Mission and the book of Acts in a pluralist society

Introduction

There are many possible ways to learn mission ¹ from Acts. ² Some have used Luke–Acts as a grab-bag of timeless commissioning statements or as a “casebook” of mission principles. ³ Others have looked back to Acts as the golden age of missionary triumph in an attempt to recreate it. ⁴ Rather than offer one more eclectic approach which presumes the answers it goes in search of, I will start with Acts and allow the exegetical study to shape the questions—to say nothing of “answers”—with which we might interrogate our own mission practices. Specifically, I will take up an under-examined aspect of Acts—namely, the way in which the messianic identity of Jesus and universal witness are related. Specifically, I will argue that Luke’s narrative construal of the relationship between witness and what we might call—to use shorthand—“christology” is central to how Acts interprets the challenges of intercultural encounter. Taking the Cornelius incident as broadly representative (10–11:18; 15:7–11), I will show how Luke narrates the unfolding of universal witness (to Jews and Gentiles everywhere) as an unfolding of the identity of Jesus and sign of his universal lordship (10:36). From a witness’s perspective especially (in this case, Peter’s), recognition of Gentile inclusion is simultaneously an acceptance of Jesus’ universal lordship. Rather than focus on what Luke thinks about the challenge of the gospel to the “other” in some abstract way—which is really no way at all—I will pay attention to the portrayal of the challenge of Jesus’ universal lordship for the apostles and witnesses themselves. If Acts envisions the practice of universal witness as primarily the fulfillment of messianic identity, what are we to make of human participation in the unfolding of Jesus’ lordship, and how does it relate to the common presumption that mission is a mandate from Jesus (e.g., Matt 28:18–20)? With Luke’s help, perhaps, we can reimagine the place of intercultural encounter in a theology of mission, offering a Lukan sketch of what we might tentatively call a “christology of intercultural interdependence.”

Christology and universal witness

We begin with Luke 24:46–48, a pivotal text for Luke–Acts: “Thus it is written, that the Messiah is to suffer and to rise from the dead on the third day, and that repentance and forgiveness of sins is to be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem. You are witnesses of these things.” Not only do Jesus’ death and resurrection fulfill the biblical script, ⁵ so to speak, but so does universal witness—through proclamation of repentance and forgiveness of sin in his name to all nations. In a manner yet to be clarified, Luke claims the events of Jesus’ passion and resurrection now past and universal witness still to come represent the culmination of Israel’s testimony about the Christ. ⁶

The conjunction of apostolic mission with Jesus’ death and resurrection may initially strike us as a novelty within Luke–Acts. After all, nowhere in the Third Gospel does Jesus himself take up sustained outreach to Gentiles, ⁷ nor does he charge his followers with such a task until after he is risen from the dead (Luke 24:46–48; Acts 1:8). Therefore, universal witness seems, at least at first, to be an addendum to the established christological claim (of his death and resurrection), especially since the apostolic commission (chrono)logically comes after Jesus’ resurrection. Surely, we might suppose, the “Lukan commission” is intended as a kind of response to the recognition of Jesus as messiah, an answer to the summons to proclaim him abroad. Indeed, Luke’s two-volume work can be divided by these events—the Third Gospel offers the story of who Jesus is, culminating in his passion and resurrection; Acts takes up the subject of universal proclamation by apostles and witnesses after Jesus’ earthly departure (1:11). In short, Luke is about the identity of Jesus, Acts about the story of his followers. ⁸ At least, according to the standard account, that is, Luke’s two volumes move from Jesus to his witnesses or, in traditional terms, from “christology” to “missiology.” ⁹

One notable representative of this account is Chris Wright (2010), who understands the yoked claims of Jesus passion/resurrection (Luke 24:46), on the one hand, and universal witness through the preaching of repentance/forgiveness in his name (24:47), on the other, as distinct categories of biblical fulfillment, using the conceptual shorthand of “christology” and “missiology.” Because of his overriding commitment to read the OT missiologically, but also to safeguard the OT from unchecked christological interpretations, Wright distinguishes sharply between the christological and the missiological. But such a distinction—let alone separation—between christology and missiology in Luke–Acts is by no means obvious, even if such distinctions are rhetorically a given today. As we will see, the evidence for such a distinction in Acts is surprisingly scant, especially if we temporarily bracket Matt 28:18–20.

