Lamenting the scholarly neglect of the theology of the book of Acts, Michael Salmeier's Restoring the Kingdom seeks to trace the contours of the characterization of God in Luke's history of the early church. The work, a revised version of the author's Oxford doctoral thesis, begins by identifying ten traits that must be present for any successful analysis of the theology of Acts. These criteria provide a basis for a critique of previous works, and they help set an outline for Salmeier's own investigation. The author advocates a pragmatic reader-response approach to the theology of Acts, and thus in chapter two, Salmeier attempts to describe the basic conception of God that the implied reader is likely to have held prior to reading Acts. The author finds that the implied reader is likely to have been familiar with the Septuagint and sympathetic toward Jewish tradition. Hence, the Jewish Scriptures and the literature of early Judaism serve as the crucial “extra-texts” that inform the perspective from which the implied reader of Acts perceives the narrative.

Having summarized the vantage point of the implied reader, Salmeier then turns to an analysis of the characterization of God in Acts in the remainder of the book. Restoring the Kingdom blends a thematic and sequential approach to the discussion, with each new chapter of Salmeier's work tracing out the development of a different theological theme over the course of Acts. For Salmeier, the initial portrayal of God in Acts 1:1-8 is determinative for the rest of the narrative, establishing the reader's expectations for how the plot of Acts will unfold. Accordingly, on the basis of Jesus' implicitly affirmative statement regarding the restoration of the kingdom in Acts 1:6-8, the reader of Acts expects that the long-awaited restoration of the kingdom will be accomplished by God shortly within the narrative. As the story progresses, this expectation is met, as the narrator closely connects the activities of God, Jesus, and the Spirit to demonstrate the in-breaking of God's spiritual kingdom among his people. Thus, the hope for the restoration of Israel is satisfied in a surprising way. Still, Salmeier attempts to show how the narrator retains a future hope for ethnic Israel even as he describes the fulfillment of God's kingdom promises to Israel in the present life of the church. Through his examination of several different “strands” of the characterization of God, the author ultimately concludes that in Acts God is portrayed as the agent controlling the action of the narrative, ordaining the times and seasons of salvation history and restoring his kingdom through the work of his Spirit and the reign of his exalted Son upon his heavenly throne.

Restoring the Kingdom offers a number of helpful insights into the theology of Acts. The author is surely right to critique those who find divine activity in Acts only in those places that explicitly mention God. In addition, the author successfully shows how the characterization and activity of Jesus and the Spirit are closely associated with the characterization and activity of God within the narrative. Salmeier attends closely to the scriptural resonances throughout Acts, and though some of his interpretive proposals may not be entirely compelling, the author's ambitious reading of Acts at the very least demonstrates the vast potential for meaning embedded within the text of Scripture.

Still, important aspects of Salmeier's methodology are problematic. Salmeier initially acknowledges that Luke's Gospel would have been an important “extra-text” for the implied reader of Acts (p. 12). However, in his actual sketch of the background conceptions of the implied reader in chapter two, Salmeier relies exclusively upon conceptions of God derived from the OT and the literature of early Judaism. Certainly the author's subsequent discussion of Acts incorporates evidence from Luke's Gospel in a piecemeal fashion, yet it is curious that theological conceptions derived from Luke's Gospel would not factor more prominently into Salmeier's understanding of the implied reader, given that the third Gospel is the one “extra-text” that the book of Acts unambiguously mentions as part of the background knowledge of the audience (Acts 1:1). Additionally, Salmeier leaves unaddressed the question of the implied reader's knowledge of broader Christian tradition, which one might suppose could be an important concern in light of the presumed Christian identity of Luke's readership.

Ultimately, one might even question the extent to which Salmeier's approach is actually reader-oriented, for in the final analysis very few of Salmeier's conclusions are derived from the type of considerations that have typically been the domain of reader-response approaches to the NT (e.g., the temporal arrangement of the narrative, differences in awareness between the reader and the characters of the story world). Instead, Salmeier's pragmatic reader-response approach consists primarily of a sustained engagement with the literary and religious milieu of the book of Acts. This approach differs little from conventional historical-critical exegesis, except perhaps in the author's interest in proving that the intended readership of Acts would have been aware of the subtleties in Acts that Salmeier detects.

Thus, Restoring the Kingdom is a mixed bag of perceptive observations encased within an overarching methodology that is flawed in multiple respects. As an alternative, one might consider Alan Thompson's recent The Acts of the Risen Lord Jesus as a more accessible and methodologically sound introduction to the theology of Acts. [Editor's note: Thomas Schreiner reviewed Thompson's book in Themelios 36.3.]

---