Acts.

Having a favorite biblical book is like having a favorite among one's fingers or teeth: the notion seems wrongheaded and a little ridiculous, a misunderstanding of the parts and the whole and the ways they are bound up together. Yet people do have favorites, and lately I've thought that mine is Acts. I suppose I'm drawn to it for much the same reasons that Larry Woiwode suggests he is: for its mingling of narrative and doctrine, of prophecy and practicality, and for the balances its author strikes, as Dante did, between the just and the unjust and the people haltingly making their way toward their final end. The book is also especially resonant for the reader whose encounter with God has had more to do with an experience of church than with one of Jehovah or of Jesus Christ.

Lately, too, Acts has become a proof text for Christians of all sorts, whether evangelicals exhorting us to witness and testify or peace-and-justice activists who would remake church and society to match their sense of how the early Christians did things. And Anthony Burgess and Gore Vidal have based novels on it. Like those authors, Woiwode usually writes fiction. As a result, perhaps, he tries to subordinate himself to the text rather than rewrite it; with a shelf of fiction behind him, he seems to relish the chance to finally be at play in the fields of the Lord. In this discursive close reading of Acts, Woiwode means to open up the text to unschooled readers and to show its relevance for our age. More often, though, he renders Acts strange and unaccommodating, in ways that suggest just how intractable the problems of church and world are, and how surprising the solutions to them can be.

Woiwode developed the book from an essay he wrote about Acts for Incarnation: Contemporary Writers on the New Testament (Penguin). Too many of the contributors to that book took the tough meat of modern commentary and criticism and sandwiched it in the white bread of their childhood memories. Woiwode, though, wrote about Christianity as a believing adult. In Acts, he describes in detail how he was born again. He was raised a Roman Catholic in North Dakota (he recalls a German-American priest declaiming on First Corinthians: "Does that mean, wives, that you must submit to him when he asks you to go to bet wid him? Yes/"). In college he became "an agnostic humanist, a hedonist roarer--the kind you want to stay far from if he's had one too many." He went on to have success as a novelist and college teacher, but diabetes, a drinking problem, and marital difficulties, as well as a generalized loathing of contemporary American life, sent him back to Christianity and back to North Dakota. As members of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church (which withdrew from mainstream Presbyterian churches in the 1930s), he and his wife chose their plot of farmland because it is near the only such congregation in the state.

Woiwode writes at length about the glories of the Dakota landscape at harvest time--"the feel of the air and the quality of light then, along with the look of the fields... [and] the potbellied clouds that carry rain rolling past all day ." And he takes several thousand words to set out his aims for the book, with the uneasy mix of humility and arrogance that characterizes his approach. On the one hand, he wants to introduce students to Scripture and the church and to acknowledge "the ways in which the present church has deviated from the church that develops in Acts."

On the other, he believes he's putting his writerly tool to untilled earth in the areas of church, culture, and aesthetics, and he hopes the book "might be the beginning of an opening up in the church in general to the arts and other issues of concern." Beginning with "In the first book, 0 Theophilus" and moving painstakingly toward "teaching about the Lord Jesus Christ quite openly and unhindered," Woiwode considers virtually every line of the text. His reading is careful and winningly insightful. In his account of the angel's freeing Peter from jail, for example, he observes that "Herod 'examines' the guards, most likely a euphemism for torture, and then executes every one of them. It's for this reason,"he goes on, "that Luke takes the time to supply minute details; all the witnesses to these details, and to the impossibility of Peter escaping by other than a supernatural act, are now dead, shut up for good. This is one miraculous event the Jerusalem populace isn't going to hear about."

Woiwode himself has what is often called a novelist's eye for details, and in alighting upon the fine points of Acts he identifies himself and Luke as fellow practitioners of the narrative art. He delights in Luke's observation that upon regaining his sight "Paul arose and was baptized; he took food and was strengthened," the ordinary domestic act deepening the pathos of the episode. He highlights Luke's many references to feet--from Peter's healing of a lame man to the martyr's garments laid at Saul's feet--and notes how apt these are in a story about "those moved by the Spirit to convey that gospel by the most common and humble means of transportation, footpower, into the fields that widen from Jerusalem to encompass the World."