Building on the thesis of Jacques Dupont, ¹⁰ I submit that rather than a twofold scheme, Luke employs a threefold pattern of biblical fulfillment, first evident in Luke 24:46–48. Jesus is the Christ (1) by his death, (2) by his resurrection, and (3) by his universal Lordship signified in the proclamation of repentance and forgiveness in his name to all nations. On this view, witness belongs within the christological unfolding of Jesus’ identity, not alongside it as a secondary claim. Even if these events are fulfilled in different tenses—passion and resurrection (past) ¹¹ and witness in his name (future)—both are promised in Scripture ¹² and therefore, for Luke, attest a common messianic framework.

Dupont (1974) makes the case for this reading in several ways. ¹³ I will highlight and develop three aspects of his argument that illuminate Acts’ narrative construal of the relationship between christology and witness. After a subsequent analysis of the Cornelius incident I will take up some possible implications of the discussion for informing mission today.

Building on Dupont, attention can first be drawn to the well-known conclusion that Luke has “updated” the apocalyptic tone of Mark by pushing Jesus’ return from the imminent future to the distant horizon. ¹⁴ Through a redactional study of Luke’s use of Mark 13:10 we can see how Luke has translated the apocalyptic associations of Mark’s understanding of universal witness into a motif of promise and fulfillment. ¹⁵ In Mark, Jesus says, “first it is necessary (δεῖ) for the gospel (τὸ εὐαγγέλιον) to be preached (κηρυχθῆναι) to all nations (εἰς πάντα τὰ ἔθνη)” (13:10; cf. 16:15). Following Ferdinand Hahn (1965: 59–63), we note that Luke omits this verse from his version of the same discourse (Mark 13:5–32 // Luke 21:8–33), even though Luke records the verses around Mark 13:10 in two different places (12:11–12; 21:12).

In characteristic fashion, Luke has moved the statement from its apocalyptic setting in Mark into a setting where it functions prophetically—in this case, to Luke 24:47. Evidence of this can be found in the fact that only in Mark 13:10 and Luke 24:47 does the passive infinitive κηρυχθῆναι appear in each respective Gospel. Perhaps more remarkably, the same holds true for the phrase εἰς πάντα τὰ ἔθνη (cf. Rom 16:26). Even the original tone of divine necessity (δεῖ) in Mark 13:10 fits Luke’s outlook in Luke 24, where the especially Lukan word is used repeatedly with regard to the fulfillment of Scripture (cf. Luke 24:7, 26, 44). Luke has translated Mark’s forward-facing claim into a backward-facing claim, even if proclamation to all nations is still to come. ¹⁶ Thus, whereas for Mark universal witness is a sign of the end, for Luke it is a guarantee that Jesus is the Christ, to whom the Scriptures bear witness.

Second, Luke describes Paul’s ministry (13:47; 26:20–23) in a way that refers back to and fulfills the “messianic oracle” (oracle messianique) of Luke 24:47–48/Acts 1:8 (Dupont, 1974: 138). The significance of this connection grows when we realize that Jesus’ promise to his apostles that they will “be witnesses in Jerusalem … to the very ends of the earth” (Acts 1:8) goes largely unfulfilled, except by Paul. Luke connects Paul’s ministry back to Jesus’ commission in a speech at Pisidian Antioch, when he quotes (“the Lord,” quoting) Isa 49:6 (Acts 13:47; cf. Isa 42:6) with respect to himself and Barnabas, “I have set you to be a light for the Gentiles, so that you may bring salvation to the ends of the earth” (13:47). Isaiah’s words, especially the phrase “to the end(s) of the earth,” remind us that Paul is the only character to engage fully in a vocation of universal witness (Acts 9:15–16; 22:15; 23:11; 26:16–23). Even his retrospective account in Acts 26:20 echoes the geographical ordering of Acts 1:8: “[I] declared first to those in Damascus, then in Jerusalem and throughout the countryside of Judea, and also to the Gentiles, that they should repent.” As some have pointed out, underlying Paul’s self-understanding in Acts (9:15–16; 13:46–47; 22:14–15, 21; 26:16–18, 22–23) is an Isaianic conception of servanthood and witness that echoes Luke’s construal of Jesus himself. ¹⁷ By putting Isaiah’s words into (Jesus’ and) Paul’s mouth in Acts 13:47, Luke exemplifies a pattern of overlap between the vocation of Jesus’ servants and that of Jesus himself (Beers, 2015). In the unfolding of universal witness, the universal lordship of the Christ will be plain to see. ¹⁸

