Foundations of Hope for Resurrection in Acts 2

(avg. read time: 9–19 mins.)

The post today is derived from the following article:

K. R. Harriman, “‘For David Said Concerning Him’: Foundations of Hope in Ps 16 and Acts 2,” JTI 11 (2017): 239–57.

Readers who want more information on research and more interaction with scholarship are encouraged to consult that article. And as I have already given my analysis for Ps 16 in my series on Resurrection in the OT, I will not be reiterating it here. Rather, my focus will be on the foundations of hope conveyed in Peter’s Pentecost speech in Acts 2, specifically in how they are related to the use of Ps 16 in this speech.

By the general notion of “hope,” I mean the confident trust in the accomplishment of a positive purpose (variously described as life-giving, just, salvific, redemptive, and/or restorative) in the future by one who is worthy of trust. By “foundations of hope,” I mean the foundational beliefs upon which hope rests, or the reasons for which a person expresses hope. One can express these foundational beliefs in relation to hope in numerous ways. Invocations of past precedent (or promises and prophecies) serve well as bases for future confidence. Similarly, one might articulate future hopes through idealization (i.e., supreme amplification) of past or present goods. Expressions and imagery of power and justice for the source of hope may also be a premise for the conclusion of hope. Both Ps 16 and Acts 2 proclaim hope in these ways within frameworks that the biblical covenantal history has shaped, as I have noted in my post on Ps 16. The question is, what continuity and discontinuity does one text have with the other text that uses it?

The Nature of Hope in Acts 2

Peter’s speech in Acts 2:14–36 is one of only two New Testament texts that quote Ps 16 directly (the other being Paul’s speech in Acts 13).¹ I focus only on this speech because Luke presents it as paradigmatic for the other gospel proclamations in Acts, a point that I have explored elsewhere.

While Ps 16 expresses hope in God’s salvific action that uses suggestive resurrection imagery, Acts 2:14–36 expresses hope in a specifically eschatological context.² The overarching theme of the fulfillment of Scriptures, especially with the invocation of the “last days” prophecy of Joel in 2:17–21, the occurrence of resurrection (2:24–32), the presence of the Messiah (2:30–36), and the promised presence and action of the Holy Spirit all point to the eschatological character of the speech’s context. Within this context, the hope of the Jews Peter represents has undergone several notable mutations.

First, while the notion of deliverance from Sheol could imply resurrection (or at least supply the imagery for that kind of hope), resurrection more clearly has a central role in the hope of Peter and his fellows. Second, whether or not scholars today think one should read Ps 16 as Davidic, the earliest Christians and their successors did; yet they also took one step further and saw the presence of the Davidic Messiah in this text as the basis for their hope. The Davidic Messiah was a figure of hope who was the ideal fulfillment of the Davidic covenant. Third, to combine the previous two mutations, the basis of hope for the earliest Jesus followers was in the resurrected Messiah, which was a new take on the Psalm, messianic hope, and resurrection hope (as there was no expressed hope for the Messiah to be resurrected prior to the NT).

Peter describes the hope offered to recipients of his message as salvation, particularly as forgiveness of sins and the reception of the Holy Spirit. These characteristics of the early Christian hope entailed restored relations with God, as well as the closer, more permanent union with God articulated in past prophecies (Deut 30; Isa 11:1–10; 32:15–20; 33:13–24; 40:1–11; 44:1–5, 21–28; 51:3–14; 52:13–53:12; 61:1–2; 66:11–13; Jer 31:31–40; 33; Ezek 36:25–38; 37; 43:1–7; Joel 2:28–32; Mic 7:14–20; Zech 13–14). The immediate means of receiving such hope were repentance and baptism, which were ways of declaring allegiance to the Savior: Jesus, the crucified and risen Lord and Messiah who gives a Christomorphic shape to hope whereby God will vindicate and exalt those who pledge allegiance to Jesus as he vindicated and exalted Jesus in his resurrection (cf. Acts 4:2; 13:32–39; 23:6; 24:15; 26:6–7; 28:20; Rom 6:5; 8:9–11, 29; 1 Cor 15; Col 1:18; Phil 3:10; 1 Pet 1:3; 3:21; 1 John 3:2; Rev 1:5; 3:21).

