Luke
A two-volume Christology rooted in the Spirit — Jesus as the one through whom God acts to fulfil his promises to Israel.
Overview
Luke is the only NT author who gives us a two-volume work: the Gospel of Luke and the Acts of the Apostles. This double perspective is crucial for understanding his Christology, because the speeches in Acts — particularly Peter's Pentecost sermon — provide what may be some of the earliest Christological formulations in the NT, even if Luke himself is writing later.
Luke's distinctive contribution is a Spirit-Christology. Jesus is conceived by the power of the Holy Spirit (not by a pre-existent being descending from heaven), anointed by the Spirit at his baptism, empowered by the Spirit for his ministry, and proclaimed in Acts as the one whom God "made both Lord and Christ" through the resurrection. This language of divine appointment and empowerment is theologically significant.
Luke also grounds Jesus firmly in the story of Israel. His Jesus is the fulfilment of prophetic expectation — a Spirit-filled prophet like Moses, a Davidic king, and the servant of God who brings salvation to the ends of the earth. This prophetic-messianic framework provides a Christological lens that is distinct from both John's Logos theology and Paul's participatory soteriology.
Christological themes
- Spirit-anointed prophet — Luke's Jesus inaugurates his ministry by reading Isaiah 61 in the Nazareth synagogue: "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me." This programmatic scene establishes Jesus as the Spirit-empowered agent of God's salvation. The Spirit is the source of Jesus's authority and power throughout Luke's narrative.
- "A man attested by God" — In Acts 2:22, Peter describes Jesus as "a man attested to you by God with mighty works and wonders and signs that God did through him." This language of God acting through Jesus, rather than Jesus acting as God, represents one of the most explicit agency-Christology statements in the NT.
- Conception by the Spirit — Luke 1:35 explains Jesus's divine sonship in terms of the Holy Spirit's power overshadowing Mary. Significantly, Luke does not invoke pre-existence or incarnation — the sonship is grounded in the miraculous conception itself. The angel says the child "will be called" Son of God, language that points to a status conferred rather than an identity possessed from eternity.
- Exaltation Christology — Acts 2:36 declares that God has "made" Jesus "both Lord and Christ" through the resurrection. This "making" language is striking — it implies that Jesus's lordship and messiahship are the result of God's action, not inherent attributes. Some scholars see this as preserving a very early, pre-Pauline Christological formula.
- Saviour and servant — Luke applies the title "Saviour" to both God and Jesus, but always in a way that makes clear that Jesus's saving work is God's saving work enacted through his chosen agent. Jesus is the "servant" (pais) of God in Acts, a title that connects him to the Isaianic servant figure and the Davidic royal tradition.
Key passages
What scholars debate
The key debate about Luke's Christology centres on whether his Spirit-language and agency-language represent a genuinely "lower" Christology than John's or Paul's, or whether Luke is simply expressing the same high Christology in a different idiom. Scholars like James Dunn argue that Luke's Christology is closer to the earliest Christian proclamation and reflects a stage before the development of pre-existence theology. Others, like C. Kavin Rowe, contend that Luke's narrative identifies Jesus with the God of Israel through subtle but deliberate literary strategies.
The relationship between the Christology of Luke's Gospel and the Christology of the speeches in Acts is also contested. Do the speeches in Acts preserve early pre-Lukan traditions with their own theological perspective, or are they Luke's own compositions placed in the mouths of the apostles? If the Pentecost sermon reflects an early adoptionist formula, it would be evidence that the earliest Christians understood Jesus as a man whom God elevated — a very different starting point from Johannine Logos theology.