Third, toward the end of his ministry, in a speech before King Agrippa, Paul unmistakably echoes Luke 24:46–47, saying that “the Messiah must suffer, and that, by being the first to rise from the dead, he would proclaim light both to our people and to the Gentiles” (26:23). Again employing δεῖ, Luke has Paul repeat and elaborate the threefold scheme issued by Jesus at the end of Luke’s Gospel, including the same motif of scriptural fulfillment. These three events—Jesus’ passion, resurrection, and the proclamation of light to all people—are, according to Paul, “nothing but what the prophets and Moses said would take place” (Acts 26:22)—i.e. “just as it is written” (Luke 24:46). Luke also has Paul clarify that when Luke 24:47 says “to all nations,” it means “both to our people and to the Gentiles.” In this light, “to the end(s) of the earth” (Acts 1:8) is retrospectively illumined as a geographically as well as an ethnically universal statement. The match with Luke 24:47–48 establishes the threefold scheme of Jesus’ messianic fulfillment as bookends to the narrative of Acts, making the so-called Lukan commissions (Luke 24:47–48; Acts 1:8) christological as well as ethnic and geographical (Köstenberger and O’Brien, 2001: 130).

Cumulatively, Paul’s dual claim that he fulfilled universal testimony (26:19–20) and also that “the Messiah … would proclaim light both to our people and to the Gentiles” (26:23) captures what is true for all witnesses: to speak of one’s own testimony is really to speak simultaneously of Jesus’ self-declaration (26:23; cf. 14:3). Without universal witness, the third pillar of Jesus’ identity—his universal lordship—remains unestablished, helping to explain why Acts on the whole is suffused with a strong sense of divine superintendence (or “pneumatology”). The fulfillment of universal witness, in this sense, is a key aspect of Jesus’ messianic identity, since it is ultimately carried out by God at work in Christ and by the power of the Spirit through his followers.

The logic of the article to this point may give the impression that Jesus is not the true Lord if his followers do not engage in universal witness in his name. Luke would hardly have understood this way of putting it. Rather, to the question of Jesus’ identity, Luke would point to the Scriptures and the way prophetic expectations find fulfillment in the story of Jesus’ death and resurrection (Luke 24:25–27, 32, 44–46) and in the story of his universal lordship signified by universal witness (Luke 24:47–9; Acts 1:7–8). In other words, Luke would tell the story of his Gospel and Acts. We can summarize Luke’s construal of the relationship between Jesus’ identity and the universal proclamation in his name as “christology-in-witness.” Luke, however, prefers showing to telling, and the Cornelius episode (Acts 10:1–48; 11:1–18; cf. 15:7–11) and its aftermath (11:19–21) vividly demonstrate how Luke narratively portrays “christology-in-witness” in its intercultural dimensions.

Acts 10: a nexus of christology and universal witness

The Peter and Cornelius story (Acts 10:1–48) is the key episode in Acts’ construal of universal witness, in part because it marks the crowning recognition of Jesus’ universal lordship (10:36), in part because Luke gives this event unparalleled emphasis. ¹⁹ In the story, the Jewish Peter and the Gentile ²⁰ Cornelius receive parallel revelations from God (10:3–6, 30–32; 10:11–16), eventuating in their meeting (10:23–25). In the course of Peter’s message to Cornelius’ household (10:34–43), the Gentiles are baptized by the Spirit and begin praising God and speaking in tongues (10:44–46), the propriety of which Peter formally acknowledges by ordering their water baptism (10:47–48). Peter then goes on to defend the significance of this event to the Jerusalem Jewish believers and apostles in 11:1–18 and later the whole Jerusalem council (15:7–11). For the sake of space, I offer three observations on the significance of the story for Acts’ construal of christology-in-witness in an intercultural key.

First, it should be pointed out that the story focuses our attention on Peter’s perceptions of events, rather than on Cornelius’. When the story is told again in chapters 11 and 15, Cornelius’ name is first excised and then the man himself erased altogether (Witherup, 1993: 55–56). What occupied Luke above all was the meaning of the unfolding of events for Peter and for the wider church. ²¹ Therefore, Luke’s exacting detail centers our attention on two things at once: at the broad salvation-historical level, the admission of Gentiles into God’s people as equal to Jews (“[They] were astounded that the gift of the Holy Spirit had been poured out even on the Gentiles for they heard them speaking in tongues and extolling God”; 10:45–46); at the granular level, Peter’s experience of witness in a boundary-crossing encounter (“it is unlawful for a Jew to associate with or to visit a foreigner [ἀλλόφυλος] … but God has shown me that I should not call anyone profane or unclean”; 10:28). What concerns us primarily is the second level, Peter’s response to the divine revelation from God and through the Gentile Cornelius, which brings us to the heart of Luke’s construal of witness, christology, and interculturality.

