Miracles: They're Not Just for Fundies Anymore
Asbury's Craig Keener has written some decent NT commentaries. But it is 2011's
Miracles: The Credibility of the New Testament Evidence, a two-volume tour-de-force with refreshingly little to say about the New Testament itself, that should give him real street cred as a world-class scholar.
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You ain't gotta be TBN: even the
Baptists are getting in on this action!!! |
Hold the phone...
refreshingly?
Yes! Keener has written some decent commentaries on some Gospel narratives and on Acts, and he knows how these things usually get hashed out. This or that account is brought up and its "form" is analyzed, and it is beaten like a waterboarded witness until it admits what "layers" it supposedly contains, add in the requisite parallelomania and you've got yourself a story completely evacuated of history by the historians.
Keener has paid the price in reviews for refusing to play by these rules, and so in this book, I suspect he knew there would need to be some deeper spade work done. It's kind of like writing a prequel after the main story, except with way better results than LucasFilm ever got!
This is a book whose proper genre ought to be something like "Epistemology of New Testament Studies." His target is none of the foxes who have nibbled various parts of the New Testament vineyard. No! C Keener comes loaded for bear in this one. Modernity has two great commandments: thou shalt not believe in an intervening God, and the second is like unto it: thou shalt disavow any purported working of that God as against the "universal human testimony." As all people know, the universe works by immutable
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What has two thumbs, a brass toe, and a bit
of nostalgia for his toga-draped fraternity
keggers? |
chains of cause and effect. Of course the muscle in this modernist mafia is the Great Brass-Toed Philosopher himself. It is David Hume who insisted that humanity spoke with one voice in a great cosmic denial of any miraculous activity. And this second table of the modern torah has underwritten, as torahs are meant to do, an entire way of thinking about the Bible. Thus, Bultmann insisted that wherever miracles were related in the Gospels and Acts, for example, it was clear that there was no real testimony present but rather the accretions of a subsequent "Christ-tradition" to the pristine narratives about Jesus.
Keener responds appropriately with a two-part thesis, one to overturn each of the two tables. The first, covered in chapters 7-12, completely refutes the Hume's argument from the so-called universal denial of miracles. There are, Keener notes, multitudes of Christians around the world who claim to have seen or received miraculous healing, provision, or even miraculous movements in nature. He documents just a few dozen of the hundreds to which people he knows to be reliable might give firsthand or eyewitness testimony (even admits he didn't try that hard!). The book could have been enormous. Many of the healing stories are accompanied by medical evaluation and confirmation, although many more are not. In either case, Keener admits to being unqualified for the job of evaluating medical data. He does, however, have plenty of testimony from doctors who are themselves qualified and have evaluated the data in many cases. These cases, however, are much fewer due to the fact that many of the supposed miracles to the testimony of which Keener has access have occurred in places where medical evaluation was not possible. But the many cases where it is available, he argues, create a plausibility structure in which the other kinds of events not only make sense, but bear analogy to the ones for which he can claim some kind of medical validation.
Any fair-minded reader will emerge from those 6 chapters (the heart of the book) with no doubt about whether Hume was right. Key for the argument Keener makes is that of the dozens of purported miracles he cites and documents, none of them
need to be true for it still to be the case that Hume was wrong. There is an enormous amount of human testimony to the miraculous, correct or no. The question of whether any of that testimony concerns actual miracles is, he concedes, a more difficult one, although not an impossible one.
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--"You think anyone will buy Keener's argument?"
--"It would take a miracle!"
"Hume-perdink, Hume-perdink, Hume-perdink!"
