Alastair's Adversaria - Reading Acts As Scripture (with Patrick Schreiner)

Episode Date: February 10, 2023

Dr Patrick Schreiner, Associate Professor of New Testament and Biblical Theology at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, joins me for a discussion of the book of Acts and its interpretation. He is the author of the new Acts commentary in the Christian Standard Commentary series (https://amzn.to/3xf0Dvy). If you have enjoyed my videos and podcasts, please tell your friends. If you are interested in supporting my videos and podcasts and my research more generally, please consider supporting my work on Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/zugzwanged), using my PayPal account (https://bit.ly/2RLaUcB), or by buying books for my research on Amazon (https://www.amazon.co.uk/hz/wishlist/ls/36WVSWCK4X33O?ref_=wl_share). You can also listen to the audio of these episodes on iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/gb/podcast/alastairs-adversaria/id1416351035?mt=2.

Hello and welcome to another episode. I'm joined today by the author of a new commentary on the book of Acts, Patrick Shriner, whose associate professor of New Testament and biblical theology at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Kansas City, Missouri. It's wonderful to have you with me. It's great to be here with you, Alistair. So many people have written on the book of Acts, and it seems that everything about the book of Acts must have already been said. What made you decide to write another commentary? And what do you think that your commentary can bring to the discussion? Yeah, good question. Someone asked me to write, Alistair. That's why I wrote it. I had no previous interest in it. No, I'm just kidding. There is some truth to that. But, you know, this new series, which is the old

NACS series. I don't know if you recognize the relationship between it, but the new American commentary series is being kind of rebranded after the CSB Bible. So this is the C-S-C Christian Standard Commentary Series. The old covers, people know books by their covers, right, were kind of a red color. Now they're a blue color. So it's very confusing. But they look much better now. But they were, they're redoing the series. And that means they're reissuing some of the commentaries. And then they're redoing some of them, an offer is updating them. So for Acts, John Polhill did the one previously, which actually is an excellent commentary. It's very, very well done. I really enjoyed that one. But he's older now and he wasn't going to redo that one. So they asked me to do it.

I have been working a lot on Matthew, as you may know, and I hadn't done a ton of work on Acts besides my own teaching ministry. And then I had done a lot of spatial, actually in my kind of dissertation. So I touched on Acts and actually Jesus's ascension a little bit, even in my dissertation PhD work. So they came to me and they asked, hey, we've got Acts open. Are you interested in doing that? We're looking for a very theological reading. That's kind of how this series is going. And we know you love to do theological readings, which we'll talk about more. And I had to ponder it. And then I thought, yeah, I really do want to do acts. I'm very interested in the narrative portions of the New Testament, especially. And so,

I'm kind of a gospel's focus person. So it makes sense that I would include acts in that because it's the narrative portion of the New Testament. And then I sat down, just kind of another funny little story, I sat down and I actually Googled how many verses are in Acts. And then I looked at my due date and I thought, I need to write every day on one verse to get this done in time because Axe is a large book. So 28 chapters, I don't even remember how many verses total, but I obviously didn't do that. But I ended up working on this for about six years on and off for about six years, really spent three years solid on it and then spent another three years kind of editing, thinking, honing it. And as you asked, when I looked at all the acts commentaries, I did think,

well, what do I have to offer here? But, you know, honestly, there is a sense in which I think the world of biblical interpretation has gone through somewhat of a shift. There was a lot of really good historical commentaries out there. There was a lot of good exegetical commentaries out there. But in my own training, I was really helped by your friend Peter Lightheart, by people like Richard Hayes, by really patristic interpreters of the scriptures and the fathers. And the kind of the movement called theological interpretation of scripture. And so I looked at all the commentaries on acts. And while there's a few theological commentaries on acts, there's not a lot. And so I was really trying to step into this stream of not having to make a full-fledged argument for every