Before arriving at Peter’s new insight, however, we must draw attention to a second aspect of Luke’s characterization—Peter’s sluggish theological pace. The characterization of the apostle is primed by the fact that the divine revelation to Cornelius occurs first (10:1–6, 30–32) and Cornelius’ response is, by contrast with Peter’s, immediate. In his own divine vision, three times Peter declares scruples before the specter of clean and unclean foods (10:14–16). Even as Peter makes the turn toward acceptance, he implicitly calls Cornelius’ household ἀλλόφυλοι—foreigners (literally, “[an]other tribe/race”). After time and distance, he will revise this judgment, dissolving the linguistic dichotomy of “us” and “them” ²² which underwrites his ethnocentric definition of clean and unclean. With the Jerusalem council in Acts 15, for the first time in the Gospels or Acts (or contemporary Jewish literature), non-Jewish believers are called “brothers” by their fellow Jewish/Christian believers (Kuecker, 2011: 178, 213).

Even though his kerygmatic speech indicates his grasp of the new reality set in motion, by the end of chapter 10 Peter’s actions indicate he is still playing “catch up” to what the Spirit is doing. ²³ The Spirit even falls on the new believers while Peter is still speaking (10:44), ²⁴ reminding us again that events have theologically outstripped him. In other words, this is hardly a story of apostolic triumph in the face of adversity; the story’s suspense derives from Peter’s misgivings about relinquishing ethnic boundary markers. Indeed, God’s will now allows for Gentiles qua Gentiles to be included among God’s people, yet also seems to place a condition on Jewish apostles to recognize that fact. Remarkably, Gentiles may remain Gentiles after turning to Christ; Jewish believers must change their self-understanding vis-à-vis non-Jews. Consequently, practices tied to Jewish identity—ritual cleanness, dietary laws, circumcision—are downgraded to cultural expressions of Israelite faith, not essentials to be required of Gentile converts. ²⁵

Third, we turn to Peter’s speech in Acts 10:34–43, which expresses his recognition that God’s impartiality includes all people in the invitation to repentance and forgiveness of sins in Jesus’ name. Moreover, narratively, the acceptance of this invitation by Gentiles like Cornelius—in spite of Peter’s wavering—signals that Jesus is indeed Lord of all (10:36). Even Peter’s word order emphasizes the recognition—πάντων κύριος. As a Jewish disciple, Peter knew of God’s impartiality (cf. Deut 10:17; 2 Ch 19:7; Job 34:19); as a follower of Jesus, he had proclaimed Jesus “Lord and Christ” (Acts 2:36). But the designation “Lord” that helps explicate “Christ” had been under-defined, for Peter and for Acts’ audience, because the universal lordship of Jesus had not been narratively established by Acts 2. ²⁶ The scope of Jesus’ Lordship, represented by actual intercultural contact at least, had until Acts 10 been limited to Jews (and non-Gentile Samaritans). That the scope of universal witness is tied to Jesus’ identity is indicated by the fact that Peter’s revelation is at once christological and soteriological: “everyone who believes in him receives forgiveness of sins through his name” (10:43). Recognizing the universal scope of who is acceptable to God (10:34, 43) goes hand-in-hand with the recognition that Jesus is truly Lord of all (10:36).

An obvious point follows: it is not Peter’s encounter with Jews from the Diaspora (Acts 2) or even the sight of new Samaritan believers (Acts 8) that opens his eyes but an encounter with a Gentile (Acts 10). The Roman soldier in Caesarea, within the arc of Luke’s narrative, plays the part of the “nations” (τὰ ἔθνη) in God’s plans. ²⁷ Just as Cornelius’ turn to the faith depends on Peter’s arrival, so Peter’s recognition of Jesus’ universal lordship depends on Cornelius’ religious “otherness” (ἀλλόφυλος). Bearing witness to a Gentile—which necessarily includes the giving and receiving of hospitality (10:23–24, 48)—becomes pivotal for the transformation of those proclaiming repentance/forgiveness in Jesus’ name (Peter), not just for the recipient of proclamation (Cornelius). Because of the perspectival focus of the episode, a rich portrayal emerges of christology-in-witness rather than simply “conversion” of the “other.” Acts 10 signals a new epistemological possibility—namely, that recognition of Jesus’ universal Lordship is predicated upon participation in its intercultural unfolding, which is why the triumph of Cornelius’ conversion is narrated equally, perhaps more so, as the counter-triumphal “conversion” of the apostle Peter.

