church is itself the determinative (although not the only)21 witness to an alternative politics to that of the old age.22
The new politics is a politics of speech — and so also of act. But it begins in the speech of the church, which is a story we Christians believe is not just ours but everyone’s. As such it cannot but be a complex story with many subplots. Nevertheless, it begins simply in a meeting with the Christ. This story is told in hope that it will be received, that those who hear it will be able to recognize how all that is exists as a witness to God. Spoken as witness, its purpose is not definitive; it does not end all arguments but rather opens space for them to appear. Here is the story — now what do you think? Indeed, witness is a first step in introducing arguments we need to have, ones that could not have been discovered until each particular witness was offered.23
While witnesses expect they will be heard, they also know that sometimes they will not. Genuine witnesses to the Christian gospel are fully aware that it can and might be rejected. Indeed, to be a “witness” in the New Testament is also to be a martyr — or, better put, the term “martyr” is the New Testament Greek term for witness. Of course, “martyr” subsequently came to mean that one died in the act of witnessing — although it was not so narrowly circumscribed for the first Christians.24
The Book of the Acts of the Apostles uses the term “witness” twenty-three times.25 This frequent use is fitting since the book’s task is to describe what the first followers of Christ told others about him. Yet the usage is not generalized; witness is not so much treated as a concept as it is displayed in a story. Moreover, the Book of Acts is a narrative that carries its story not principally, as the Gospels do, by following the story of one person, but rather by focusing on first one act and then another of a crowd of witnesses. Those who witness understand themselves to have been uniquely claimed by Christ. Indeed, the witnessing we hear in Acts frequently takes a highly personal form: this is what happened to me, or us, as we encountered the Christ. These encounters are then drawn up into the whole story, becoming pillars of support. Following on the Gospels, Christ remains the center of the narrative in Acts, yet now through these others who witness to him. As their stories are told, they point to his. However, and crucially, the details and particularities of the stories are not obliterated in the pointing, nor are the characters whose stories they are.
As Kavin Rowe suggests, “readers do not have to labor long in the book of Acts until they come across its programmatic thesis: after receiving the power of the Holy Spirit, says the risen Jesus, the disciples ‘shall be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria and to the end of the earth’ ” (Acts 1:8).26 Such a program, however, depends on there being particular people who respond to the call to witness, each in his or her peculiar manner. Nearer the end of his narrative Luke dwells especially on St. Paul.
Intriguingly, Paul often witnesses by telling his own story. This is not only because it is interesting but also because it describes Paul’s own call to be a witness. The story is well known, one of the most reported in the New Testament. We hear it first within the sequence of Luke’s narrative in chapter 9 of Acts, and then it is retold twice in considerable detail by Paul himself (as Luke has it) in chapters 22 and 26. Finally, Paul alludes to the episode in his letters more than once, that is, in Galatians 1 and 1 Corinthians 9 and 15. So many references invite comparative study. Yet our interest here is focused on the two accounts Luke accredits to Paul when he retells the story of how he became a witness. These are especially interesting since they are also cases of witnessing, that is, Paul is witnessing about becoming a witness.
In the first case, in chapter 22 of Acts, Paul has just been arrested in Jerusalem amid a cloud of confusion. As they are about to take him into the barracks and away from the angry crowd, the arresting Roman soldiers are surprised to discover that Paul speaks Greek; they had been operating under the mistaken assumption that he was a notorious Egyptian revolutionary.27 The surprise seems to help Paul, since the soldiers grant him his request to “speak to the people” (22:39) — namely, the Jews. He tells the interesting tale of his life, focusing on the road to Damascus experience. Here he accents the part of the story where, after the encounter, he is put under Ananias’s wing in Damascus. It is Ananias who tells him: “The God of our ancestors has chosen you to know his will and to see the Righteous One and to hear words from his mouth. You will be his witness to all men of what you have seen and heard. Get up, be baptized and wash your sins away, calling on his name” (22:14-16, emphasis added).28
Ananias’s role is important in this telling not only because it is from him that Paul gets his charge to be a witness, but also because he (Ananias) can perform something of a witnessing role for Paul’s listeners. Paul’s encounter on the road is not his to interpret; he needs others to place the strange event in a fruitful context of meaning. Indeed, Ananias speaks for the church, and so for the God who is calling it forth throughout the progression of Luke’s narrative in Acts. Moreover, it is not by accident that Luke’s Paul includes about Ananias that he is a “devout man according to the law and well spoken of by all the Jews living [in Damascus]” (22:12). In this role Paul clearly hopes his Jewish audience will hear Ananias as a kind of second source, a corroborating witness.