Foundations of Hope

But how does one account for such mutations of hope? In addition to the fertile intervening history of theology, the factors most important in accounting for these mutations are the foundations of hope, which produce both continuity and discontinuity with the foundations one can observe in Ps 16. The first and foremost reason for mutation—as well as the first Christian foundation—was the earliest Christian claim that Jesus had risen from the dead ahead of all others—in opposition to his sentence of death and in vindication of his messiahship (on this contrast in Acts, see 2:24; 3:13–15; 4:10; 5:30–31; 10:39–40; 13:27–30)—and that the apostles had witnessed the risen Jesus. This hope stemmed from an eschatological event happening in a way that no one had anticipated before Jesus. Because of the recent occurrence of an event that God had promised as part of the climax of the grand narrative (i.e., an eschatological event), other features of eschatological promises, such as the presence of the Holy Spirit and forgiveness of sins, were also coming to fruition.

In light of recent events, Peter now sees the time in which he is living as the time of the fulfillment of Scripture. Within this eschatological vision, Peter extends the logic of the Psalm—especially in 2:24 and following—that Sheol is properly alien to the righteous by arguing that God raised Jesus from the dead because it was impossible for death to keep its hold upon him (i.e., Peter expresses the power of this foundation of hope). In short, while God had done something new in the resurrection and exaltation of Jesus, it was something new still in accord with precedent.

As such, the second foundation of hope was the fulfillment of Scripture, the Scripture that articulated the precedent and promise of God’s action. The fulfillment of Scripture was a major part of the proclamations and teaching of the early Jesus movement and the texts resulting from those proclamations and teachings. Whether the references to Scripture came from the writers/narrators or from quoted speakers, their importance to argument and articulation is undeniable.

The resurrection’s occurrence had opened up the possibilities of further fulfillment of Scripture with other eschatological expectations coming to pass (such as Joel’s prophesied outpouring of the Holy Spirit). In this sense, resurrection according to Scripture is both foundation and synecdoche. From Peter’s standpoint, this expectation of further fulfillment functions as idealization of past and present goods, as well as obvious invocations of past precedent (though, as already noted, Peter also emphasizes the newness of what occurs).

While Peter uses Ps 16 in reference to Jesus’ resurrection, it is not so much a proof-text for the resurrection as it is a means by which to interpret it. The evidence Peter cites that the resurrection has occurred is the disciples’ own testimony (2:32). Instead, Peter uses the text as a keystone in his case that Jesus is the Messiah and that his resurrection is the essential demonstration that he was/is the Holy One of David. As noted above, Jesus’s resurrection is the vindication of his identity.

And as much as I have stated that the theme is one of fulfillment of Scripture in an eschatological context, I think the promise-fulfillment interpretation of this speech is incomplete.³ According to this interpretation, Peter means to cite the text as a promise that Jesus fulfilled. The problem with this paradigm for this text is that Peter’s crucial argument turns on the discontinuity of the resurrection with the notion that the text seems to present David as speaking of himself and the fact that David is still dead and buried. Therefore, David is not speaking of himself, despite the use of first-person references. In other words, Peter’s direct emphasis is less on continuity than the promise-fulfillment paradigm would indicate, and his argument is more about fulfillment of what David spoke in a different persona than about fulfillment of a promise to David. I also think that the typological interpretation is misguided.⁴ Peter is not pointing to David as an anticipation of Jesus in this context, an anticipation which Jesus fulfilled by amplifying some relevant feature of David’s life. Instead, Peter stresses how different the fates of David and Jesus were, so that the text properly refers to Jesus rather than to David. If Peter’s argument was typological, there seems to be little sense in why Peter has a focus on contrast rather than typological similarity. One must look elsewhere for a better paradigm to account for Peter’s use of Scripture here.

As Matthew Bates in particular has argued, a key aspect of what gave rise to this foundation of hope was a kind of prosopological exegesis, by which the earliest Christians saw in many of their scriptural texts the speech of God, Jesus, and the Spirit by the prophets, who in turn took on the personae of God, Jesus, and the Spirit as mouthpieces of the speaker.⁵ Peter expresses this view by denying that David was speaking of himself at all, despite the first-person pronouns. Rather, David was speaking in the persona (or πρόσωπον) of the Messiah, who was using the travails of David to declare confidence in his own resurrection after death.⁶ The dissimilarity in their fates and the discontinuity in their stories are essential to Peter’s argument as it stands. The events of Easter have necessitated a reading of the Psalm that uncovers a new layer of meaning while the Psalm in turn provides a new layer of meaning to the events of Easter, as they serve to identify Jesus—not David—as the Holy One.

