Shaping the Scriptural Imagination: Truth, Meaning, and the Theological Interpretation of the Bible

5. Hearing Peter’s Speech in Acts 3: Meaning and Truth in Interpretation

77 5 Hearing Peter’s Speech in Acts 3 Meaning and Truth in Interpretation What does it mean to identify Scripture’s statements as “true”? Biblical narratives and academic scrutiny of them cannot adjudicate truth claims. As Juel’s reading of Acts 3 shows, determining the “truth” of what the Bible says depends in part on how the Bible moves us to act and how it leads us to greater reliance upon God in our own contexts. ——— It is remarkable how significantly interpretation can be shaped by the sorts of questions asked of the Bible. Consider, for example, the question, “What does Peter’s speech in Acts 3 mean?” For ordinary Bible readers, the question may seem perfectly appropriate. The more sophisticated might insist that the first question should be, “What did the speech mean?” It was, after all, written to people of a different time and circumstance—people who spoke a “foreign” language. Students of beginning Greek soon sense the distance between themselves and the original audience. A still more sophisticated Bible reader might insist that the question be more precise: “What does the Bible mean to a particular person or audience?” The speech might mean one thing to Peter’s audience, something different to Luke’s readers, and something else entirely to a modern-day audience. Even “modern-day audience” may be too general, since there are many. Perhaps we can ask only, “What does this passage mean to you?”—a rather different question from, “What does this passage mean?” Who speaks for a “general” audience —and what would such an audience look like? What would be their interests? In what ways would they be addressed by the speech? 78 Shaping the Scriptural Imagination The academic community has dealt with such questions by limiting them. Interpreters ask what a passage means to an imagined audience, usually the historical audience for whom Luke wrote (an audience about which we know little and that must thus be “imagined”). We seem to have agreed to speak and write for a contemporary audience that will discuss only how others are addressed by the Scriptures. Public conversation keeps the Bible at a distance, providing a safety zone for personal opinion about what the material “means to me” and making it difficult to imagine how we could speak about what it “means to us.” What then of the question, “Is it true?” Such a question cannot be addressed to Peter or to Luke or even to the church that preserved Luke and Acts in its canonical collection, since none of these can answer. The question can only be addressed to one another, and it makes sense only if it is asked about our interpretations of what the speech means. What public claims do we wish to make in our interpretations of the speech, and what would qualify them as “true”? Most interpreters, if pressed, would probably feel most comfortable dealing with “truth” questions by restricting them to historical matters, i.e., to matters of “fact.” Discussions about whether or not Peter could have given such a speech and, if so, how it would have been preserved and translated, deal with one small dimension of the truth question. “Did it really happen?” is a legitimate question, though a limited one. Those who ask such questions must be prepared to operate within the rules laid down for historical argument, rules of evidence which spell out how a convincing argument can be made about a proposition. Dealing with such matters of “historical fact” does little to assist interpreters in determining what a passage means, however. For as students of history recognize, history is rhetorical in nature: history is written to make arguments. “Facts” are important within a framework that makes them significant—that renders them meaningful. Luke tells the story of the early Jesus movement because he intends to convince an audience of something—and to change and shape that audience in view of the story he tells. The events reported mean something; they set out to convince readers “of the certainty concerning the things you have been taught” (Luke 1:4). Most students of Acts are well aware of such matters and are willing to make arguments about the literary form and the rhetoric of the work. Not any interpretation of Luke and Acts can be sustained. We know something about conventions in the ancient world and in our own that Hearing Peter’s...