To put our findings in the context of the whole of Acts, we can conclude that Peter’s christological “discovery” depends on his venturing into a new intercultural context (he must go to Caesarea, not Cornelius to Joppa or Jerusalem). To refuse the trajectory toward “all nations” (Luke 24:47) and “the end(s) of the earth” (Acts 1:8)—which Peter (and the apostles) had seemingly done until Acts 10—is to limit one’s own capacity to recognize Jesus as Lord of all. Universal witness itself expresses a crucial aspect of who the Lord Jesus is, a point unintelligible to Peter except from within the unfolding of that witness, from within the kinds of practices emblematic of that recognition (fellowship, hospitality, fictive kinship). Certainly, Peter could have recognized Cornelius as a different category of believer or placed conditions on his membership among God’s people, as some Jewish believers do in Acts 15:5 (cf. 11:2). Peter instead acquiesces to God’s leading, not only because it authorizes theologically Paul’s ministry to come (Acts 13–28) but also because the mutuality of intercultural acceptance names who Jesus fundamentally is—Lord of all. Jesus’ lordship can only be expressed in irreducibly intercultural terms (Acts 2); difference is essential but not essentialized. Thus the absolutizing of one’s own culture (taking it as the measure of other enculturated responses to the gospel) ²⁸ —no matter how logical internally—is a contradiction of the gospel. At stake in Peter’s acceptance or rejection of Cornelius’ testimony is the very identity of Jesus as Lord of all (10:36), which itself expresses the consistent character of the God of Israel as “impartial” (10:34).

Moreover, so often missed in source-critical (and some missiological) studies of Acts is the narrative observation that the story of the Syrian Antioch church immediately follows Peter’s defense of the Cornelius incident in Acts 11:1–18. Scattered in the wake of Stephen’s persecution (11:19)—and not from a missionary mandate!—Hellenistic Jews spoke to other Jews in the diaspora, but some also reached out to non-Jews with whom they shared a cultural and linguistic background (Greek). That the community was particularly successful (“a great number became believers”) is a result of the fact that “the hand of the Lord was with them” (11:21). It is hardly coincidental that Luke tells us the word “Christian” ²⁹ is first applied to believers in Antioch (11:26), which happens to be our first glimpse of an inter-ethnic church. How should we understand the two pivotal breakthroughs for the universal mission (Acts 10–11:18; 11:19–26) in relation to one another? ³⁰

In some ways the two similar outcomes happen in reverse order: Peter/Cornelius was clearly driven by God, mediated by the Spirit; Antioch followed from the exiles’ likely inevitable intercultural contact, the fruit of which is divinely multiplied. In terms of our thesis, we might say in Antioch a prior recognition of Jesus’ lordship emboldened Greek-speaking Jews to engage Greek-speaking Gentiles; whereas in Peter’s case, recognition of Jesus’ universal lordship followed from his encounter with Cornelius (and the Lord). Luke appears to keep the two pictures together because both help illuminate God’s purposes, and the manifold way in which humans can participate in the fulfilling of universal witness. ³¹ They also both herald, in their own way, the witness to Jews and Gentiles which will coalesce narratively around the ministry of Paul, introduced in ch. 9 and taken up almost exclusively from ch. 13 on. Concerning Luke’s construal of universal witness in the Cornelius–Antioch sequence, what are the implications for human participation in intercultural encounter, given this broader portrait of christology-in-witness?

Human participation in universal witness

One reason it is easy to overlook universal witness as an expression of Jesus’ messianic identity is because mission over the last several centuries has been shaped by a certain reading of Matt 28:18–20 ³² (the Great Commission) that obscures such a perspective. The prevailing Protestant reading, at least since William Carey’s eighteenth-century treatise (1792), has construed mission primarily as obedience to a dominical command, a view which has been taken as the default NT impetus for mission. ³³ Even the “father” of missiology, Gustav Warneck, concluded that the primary reason for the historical phenomenon of universal Christian mission was as a response to Jesus’ commission (Acts being no exception). ³⁴ Chris Wright’s otherwise careful exegesis of Luke 24 is ultimately driven by the same considerations, ³⁵ putting an undue emphasis on biblical witness as human response to God’s actions in Jesus Christ.