What the prosopological exegesis contributes to this argument is the point that the primary speaker had all along assumed David’s hope into himself just as David had assumed the primary speaker’s identity onto himself as a prophetic speaker. Because both the primary speaker and the prophetic speaker play different parts in one long covenantal history—the latter as foreshadowing and foreteller with the former as climax—Jesus is the fulfiller of David’s hopes even as he is the fulfiller of David’s declaration. Similarly, Peter’s claim of the prophetic character of this text entails that Peter’s audience (and Luke’s audience thereafter) participates in this same history and can have this same hope of deliverance by the same deliverer who spoke through the prophet long ago and brought the words to fulfillment more recently.

In sum, this use of Scripture in Peter’s argument is fundamentally of one piece with the logic of resurrection. Whether New Testament resurrection texts refer to life after some indefinite period of death, eternal life, or glorified bodies, all of these concepts illustrate the discontinuity of resurrection with whatever the current circumstance is. However, that discontinuity is at the service of overarching continuity, since resurrection establishes a continuity of life for those who have died as a way of keeping promises to those who are dead or may yet die. As Paul declares in 1 Cor 15, the resurrection body that is imperishable, glorious, powerful, and Spirit-animated is for people who currently have bodies that are perishable, dishonorable, weak, and mortal (1 Cor 15:42–54). In Paul’s illustration of the seed that becomes a plant, the plant is a transformation of the seed and the whole transformation process has an underlying continuity. Likewise, Peter’s prosopological exegesis—by which he shows the discontinuity in how one could understand the text before Jesus and after Jesus—demonstrates this logic by citing the resurrection as the fulfillment of Scripture. Jesus’s resurrection showed a new, prophetic level of meaning to the Psalm even as the Psalm was one of the texts that showed a new level of meaning to Jesus’s resurrection as Scripture-fulfillment, but both event and text belong to the same covenantal history and the same God who makes promises and fulfills them. These new developments are ultimately developments within a single continuity, which enable believers to look back on their Scriptures and see Christ where they previously might not have expected him.

The third foundation, as implied several times above, is God’s love manifested in sovereign, inexorable covenantal faithfulness. Like their predecessors, the earliest Christians tied this belief in God’s faithfulness to historical events, though the primary emphasis has shifted from the exodus to the resurrection. While the exodus had initially provided the rubric for understanding God’s historical actions in relation to the Israelite covenant, the resurrection provided the rubric for understanding God’s historical actions in relation to the Israelite covenant and the superior new covenant (in its superior redemption from death and its superior inauguration of the new life).⁷ The earliest Christians thus read Scripture through the lens of this foundation of God’s faithful character, which came into greater focus in Jesus, his inaugurated kingdom, and the Church that spawned from his resurrection.⁸ When the New Testament authors and speakers appeal to the Scriptures, they place themselves within a long, overarching story of this loving and faithful God with the creation as well as its major sub-plots involving Israel. Specifically, the New Testament authors and speakers locate themselves at the climactic time of fulfillment because of the events that had transpired through God’s eschatological agent, the Messiah (as here in verses 30–36).

