States of Grace : ACTS: A Writer’s Reflections on the Church, Writing, and His Own Life, <i> By Larry Woiwode (HarperSanFrancisco: $17; 244 pp.)</i>

Ever since Christianity was simply called the Way, the Church has struggled to fully integrate its founder’s teachings into its religious life. Questions of factionalism, rites and practices, community membership, and the function of charity and other gifts of the Spirit, seem to be brought up by each generation, but the besetting problem has always been how to be a good citizen in the world without being adversely changed by it.

To answer just such questions, Luke, a Syrian physician from Antioch, wrote the fifth book of the New Testament, Acts of the Apostles, in the late 1st Century. And now, to further examine the challenges society poses to Christians seeking to build a City of God, Larry Woiwode has given us a highly personal commentary on Acts.

In the first chapter of Acts, just before his ascension from Mount Olive, Jesus tells his apostles, “But you shall receive power when the Holy Spirit as come upon you, and you shall be my witnesses in Jerusalem, throughout Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.” The book of Acts follows Christ’s chosen representatives from 30 to 62 AD as they preach the good news of salvation in the farthest parts of the Roman empire.

Peter was first among those apostles, a spokesman for the Christian community and, like Jesus in the Gospels, a miracle worker. But halfway through Acts, his primacy gives way to Paul, formerly a Pharisee and a fierce persecutor of the Jewish Christians, whose own stunning encounter with Christ on the road to Damascus caused him to undertake missionary journeys--first to the Jews of the Diaspora, then to the Gentiles throughout Asia Minor--until he was finally placed under house arrest in Rome. There, however, he continued “welcoming all who came to him, preaching the kingdom of God, and teaching concerning the Lord Jesus Christ with all openness, unhindered.”

Events in Paul’s half of the narrative allowed Luke to focus on the shift away from Judaism and a firm adherence to the Mosaic law, to picture Christians as they ought to be in their communities and to formulate a theology of God’s offer of salvation not just to Israel but to all humanity.

“Ours is the exact cultural agenda and atmosphere that Paul faces in Acts,” Woiwode says, identifying a state when to be seriously Christian is to be considered a religious fanatic, and when fifth-column tactics seem increasingly necessary. Woiwode finds such importance to the present-day church in Luke’s book that he has provided a fundamentalist interpretation of Acts that functions as a kind of evangelism for beginning readers of Scripture. A former actor and English professor, and one of our foremost prose realists whose novels include “What I’m Going to Do, I Think” and “Indian Affairs,” Woiwode is a disciple of the Paul in Acts who says he worships “the God of our fathers, believing all things that are written in the law and in the Prophets.”

Accordingly, Woiwode ignores a good deal of contemporary biblical scholarship here, feeling that higher criticism too often loses the essential message of Scripture while it promotes a “disputatious focus on detail.” His perspectives are based instead on the 16th-Century commentaries of John Calvin, “The Westminster Shorter Catechism” of G. I. Williamson and the studies of the late J. Gresham Machen, a former professor at Princeton Theological Seminary and a founder of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church to which Woiwode and his family belong.

Critical scholarship generally considers Luke a highly talented Hellenistic literary craftsman, not a historian, but Woiwode prefers a far more literal reading. Comparing our concept of writerly inspiration with the original, Greek sense of the word--God-breathed--Woiwode says: “Something of this sort surely happened to Luke . . . when he wrote Acts. I suspect that as he walked the roads of the Fertile Crescent, thinking through these events he wished to put into an orderly account, whole pages like assembled jewelry appeared in his mind, staggering him.”

And later he writes: “Certainly the authors of Scripture were flawed with sin like everybody, but when they spoke or wrote as they were moved by the Spirit, their flaws were overwritten by God. If you begin to try to pick out verses you feel are tainted . . . the tendency is to make an idol of your ability to discern where Paul or Luke went wide--of what mark? Yours. Then you will suggest the possible errors mere copyists may have made in transmitting Scripture, whether accidental or purposeful, and what about that? Or you will mention debate racking the church over its inability to settle the matter of the canon within itself.”

Woiwode prefers the simpler route of presuming the factual worth of Luke’s historical data, for his prime intention here is not hermeneutics but a portrait of Christianity’s forceful, beneficial effect on his own life and work. Of his faithless past, he writes: “I was separated from my wife. I’d finished a book that took 10 years, and in that sense things were resolved, but there was no resolution to other matters. At 35 I’d received the critical attention I’d hoped to have by the end of my life, and also money, yet what did I have? A disorganized, scattered life with no peace. By the time I was reconciled with my wife, I’d lost my father, who had meant a lot to me and had, in spite of prejudices he’d faced, held to the (Catholic) faith his father had. In the midst of this continuing lack of resolution, a moment of real . . . crisis came, when I had to say, or I realized--however it happened, because it happens in wordlessness--I knew I would never live the same life.”

And so Woiwode left university teaching, and he and his family moved onto a wheat farm in North Dakota, where he home-schools his children and writes six hours a day, six days a week in a hard, dry, Western geography that inspires the finest writing in this book:

“I step out of the converted granary where I work, telling myself it holds a certain store of harvest, and in the quiet dark of beginning sunrise I notice the morning star, wobbling its way up the sky like a distant sparkler, trailing streams of light. Off to the east, past a line of toothed and rounded buttes, the sky is orange-crimson, and for a second I feel I’m viewing the hills of Jerusalem, where this account has taken me--that stark outline on the horizon where Acts unfolds. An owl hoots to the north, and a startled bird, perhaps awakened by it, shrills twice in a far-off field. Then in the morning silence that can saturate this landscape so wholly that generations of the earth seem to lie stilled, listening, I give thanks that the same Spirit who descended with power on the apostles has called me across these vast distances of time into faithfulness in Him on this particular point on the earth.”

Woiwode’s “Acts” is a shrewd, passionate, fearless, intimate and often condemnatory book, of the kind Leo Tolstoy produced in his old age. Not a few of Woiwode’s “reflections on the Church, writing and his own life” have the flavor of the jeremiads against American popular culture and academia that Allan Bloom and Alexander Solzhenitsyn have chided us with in the past. But “Acts” is hopeful and joyous, too, as a book based on the Gospels must be, and full of a faith, obstinacy and plain-spoken zeal that are finally compelling.

“The world and the church,” he writes, “are at the edge of a new decade, and as a Christian and a writer, I believe this is one of the best times to be alive. I’m not sure good is getting better and bad worse, but there is less room for indecision, and many Christians seem to sense that their choices, even daily, are becoming more momentous. They will become even more so soon.”