Acts 7:54–60

Reading

Stephen prays to Jesus. He addresses to the risen Christ the words Jesus addressed to the Father, and commits his spirit to him — an act of worship that would be idolatrous if directed to a creature.

Argument

The verbal parallel with Luke 23:46 is deliberate and is Luke's own construction: the same author, the same scene-type, the same committing of a spirit. Substituting "Lord Jesus" for "Father" in that formula is a considerable claim.

The verb epikaleomai ("call upon") is the standard Septuagint term for invoking God, and Luke uses it that way elsewhere — "everyone who calls upon the name of the Lord shall be saved" (Acts 2:21), quoting Joel 2:32, where the Lord is YHWH. Paul describes Christians simply as "all those who in every place call upon the name of our Lord Jesus Christ" (1 Cor 1:2).

Receiving the spirits of the dying is a divine prerogative in Jewish thought (Eccl 12:7; Ps 31:5, the very psalm Jesus quotes).

Larry Hurtado treats this scene as part of the earliest evidence for a "binitarian" devotional pattern in which Jesus is a recipient of cultic invocation from the beginning.

Counterargument

Stephen is looking at him. The whole point of vv. 55–56 is that Jesus is visibly present to Stephen in the vision. Speaking to someone you can see is not obviously the same act as prayer to the unseen God, and the New Testament's own model prayer is addressed to the Father.

The vision has two figures, not one. "The glory of God, and Jesus standing at the right hand of God" — God and the one beside him. If this scene establishes anything about Christology, it establishes distinction as clearly as it establishes exaltation.

The Son of Man is the figure addressed. The title Stephen uses is Daniel's human figure who receives dominion, not a divine name (see Son of Man).

The request fits delegated authority. Jesus is the one who raises the dead on the last day, by the Father's appointment (John 6:40; 5:21). Asking the appointed resurrector to receive one's spirit is a request to the one commissioned to do exactly that.

And epikaleomai is not restricted to deity. Paul "appealed to Caesar" using the same verb (Acts 25:11). The word means to call upon, and its object determines its weight.

Rebuttal

Trinitarians answer that the Caesar parallel proves only lexical range, not that the religious sense is absent here — the setting is martyrdom, not litigation, and the content is the disposal of a soul.

The concession that should be made is about the visionary setting. It genuinely is a live disanalogy with ordinary prayer, and the strongest form of the Trinitarian case does not rest on this verse alone but on the wider pattern of invocation Hurtado documents — of which this is one instance rather than the foundation.

Key scholars: Larry Hurtado, Richard Bauckham, Darrell Bock

Reading

Stephen speaks to the exalted Lord whom he can see, asking the one God has appointed to raise the dead to keep him until that day. The scene distinguishes God and Jesus in the same breath.

Argument

The vision is the interpretive frame. Stephen describes what he sees before he says anything to anyone: God's glory, and Jesus standing at God's right hand. Two parties. Whatever address follows happens inside that picture.

The substitution cuts the other way too. If Luke intended a straight parallel with Luke 23:46, the notable thing is that he changed the addressee. Jesus committed his spirit to the Father; Stephen commits his to Jesus — which is what you would expect if Jesus now holds a delegated office he did not hold before his exaltation (Acts 2:36).

The New Testament does not present this as the norm. Every recorded prayer in Acts after this is addressed to God (Acts 4:24–30; 12:5), and Paul's letters direct prayer to the Father through Christ. Biblical Unitarians differ among themselves about whether addressing Jesus is permitted; most allow it, and few think it establishes deity. See Prayer: Father, Son, and Spirit.

The second saying is instructive. "Lord, do not hold this sin against them" (v. 60) may be addressed to God rather than to Jesus — Luke does not specify — and the ambiguity shows that kyrios in this scene is doing ordinary work.

Counterargument

Even granting the vision, committing one's spirit is a weighty request, and Luke chose to record it in a form that mirrors words Jesus addressed to God. If the parallel is deliberate — and it looks deliberate — Luke is inviting the comparison rather than guarding against it.

Rebuttal

BU answer: the comparison is invited, and it is a comparison of role. Luke's two-volume argument is that God has exalted Jesus and given him authority (Acts 2:33), and the martyr scene shows that authority in operation. What Luke does not do — here or anywhere in Acts — is call Jesus God, or present prayer to him as replacing prayer to the Father.

Key scholars: Anthony Buzzard, Sean Finnegan, Dale Tuggy, James Dunn

Reading

The exalted Logos, standing at the Father's right hand, is a fitting recipient of invocation precisely because he is derivatively divine — genuinely more than a creature, and genuinely not the unoriginate God whose glory Stephen also sees.

Argument

The scene maps closely onto the framework: the Father's glory is the source; the Son stands beside it, in a position received rather than possessed; and the martyr addresses the one who mediates. Invocation of a mediating divine agent is neither idolatry nor bare creature-worship on this account.

It also explains why the earliest Christians could do this without any sense of having modified their monotheism — something both the Trinitarian and Unitarian readings have to work to account for.

Counterargument

The two-figure vision is equally well explained by agency, and the framework again risks being confirmed by a scene it merely accommodates.

Rebuttal

Logos theologians reply that agency alone struggles with the devotional dimension: prophets are not invoked at the point of death, and Luke's scene has a devotional register that a purely functional category does not obviously licence.

Key scholars: Larry Hurtado, Justin Martyr (historically), David Bentley Hart

Reading

Stephen prays to Jesus because Jesus is God. The vision shows God's glory and the human manifestation through which that glory is seen — not two divine persons.

Argument

Oneness readers take Stephen's address as straightforward prayer to God under the name in which God has revealed himself. That Stephen uses of Jesus the words Jesus used of the Father is, on this account, exactly right: the Father and Jesus are the same God.

The “right hand” is read as a position of authority rather than a location, so the vision does not require two persons standing in space.

Counterargument

Stephen names two things he sees — “the glory of God, and Jesus standing at the right hand of God” — and the sentence has to be re-read as one thing seen twice for the Oneness account to work.

Rebuttal

Oneness writers reply that “the right hand of God” is a standard idiom for authority and that the glorified humanity of Jesus is genuinely distinguishable from the invisible God whose glory fills the vision, without that distinction being a distinction of persons.

Key scholars: David K. Bernard, David Norris