--"You promised never to say that name!" |
And with the question of the truth of the accounts he relates, Keener takes aim at the first table: for only a very small fraction of these accounts need to be true in order for there to be compelling evidence for divine action in the world. The book's later chapters, 13-15, deal specifically with these questions by adducing limiting cases. That is, if we grant the widest possible scope to possible alternative explanations for many of the miracles and healings (he admits that some of the testimonies he documents may indeed be explicable by natural causes--though far fewer than one might think), there are still testimonies (and plenty of them!) of incredible, medically inexplicable events: the removal of cataracts from eyes, the instant restoration of vision to those with severed optic nerves, and even the restoration to life of those who have been dead for far too long to hope for that. He documents one case of a child who was dead for three hours but was restored to health by prayer and lives on to the present day (she is his sister-in-law) in great health. Six minutes without oxygen would generally leave a person with massive, crippling brain damage even if they were to be restored. That this event could have occurred naturally has a probability of very near zero. That this and many other such "anomalies" occur in response to prayer (far more frequently than without prayer) creates a pressure that starts to suggest, over the course of the book, that it would be more remarkable that these events were not divine in origin than that they were.
It is difficult to argue with the testimony of an eyewitness who is still living to events concerning a child, restored from death, who is also still living. It is difficult, but not impossible. The book's last 3 chapters do not in any sense create a deductive argument for the existence of divine action (or existence, for that matter). But they do suggest a cumulative case argument whose conclusion seems to explain these testimonies better than any other could. And thus, the final chapters connect very nicely to the book's first six chapters to form what I would call the "head" of the book (the middle chapters, as suggested before, being its "heart"). These early chapters address the particular phenomena testified to in the biblical texts, phenomena which are shown by chapters 13ff. to be analogous to those about which Keener has collected testimony. The early chapters also address Hume's skepticism head-on to see whether it works intrinsically as a theory, although it is here, I suspect that the book will run into the most problems with those who specialize in Hume's thought and see it as definitive on these questions. Keener is on much firmer ground where he simply disputes the claim and (by any measure I can conceive of) debunks it. These early chapters, then, along with the final chapters, aim to give modern readers of the bible nothing less than a brain transplant (or perhaps just a renewed mind). The modern reader of the biblical text, pressed to the question by the weight of so much testimony, is invited to examine the Bible afresh and see whether or not similar testimonies are to be found there.
(One side note: In light of these testimonies, chapter 10 is a particularly bright gem, in which Keener treats some of the miraculous testimony in the history of the Church. The book would have been pulled out of shape by too deep a look into this, but since to my mind Church history suffers from the same modern pathogen as NT history does, it was refreshing to see Keener turning his gaze there even for a moment. I certainly wonder, for example, how St. Gregory's
Life of Benedict would fare under scholarly revisitation after the pallet-cleansing Keener aims to give.).
Keener succeeds admirably in his set aim, but I think the book merits a stronger statement still. The book stands as an admirable analysis and retooling of the epistemological scaffolding of much New Testament scholarship. It is, to repeat, most fittingly described as a contribution to the epistemology of Biblical Studies. Yet it might be suggested that the book does not merely aim to testify about miracles, but to press the problem of accounting for all of this testimony. Fabrication or deceit will not do, for, as Keener notes, most of his witnesses have absolutely not motive for it. Additionally, many of them are personally known to him and he therefore has reason to trust them (his wife's family, for example). He has, in addition, his own testimony to give. But if these testimonies cannot be dispensed with as deceptions, and if they cannot be sufficiently accounted for by many of the alternative explanations he proposes (histeria, hypnosis, suggestion, psychosomata, etc...), then how is one to account for them? And it is to this question that I think the book ultimately leads, even if that question is, as Keener suggests, his secondary question.
Indeed, It seems to me that Keener's book suggests a plausibility structure with which one can read the New Testament afresh. But the weight of Keener's testimony does not merely rest at the point of making the New Testament plausible. Indeed, it may serve to re-enchant the world, such that readers are now forced to find a paradigm to explain a world they did not know they lived in. The fact of so many multiplied accounts of healing on the heels of Christian prayer may open up the New Testament not only as history, but as the history in which other histories begin to make sense. And in this way, perhaps we may be brought once again to the one whose stories the Gospels tell, to be addressed again by Him, surely itself another miracle worth witnessing to.