Rather than read Jesus’ commissions in Luke through the Great Commission in Matthew, when we look closely we notice Luke’s commissions lack imperatives. As we have seen, Luke conceives of universal witness primarily as a (scriptural) promise and therefore a sign of christological identity. Indeed, it is a mistake to read the progress of the word in Acts as simply the triumph of human obedience out of missionary obligation. But if we have established that witness in Acts is primarily a means of recognizing what God is doing in Christ and less the discharge of an obligation, what does “you will be my witnesses” really mean? By our analysis thus far it does not mean that witness is a second discrete step (“missiology”) in a sequence initiated by Jesus’ death and resurrection (“christology”). “You will be my witnesses” (1:8) signals that Jesus retains agency over the unfolding of the witness because it is his universal lordship that is, in fact, at stake, and not the church’s dominion.

But where does that leave the apostles and witnesses and, by extension, readers who identify with them? ³⁶ Are they merely puppets twitching with every jerk of the divine hand, as Ernst Haenchen (1959: 315) ³⁷ memorably imagined it? While it is true that Luke narrates the triumph of the missio Dei rather than that of the missio ecclesiae, to say that Jesus retains agency over the mission does not nullify the role of human participation in the fulfillment of universal witness. ³⁸ Because universal witness is arguably not completed in Acts, only initiated in earnest with Acts 10 and exemplified in Paul’s wide-ranging exploits, ³⁹ the witnesses themselves are in a position of learning and relearning the identity of Jesus (Gaventa, 2008) as they participate in ongoing witness to him.

Another way of putting it is that witnesses discover the fulfillment of Jesus’ identity specifically by participating in universal witness. This is one of the reasons why Acts’ pivotal pronouncement of Jesus’ identity—that he is “Lord of all” (πάντων κύριος, 10:36)—comes out additionally as a realization of Peter’s. The two aspects of the claim, surprising recognition and kerygmatic pronouncement, are intertwined, evident in the phrase’s odd syntax. ⁴⁰ Moreover, the emphatic position of the modifier (πάντων) reminds us that what is new is not Jesus’ lordship but its scope (“of all”). Ultimately it is the scope of Jesus’ lordship that gives proof of his scriptural, messianic identity (cf. Isa 49:6; 42:6). To learn of the scope of his lordship, moreover, requires intercultural contact through witness.

If participation in universal witness is a means both of fulfilling Scripture’s witness concerning Jesus’ messianic identity and, in a manner, of discovering it anew, the book of Acts qualifies popular notions of mission as obedient response and information-sharing. Acts emphasizes instead learning Jesus’ expansive identity through intercultural encounter and the mutuality it implies. What results is a kind of christology of intercultural interdependence, which cuts across traditional modes of mission supported by the binaries of “we”–“they,” missionary–missionized, knowledgeable–ignorant, and so on, and puts all on equal footing as those in need of repentance and forgiveness, including and maybe especially the “witnesses” themselves. Luke construes christology in the unfolding of universal witness itself so that Jesus’ identity as Lord of all is learned by intercultural encounter as much as it is delivered by missionary proclamation.

In an age when world Christianity—rather than “global Christendom” (Sanneh, 2009b: 21–26; Flett, 2016)—reflects the intercultural origins of the Christian “way” (Acts 9:2; 16:17; 18:25, 26; 19:9, 23; 22:4; 24:14, 22), we are reminded that at stake in Christian witness among cultures is the very question of who Jesus is. If indeed he is “Lord of all” (Acts 10:36), it is more than a propositional claim to be passed on to others in the name of missionary obligation. Rather, Jesus’ universal lordship is a reality to be endlessly discovered through intercultural witness, so that witness becomes the epistemological premise of faith itself. “You will be my witnesses” (Acts 1:8) is an invitation above all to find out, with Peter and the Hellenistic Jewish believers, that “the God whose presence calls forth a distinctive form of doxology in one culture is the same God whose mercy calls forth grateful praise as well from other cultures, in other forms” (Brownson, 1998: 24).