In this and every age, the church desperately needs prophecy. It needs the bold proclamation of God s transforming vision to challenge its very human tendency toward expediency and self-interest to jolt it into new insight and energy. For Luke Timothy Johnson, the New Testament books Luke and Acts provide that much-needed jolt to conventional norms. To read Luke-Acts as a literary unit, he says, is to uncover a startling prophetic vision of Jesus and the church and an ongoing call for today s church to embody and proclaim God s vision for the world.