Perhaps this is the reason it is not surprising that Ananias is omitted in the subsequent retelling in chapter 26. Here Paul is speaking before the Roman Agrippa, who no doubt will be entirely unimpressed by the devout follower of the law in Damascus. This change in the story might seem disingenuous, as if Paul is playing to his audience. But of course he is — for he wants them to listen. He is, after all, witnessing.
Paul witnesses so as to win people over, which is not to say that he speaks falsehood to do so; that would be absurd, since he believes he is preaching the truth about all that is, which clearly cannot be held together with a lie. Yet the story can be both truthfully and differently told, which Luke’s Paul is happy to do if the different telling will bring different people differently into the truth.
Witness in this regard is not merely passing over plain, unadorned truth. As mentioned earlier, it is affecting truth; if it is “believed” yet bears no active fruit in response, it has failed as witness. As Jesus says, you need ears to hear it — which implies that some listen but do not hear. If the gospel is to be “heard” it must penetrate into one’s life. And this cannot happen if it remains foreign. As he witnesses, Paul means to bring his witness close. For some, the story of Ananias will help; for others it will not.
While Ananias disappears in the second story, the crucial point he speaks in the first story about Paul’s call to be a witness remains. As Paul relates,
“About noon, O king, as I was on the road, I saw a light from heaven, brighter than the sun, blazing around me and my companions. We all fell to the ground, and I heard a voice saying to me in Aramaic, ‘Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me? It is hard for you to kick against the goads.’ Then I asked, ‘Who are you, Lord?’ ‘I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting,’ the Lord replied. ‘Now get up and stand on your feet. I have appeared to you to appoint you as a servant and as a witness of what you have seen of me and what I will show you. I will rescue you from your own people and from the Gentiles. I am sending you to them to open their eyes and turn them from darkness to light, and from the power of Satan to God, so that they may receive forgiveness of sins and a place among those who are sanctified by faith in me.’ ” (26:13-18 NIV, emphasis added)
These passages not only demonstrate how witness is crucial to the program of Acts but also focus our attention on the particular stories where witness is displayed. Especially in these cases, one telling builds on another. Luke here tells us what Paul told Agrippa or the crowd in Jerusalem about what Jesus or Ananias told him — and this is all about witnessing, which itself involves telling. Witness, then, is displayed as it is introduced; indeed, this is inevitable, for witness to the Christ always requires that the one who witnesses is him- or herself drawn up into the message.
One might fear that the layering, witness upon witness, would produce monotony. Yet, to the contrary, the stories are lively and bring strong reaction. This is partly because, as just noted, it is the prerogative, perhaps even the duty, of the teller to retell the story in such a way as to intrigue. But, more to the point, the nature of Christian witness brings the teller into the story and invites the listener to investigate her. Her life is opened by her speech as witness. In academic argument we typically protest when this occurs: the argument should stand on its own legs. Not so with witness; if the witness fails to instantiate that to which she witnesses, her listeners rightfully reject what she says. Put another way, with respect to Christian witness, ad hominem is entirely fair game. Since this is so, as opposed to “pure” argument, witness is dull only if the one witnessing is dull. And, indeed, if the Christian witness is a dull person, something is wrong — since there is no greater adventure than the Christian life.
This is not a throwaway point. Christian witness is about nothing more or less than how we were made to live, or, expressed more classically, what is our true end. With the story St. Paul tells we are presented with his encounter or “experience” with Christ, yes, but this means little if it does not take his life somewhere, indeed, in the direction it was meant to go. This is why both accounts of the Damascus road encounter take as their focus the new calling or “appointment” Paul receives in it. The calling is the message, but the message requires, as we have seen, both word and deed. This, in fact, is an essential component of the point, made earlier with respect to Kerr’s work, that theology requires, indeed, is a form of practical reason. In this way, the life of Christian witness is linked inextricably to crucial questions of morality properly understood, namely, what is the good life for human persons.29 The life of Christian witness is, as St. Paul has come to know both by hearing and also by doing, the truest and best way to live. To be sure, it can be lived differently, as Acts shows us by showing us so many different witnesses. But each is a full, profoundly interesting life, the life the particular witness was meant for, and which the witness now lives out as a gift received from Christ to whom he or she bears witness.
Evidently dullness was not a problem for Paul, although in another sense “interesting” came to be. For interesting living is also imaginative living, and this is not always well received. So it is that both accounts of Paul’s witnessing about being appointed as a witness carry forward to a reaction. In the first we get the following report from Luke: “The crowd listened to Paul until he said this [that he was sent by God to the Gentiles]. Then they raised their voices and shouted ‘Rid the earth of him! He’s not fit to live’ ” (Acts 22:22). In the second, Luke tells us that Festus, who is listening with King Agrippa, “interrupted Paul’s defense. ‘You are out of your mind, Paul!’ he shouted. ‘Your great learning is driving you insane’ ” (26:24).