While the earliest Christians were the first people on record to attribute messianic meaning to Ps 16, they were far from the first to see the prophesied primary executor of God’s will as a regal Davidic messiah. In the Hebrew Scriptures, this figure was both the ultimate fulfillment of the Davidic covenant and the new actor on the stage of salvation history who served as the means of effectuating the grand promises of the Israelite covenant by purifying the nation of Israel, defeating its enemies, and unifying its scattered people (Ps 132; Isa 9:1–7; 11; 55:1–5; Jer 23:5–8; 30:1–3, 18–22; 33:14–26; Ezek 34:23–31; 37:19–28; Hos 3:4–5; Mic 5:2–15). Later works of the Second Temple period would similarly present this figure as one who would effectuate God’s faithfulness (T. Jud. 24; 4QcommGen A V, 1–4; 4QDibHam[a] 1–2 IV, 5–8), deliver Israel from enemies and diaspora (T. Naph. 8:2–3), or as having both roles (T. Sim. 7:2–3; Pss. Sol. 17:21–46; 4QpIsa[a] III, 11–24; 4QFlor 1 I, 7–13). In the context of the speech Peter conveys the first sense of who this Davidic Messiah is and what he does, hence the focus on the fulfillment of God’s promises and the purification of Israel by faith, repentance, and baptism. Furthermore, as the ultimate Davidic descendant, he fulfills the Scripture by being both the recipient of God’s faithful love and the enactor of it, so that the effects of declaring allegiance to him are the long-promised forgiveness of sins and reception of the Holy Spirit. The resurrection serves as the divine confirmation of Jesus’s messianic identity and of the efficacy of God’s promised salvific work through him. However, this argument also features a strong element of discontinuity in that the no one saw the crucified and resurrected Messiah in these Scriptures until after the fact. The discontinuity of this action—much like the expected discontinuity of a new character known as the consummate Messiah bursting onto the scene at some point in the future—is ultimately at the service of the underlying continuity of God’s purposes in salvation history.

This messianic logic of God’s action adds another layer to the aforementioned resurrection logic in how the earliest Christians approached the Scriptures. They saw foretold events and texts being enacted in unexpected ways, but these unexpected happenings brought the fundamental continuity of the grand story to fruition. Likewise, the story of Jesus the Messiah—the key point in the larger story told in Scripture—reshapes the understanding of this continuity while maintaining the foundational affirmation of God’s salvific love and unerring faithfulness.

Fourth, the drama of God’s justice in judgment serves as a foundation of hope in this speech as it does in the Psalm, though the center of that drama has taken on a different shape. While the Psalm has an implied imperative for the righteous to continue in the ways of the Lord (Ps 16:4–8), and is thus more epideictic in character, Peter’s speech has a deliberative direction to it as he calls upon the Israelites to change their course via repentance and baptism. This course of action is appropriate because the time of fulfillment has come and the figure at its salvific center, the Messiah, has come already. The covenant and the covenant community run through Jesus. As such, the definition of membership in the covenant community now has a distinctly Christomorphic shape so that what Peter proclaims is necessary is declaration of allegiance to this Christ. Likewise, as stated above, the implied hope based on this proclamation has a distinctly Christomorphic shape.

The basic logic of this foundation is that if God vindicated Jesus from his ignominious sentence, then surely God will vindicate those people who declare allegiance to him by granting them salvation. This expression and example of God’s justice serves as a foundation of hope for whoever hopes for the complete enactment of God’s justice over the entire world. Here, that sense of justice is most directly the justice of deliverance from sin and community creation through the common faith and common baptism. Those people who have become bound together through sharing faith and baptism thus also share in the hope of God’s consummate justice as adumbrated in Jesus.

Fifth and finally, Peter extends the foundations of hope to include Jesus’s exaltation. Peter more directly ties the exaltation of Jesus to Ps 110 shortly after his citation of Ps 16, but his understanding of Jesus as the Davidic Messiah and his linkage between the resurrection and exaltation surely impacts his use of Ps 16. Resurrection and exaltation are not strictly identical in this speech (Peter separates narration of the two events with οὖν in 2:33 and with his interlude that what the apostles had witnessed included God raising him from the dead) or in Luke’s larger story, but they are as inseparable in salvation-history as the death and resurrection are (a point I noted in my series). Luke and Luke’s speakers often use the resurrection in connection with other post-resurrection events or as a way to evoke the whole of them (Acts 1:3, 22; 3:15, 20–21; 4:10–12, 33; 5:30–31; 10:40–42; 13:30–37; 17:31; 26:23). Jesus’s rise from the dead thus bears tremendous theological weight and has multiple layers of meaning, including heavenly accession and the confirmation of Jesus’s status as Lord and Messiah. The key outcomes of Jesus’s resurrection that Peter emphasizes are Jesus’s exaltation and resultant provision of salvation, especially the gift of the Holy Spirit. Jesus is able to provide such benefits to his followers precisely because of his position in the heavenly throne room (and, as noted in the series, the heavenly sanctuary).

