Today I switched within my (working) thesis proposal. The intense games are now able to begin. So this is actually the very short and vague proposal that serves simply to acquire some general ideas lower- I had been restricted to a webpage. Hopefully the thesis is going to be lengthy and never vague.

Functions of the Eucharistic Community: A theological/political narrative

In the finish of Luke’s Gospel, the disciples and also the resurrected Lord collected together while dining: “When he what food was in table together, he required the bread and fortunate, and broke it, and gave it for them. As well as their eyes were opened up plus they recognized him” (Lk 24.30-31a). As Luke recapitulates this scene with the voice from the disciples, “he was recognized to them within the breaking from the bread” (24.35b). Understanding the Lord is adopted with a command to witness (24.48), as to the was “written, the Christ should suffer as well as on the 3rd day rise in the dead, which repentance and forgiveness of sins ought to be preached in the name to any or all nations, starting with Jerusalem” (24.46-47). Within the breaking from the bread the disciples understood Jesus. These were then to become embodied witnesses towards the existence, dying, and resurrection from the Lord of.

In Luke’s second volume, Functions, we discover a residential area of believers who’ve become witnesses towards the resurrected Lord. As Dr. Kavin Rowe writes, “Acts narrates the existence from the Christian mission because the embodied pattern of Jesus’s own existence.”[1] Within this mission, Rowe states, “Luke narrates the salvation that attends the Christian mission as something which entails always the development of the community, an open pattern of existence that witnesses to the current dominion from the resurrected Lord of.”[2] This community, bearing witness towards the Lord, is really a political witness.

The city we discover in Functions embodies a theological truth, which results in a political understanding around the globe and time.

William Cavanaugh provides a strikingly similar narrative as he writes in regards to the narrative from the Eucharist: “The Eucharist anticipates the long run Kingdom, re-people Jesus’ conflict using the forces of the world, and brings both future and past size of Christ in to the present by means of an obvious body. It makes sense a ‘confusion’ from the spiritual and also the temporal, an invasion of worldly space and time through the heavenly, and therefore the potential of another type of social practice .”[3] The Eucharist, because it “consumes”[4] Christians in to the body of Christ, needs a social practice that bears both a theological and political witness.

Within my thesis, I wish to show the way the narrative of Functions portrays a people embodying a Eucharistic community. I don’t want to argue, however, that Luke had this type of thesis in your mind because he authored Functions. Like a people embodying Christ’s cruciform method of existence, which we remember within the Eucharist, the Functions community provides a political message the risen Lord may be the Lord of, past, present and future. The work may also help the church right now to see what it really might look enjoy being an “Acts community,” a politically visible Church, within the emerging ‘Market-Condition.’ With this I’ll speak to the political historian Philip Bobbitt.

[1] C. Kavin Rowe, World Upside Lower (New You are able to, NY: Oxford, 2009), 173.

[2] Rowe, 154. My emphasis.