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This book engages constructively the cultural power of the theological vision of the Acts of the Apostles. According to Acts, the apocalypse of God in Jesus of Nazareth entails the formation of a new culture. On the one hand, this new culture is constituted in such a way as necessarily to disrupt basic patterns of pagan existence—to the extent that one can speak of the potential for cultural dissolution; on the other, the Christians resolutely reject accusations of governmental overthrow and sedition. How the Christians embody the possibility of cultural disintegration and claim legal innocence before the Roman authorities are two aspects of one complex dialectic that informs Luke's total project: to narrate the inextricable interconnection between God's revelation and a total pattern of life. The dialectic in Luke's writing exhibits the theological effort to redescribe cultural dismantling as the light and forgiveness of God: the deconstructive move of the apocalypse to the Gentiles has its reconstructive counterpart in the creation of a people who receive light in darkness, forgiveness of sins, and guidance in the way of peace. The theological vision of Acts confronts its modern interpreters with a number of pressing questions about claims to universal truth about God and the politics such claims produce. The book thus concludes with an extended reflection on the intersection between Acts' vision and current ways of thinking about religious truth, tolerance, and politics.

Many on the Left have looked upon “universal” as a dirty word, one that signals liberalism's failure to recognize the masculinist and Eurocentric assumptions from which it proceeds. In rejecting universalism, we have learned to reorient politics around particulars, positionalities, identities, immanence, and multiple modernities. This book builds on these critiques of the tacit exclusions of Enlightenment thought, while at the same time working to rescue and reinvent what universal claims can offer for a revolutionary politics answerable to the common. In the contemporary quarrel of universals, the book shows, the stakes are no less than the future of our democracies. The book investigates the paradoxical processes by which the universal is constructed and deconstructed, instituted and challenged, in modern society. It shows that every statement and institution of the universal—such as declarations of human rights—carry an exclusionary, particularizing principle within themselves and that every universalism immediately falls prey to countervailing universalisms. Always equivocal and plural, the universal is thus a persistent site of conflict within societies and within subjects themselves. And yet, the book suggests, the very conflict of the universal—constituted as an ever-unfolding performative contradiction—also provides the emancipatory force needed to reinvigorate and reimagine contemporary politics and philosophy. In conversation with a range of thinkers from Marx, Freud, and Benjamin through Foucault, Derrida, and Scott, the book shows the power that resides not in the adoption of a single universalism but in harnessing the energies made available by claims to universality in order to establish a common answerable to difference.