As Woiwode stresses, though, Acts is not just a story. It is the Word of God. "Jesus never opens his mouth except to speak doctrine," he declares, and so, by implication, neither do his disciples. Together, their disquisitions and Luke's arrangement of them in Acts prescribe the right ways for Christians to act in the world. It is, I think, in Woiwode's effort to draw out the doctrinal and cultural implications of Acts that problems loom up like those potbellied clouds on the Dakota horizon. They are not his problems so much as those of the whole church, and his encounter with them suggests why Acts remains such an enigmatic book.

First there are the problems that arise within the church. Reasoning from Acts-- and from his church's adherence to sola Scriptura in doctrinal matters--he pronounces on matters of inspiration ("Either it's the word of God or it isn' t, I'm inclined to think"), terminology (he favors "New Covenant" over "New Testament"), the sacraments (as he sees it, only baptism and Communion are valid), baptism (it's okay to baptize infants, and immersion isn't necessary), discipline ("properly and orderly" is a crucial instruction), and the ordination of women (sorry, but Jesus ordained only men). He is particularly agonized by church efforts to sponsor foreign missions while failing to "take care of its own": he believes the missions drain funds that might be used to feed the hungry close to home and sap the energy that should be used to reconvert "the apostate U.S."

The problems of our shallow, fallenaway culture are the other main object of Woiwode's concern. Like Wendell Berry's, his critique of American society puts a rural spin on familiar diatribes about the academy, the government, and the compromised churches. He heaps contempt on urbanires for their lack of gratitude to farmers, decries television's talk-show philosophers and "refried news," and yet ventures that Stephen King is so popular because he alone among contemporary writers dramatizes the war of good and evil.

Now, Woiwode's cultural critique isn't incontrovertibly off base. Nor, seen in themselves, are his doctrinal stands. Their drawbacks have less to do with their objective truth than with their rhetorical character. His views on doctrine are quite specific, while his judgments about American culture are generalized to the point of banality. It is not surprising, then, that in the end they have little to do with each other.

This cognitive dissonance, I think, defives mostly from Woiwode's theology of the church. Grounded in sola Scriptura and specifically in the Acts' account of the earliest Christians, his understanding of the nature and role of the church doesn't enable him to grapple as he might with the improper and disorderly world. Woiwode would argue the contrary, I suspect, but the shape of his argument here tells against him. Though he warns against sectarianism and castigates a few textbook sects (for example, the Quakers, so many of whom are now so unreservedly worldly), he is wary of discussing the church and the world in the same breath, much less com- ing to terms with the ways in which, for good and for ill, they intersect. Nor, apart from his views on specific doctrines, does he suggest ways in which today's too worldly church might better conform to the model of Acts. His observation that the church must take care of its own more than it is doing now is a crucial one, and goes a long way. But in exploring just how this might come about, he too often simply sends the reader back to Scripture with his best wishes.

Intentions aside, Woiwode resists any thoroughly worked out identification of today's church with the church of Acts. Moreover, his literary instinct for the particular runs counter to his argument about the unalterable nature of the church. Even as he proposes that today's Christians and those of Acts face the same quandaries, his loving attention to the scriptural details makes clear how very different the world of Acts is from ours: in setting, in social arrangements, in the roles of men and women, in the degree of persecution, in the number and manner of miracles, in mode of transportation (those feet again), and so on. With his novelist's gifts of vivid language and keen observation, Woiwode--in spite of himself--joins Luke in bringing to life a world that is undeniably remote. As a consequence, Woiwode is unpersuasive in suggesting that we can simply pick up our Bible and get on with the business of living a gospel unmediated by our own time and place.

In some sense Woiwode knows this. In asides ranging from an homage to T.S. Eliot to an appraisal of C.S. Lewis's space trilogy to his admiration of John Updike' s public identification of himself as a Christian, he seeks to establish that the novelist and the Christian recognize alike the value of particulars and the imperative to teach through their work. From the book's earliest sentences, Woiwode declares that writing--and in particular the writing of Acts--is a personal act of faith. And as the book's frankly imitative conclusion makes clear, Woiwode's own model among the early Christians is not Peter or Paul or Stephen but Luke himself. In the end, despite his seemingly uncompromising theology, Woiwode here is a writer reflecting on a favorite book. Vexing as he can be about the letter of the early church, he is finally true to the spirit of it. His act is, as it should be, an artful one.