typological connection I made because that would make the commentary way too long. And I just read the fathers and I see them doing it because they believe in a divine author. They believe in the unity of the scriptures and I thought, I think I can do the same thing. Now, I do provide some arguments, but you don't have time to get into everything. And then at the same time, I did see a lot of people using dogmatics really to help interpret the book of Acts. And so I very purposefully, actually, if you open the commentary, the first thing you get is the theology of Acts. I don't start with genre and date and author on purpose because there's a lot of good ways to do commentaries. But, you know, as you think about history and God and his relationship to history, God comes before

history. Ontology comes before into epistemology is another way to put that. God orders history. God creates history. And so it kind of makes sense. And one and another way to start with God and who he was and how he's portrayed in the book of Acts. I don't claim to be trained in systematic theology, but I try to say, stay up on the conversation. And so the other piece of this, theology that I maybe mentioned in my book that's unique is when you come to the to acts often people just think of the holy spirit and i noticed there is a not an emphasis upon the father's action in the book of acts and so um alan thompson has done great work on the work of christ in the book of acts with the nsb t series carson's little gray series on biblical theology and then i saw a ton of

great work on the spirit and acts but i didn't see a lot of work on the father and axe so i actually did it through a Trinitarian perspective and use kind of the classical relations of origin and the missions of the Son and the Spirit to really help me order the theology of Acts, which is, you know, it was so nice to have that kind of paradigm to just say, yeah, this is how everyone has kind of thought through the relation of the Father, Son, and Spirit. And it really plays itself out perfectly in Acts. I think the early church knew exactly what they were doing. And so beginning kind of with the father's plan. Boulé is kind of the term they use in Acts for the father's administration of this whole

plan. And then the son who's ruling and reigning ascended to the heavens and directing this plan. And then the spirit who is empowering. And so we need to back up when we talk about the spirit and say, remember, the spirit is sent by the father that we could get made. And maybe by the son we could talk about, well, I don't know. I don't have a lot to say about that. But certainly we need to have an order of relation there that he spirates from the father,

just as the son is eternally begotten from the father. So I was using categories like that to kind of help me walk through the commentary and then using, as I said, kind of the patristic way of interpreting that's saying, you know, every word is in here for our instruction. And every word is meaningful. So I think I quoted from maybe even a reformer at the beginning that said, all of this is here for our instruction. And so things that you might think are boring or why is this in here, that's where he really wants you to dig in there and say, why is this included? I think even when

that comment was made, it was on Acts 27 and the Sea Journey. And he was like, what are we to do with all these details, which we might talk about later? But I found that really helpful is just a paradigm. So I hope as people pick up this commentary that they'll see different things that they haven't seen before in the Book of Acts because I am approaching it from a unique angle. I read over a dozen commentaries on the Book of Acts fairly in the last few years. And it really, I think that holds true that there are a number of things that you just don't see dealt with very well. The theological element, much of the literary element, I think, is neglected in many of these commentaries. They're not thinking enough about the structural

features and some of the illusions and other things like that. And then the typology more generally, there's a lot more work that can be done on that. And so, whereas I'd recommend, I mean, if I'm going to recommend an exhaustive commentary on the book of Acts, it would be Craig Keeners, which is just a be-ha-martha, but probably one of the biggest commentaries out there, about five I read the whole thing. It was, yeah, he sent it to me. He's the kindest man ever. And he found out I was working acts, and he sent me all four volumes.

And I thought, wow, this is amazing. Why do I need to write anything? And he recommends your commentary on the cover as well. That's right. That's right. He endorsed it. He was kind to do so. But yes, if I were going to recommend a commentary for pastors and preachers and well-read lay people,

this would be the commentary that yours would be. be the commentary that I'd recommend. It really covers the bases very well. If you're thinking about some of these literary connections with the book of Luke, for instance, Tannahill stuff is helpful on that. For a broader treatment, getting into the detail, but also covering these theological and literary and historical and other bases, I found your commentary incredibly helpful. So thank you for your work on it.