The covenantal context of these events also reinforces the link between resurrection and exaltation. Jesus’s resurrection is at once a vindication of his messianic identity, which the Gospel according to Luke has laid out from its first chapter (Luke 1:32–33, 69–71; 2:11, 25–35; 3:15–17, 21–22; 4:16–21; 7:18–23; 9:18–27; 18:35–43; 20:41–44; 22:66–70; 24:25–27, 44–49), and a confirmation of the Davidic covenant, which God has brought back to life after a time when Davidic kings were completely absent. In the case of this speech’s relation to the Psalm, even if one grants the Davidic origin, this link of resurrection and exaltation presents discontinuity in: 1) the heights to which Jesus has risen, as opposed to David, who would have hoped for restoration to a life and position below Jesus’s station; 2) the intervening covenantal history from which Jesus emerges as the restorer of the dormant Davidic dynasty; and 3) the unexpected form that the fulfillment of the Davidic covenant has taken. Still, these facets of discontinuity emerge from the underlying continuity of confirming the promise to David (and thus to Israel) and of the return to life from death.

Conclusion

In short, Peter’s use of Ps 16—and the consequent continuity and discontinuity of the nature and foundations of hope—operates according to messianic and resurrection logic in which the elements of discontinuity are at the service of maintaining continuity. The nature of hope in Ps 16 is ambiguous, but the imagery is open to a resurrection interpretation, though without the additional theological weight such an idea carries in Acts, which occupies a different place in salvation history. All of the foundations of hope that Ps 16 presents—God’s inexorable faithful love, the covenant, and God’s justice—appear in Acts 2 as well, albeit in an eschatologically driven context in which the long arc of covenantal history was bending toward its culmination. Hence, Peter appeals to the fulfillment of Scripture, the coming of the Messiah (the ultimate Favored/Holy One), and the connection of resurrection and exaltation rather than to more traditional covenant imagery. Furthermore, he appeals to an event in the recent past of Jesus’s resurrection as his most fundamental foundation of hope that both climaxes and supplants the significance of everything that has come before because of how it has fulfilled and changed everything. The tension of continuity and discontinuity can be difficult to maintain, but Peter’s example is a reminder of the importance of holding both aspects together when proclaiming Christian hope as the fulfillment of God’s promises and the emergence of something new.

1. Some, such as John C. Poirier (“Psalm 16:10 and the Resurrection of Jesus ‘on the Third Day’ (1 Corinthians 15:4),” Journal for the Study of Paul and His Letters 4 (2014): 149–67) argue that 1 Cor 15:4 alludes to this Psalm as well. If the argument is sound—and I do think there is something to commend it, even if not in every point made—the Corinthian text would present further evidence that the use of Ps 16 goes back to the earliest gospel proclamations.

2. As David E. Aune (The Cultic Setting of Realized Eschatology in Early Christianity, NovTSup 28 (Leiden: Brill, 1972), 7) notes, eschatology is the idealization of soteriology.

3. For this paradigm, see William Kurz, “Promise and Fulfillment in Hellenistic Jewish Narratives and in Luke and Acts,” in Jesus and the Heritage of Israel: Luke’s Narrative Claim upon Israel’s Legacy, ed. David P. Moessner (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 1999), 147–70.

4. David P. Moessner, “Luke’s ‘Plan of God’ from the Greek Psalter: The Rhetorical Thrust of ‘The Prophets and the Psalms’ in Peter’s Speech at Pentecost,” in Scripture and Traditions: Essays on Early Judaism and Christianity in Honor of Carl R. Holladay, ed. Patrick Gray and Gail R. O’Day, NovTSup 129 (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 225–28, 234–36.

5. Matthew W. Bates, The Birth of the Trinity: Jesus, God, and Spirit in New Testament and Early Christian Interpretations of the Old Testament (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 33–35, 153–56. Cf. Justin Martyr, 1 Apol. 36; Irenaeus, Epid. 49–50; Origen, Philoc. 7.

6. Bates, Birth, 154.

7. N. T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God, vol. 3 of Christian Origins and the Question of God (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2003), 427–28.

8. Rikk E. Watts, “How Do You Read? God’s Faithful Character as the Primary Lens for the New Testament Use of Israel’s Scriptures,” in From Creation to New Creation: Biblical Theology and Exegesis, ed. Daniel M. Gurtner and Benjamin L. Gladd (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2013), 199–220.