A commonality in the reaction is that suddenly what Paul is saying, and Paul himself, appears strange, even offensive, to his audience. Commenting especially on the second episode, Kavin Rowe notes that
considered from a pagan point of view — that is, any Graeco-Roman perspective outside the specifically Christian rationale for mission — the Christian mission must inevitably appear strange. It is not simply that the death of one Jew at the hands of a Roman governor would not even make the news, or the idea that all of time should be thought in relation to this Jew rather than the emperor, or his followers’ belief that the Jew was alive again, or the conviction that what was “wrong with the world” was directly related to humanity’s worship of the god of Israel, as strange as these things would doubtless appear. It is rather, to be conceptually more precise, that there was no preexistent category or tradition of inquiry within which the phenomenon of Christian mission could be rightly perceived. . . . Festus’ perplexity . . . was the proper epistemological posture of someone who thinks the Christians are literally crazy.30
As Rowe’s book title indicates, Christian witness in Acts turns the pagan world “upside down” — which also means that very often the witnesses and the Christ they carry will appear simply crazy to the likes of the Roman governor Festus. For Rowe, Festus’s description of Paul as “crazy” is indicative of and integral to the pattern of Acts. Far from being an apologia for the Greco-Roman (as opposed to the Jewish) way — as some scholars have alleged — Luke’s story repeatedly displays what Rowe calls the “collision” between Christian mission and the pagan world it encountered. Using Charles Taylor’s notion of the “social imaginary,” Rowe shows how the new Christian vision challenged the metaphysical order in which the typical practices of the Greco-Roman world made sense.
Sacrificing to the gods, soothsaying, magic, the use of household shrines, and so forth all gain their intelligibility as practices within a moral or metaphysical order that underwrites the reality in which it makes sense to do these things. . . . [A]ccording to Acts, sacrificing to gods, soothsaying, magic, and so forth, do not “make sense” for the early Christians. The reason is not hard to find: the wider predicament in which these practices made sense has disappeared. Thus the collision between the Christian mission and the larger Mediterranean world is both extraordinarily deep and “thick” for the reason that it entails multiple layers of sense-making, that is, a social imaginary.31
The witness that is the Christian gospel is hardly harmless. Rowe calls it “a deep threat to preexisting foundational ways of life in the Mediterranean world.” As Paul brings the news to Lystra or Philippi or Athens, his visits presage what Rowe calls “cultural collapse.”32 But the threat comes not in a swarm of military might, nor, for that matter, in a barrage of innovative political ideas. It comes rather as theology. “The possibility of cultural demise [of the pagan world] is rooted in the counter-cultural explication of the break between God and the world. . . . Because ‘God’ in Luke’s sense corresponds not to a particular point within the widest of human horizons but to that which constitutes — makes possible and stands over against — the entirety of the human horizon, the call to (re)turn to God carries with it an entire pattern of life.”33
The truth to which Paul and others witness in Acts is comprehensive: it renarrates the whole of human life, indeed, all that is, in the light of the God who is — now fully known through Christ. This requires a change in the way we live, according to Rowe a change in the “entire pattern of life.” This also displays why the theology is embodied precisely in the ones who arrive with the news of it; they witness to the new vision and also inhabit it. So both what they say and who they are represent a potential threat. As such, it and they may be violently rejected, as the growing connection in the New Testament between witness and martyrdom reminds us. So those who arrive with the news may also be called to give their lives for it. Yet whether they live or die, for the gospel to take root and grow — and so challenge, even bring the demise of, the cultures it encounters — it must be brought by people who both speak and practice it. Christian faith is not a disembodied set of ideas or theories; it is not intuited or received by osmosis. The Kingdom grows person to person; it is brought through witness. Once again, the reason is theological: the God Christians worship is no general truth that can be known apart from those who have been called into his Kingdom. So if the Kingdom is to grow, these ones must travel, bearing witness.
This is why Paul thinks the feet of those who bring the gospel are so beautiful (Rom. 10:10). If they had not walked, the gospel would not have come. Moreover, they come not simply as carriers of a package they can leave on the doorsteps of cities and villages throughout the Mediterranean world, for the locals to unwrap on their own. Rather, as Luke’s story shows, we cannot know Jesus without those, like Paul, who were called by him. And the same remains today: there is no Christ without those who are still being called. To reiterate, the fact that such witnesses are required arises from the fact that the witness is to a life that defies generalization. It is a life that was and is seen, heard, even touched.
