Dr. Craig Keener: Miracles Today

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Overview

Today on the podcast, we’re joined by Dr. Craig Keener, FM and Ada Thompson Professor of Biblical Studies at Asbury Seminary. Dr. Keener joined the Seminary faculty in 2011. He’s a prolific author, writing 34 books, six of which have won awards in “Christianity Today.” Altogether he has more than one million copies in circulation.

In today’s conversation, we talk about his new book Miracles Today that answers common questions about miracles and provides compelling evidence for why we should believe in them today.

Let’s listen!

*The views expressed in this podcast don’t necessarily reflect the views of Asbury Seminary.

Dr. Craig Keener, FM and Ada Thompson Professor of Biblical Studies at Asbury Seminary.

Dr. Craig Keener is the F.M. and Ada Thompson Professor of Biblical Studies at Asbury Seminary. Before coming to Asbury in July 2011, Dr. Keener was professor of New Testament at Palmer Theological Seminary of Eastern University, where he taught for 15 years; before that time he was professor at Hood Theological Seminary.

Craig has authored more than books, several of which have won book awards in Christianity Today, of which altogether more than one million copies are in circulation. His “IVP Bible Background Commentary: New Testament “(1993), now in its 2nd revised edition (2014), has sold more than half a million copies (including editions in several languages, including more than fifty thousand copies in Korean). The “NIV Cultural Backgrounds Study Bible,” for which Craig authored most of the New Testament notes (and which John Walton and Craig edited), won Bible of the Year in the 2017 Christian Book Awards, and also won Book of the Year in the Religion: Christianity category of the International Book Awards.

Craig is married to Médine Moussounga Keener and together Craig and Médine work for ethnic reconciliation in the U.S. and Africa. Craig was ordained in an African-American denomination in 1991 and for roughly a decade before moving to Wilmore was one of the associate ministers in an African-American megachurch in Philadelphia. In recent years he has taught in Africa, Asia and Latin America, and in connection with various denominations.

Heidi Wilcox, host of the Thrive Podcast

Writer, podcaster, and social media manager, Heidi Wilcox shares stories of truth, justice, healing and hope. She is best known as the host of Spotlight, (especially her blooper reel) highlighting news, events, culturally relevant topics and stories of the ways alumni, current students and faculty are attempting something big for God. If you can’t find her, she’s probably cheering on her Kentucky Wildcats, enjoying a cup of coffee, reading or spending time with her husband, Wes.

Transcript

Heidi Wilcox:
Hey, everyone. Welcome to this week’s episode of the Thrive with Asbury Seminary Podcast. I’m your host, Heidi E. Wilcox, bringing you conversations with authors, thought leaders, and people just like you, who are looking to connect where your passion meets the world’s deep need.

Heidi Wilcox:
Today on the podcast we’re joined by Dr. Craig Keener, F. M. and Ada Thompson Professor of Biblical Studies at Asbury Seminary. Dr. Keener joined the seminary faculty in 2011. He has authored 34 books, six of which have won awards in Christianity Today, and altogether he has more are than one million copies in circulation. In today’s conversation, we talk about his new book, Miracles Today, that answers common questions about miracles and provides compelling evidence for why we should believe in them today. Let’s listen.

Heidi Wilcox:
Dr. Keener, thank you so much for once again being on the Thrive With Asbury Seminary Podcast. It’s always an honor to have you here. So thank you so much for making the time.

Dr. Craig Keener:
It’s always a privilege to be here with you.

Heidi Wilcox:
So today we’re here to talk about your latest book, Miracles Today: The Answers to Common Questions About Miracles and Provides Compelling Evidence as to Why We Should Believe in Them Today, but a decade ago in 2011, you wrote Miracles: The Credibility of the New Testament Accounts. It’s a two-volume work. So I’m curious, why was it so important to write a book on miracles 10 years ago, and then to provide what I will call it a bridge version since it’s one volume, if you will, now?

Dr. Craig Keener:
It’s not just a bridge volume, it’s like 70% of it is new material.

Heidi Wilcox:
Really?

Dr. Craig Keener:
Yeah. Yeah. There’s been a lot of new things, obviously, that have happened around the world since 2011, but there were a lot of people making claims about what the book either proved or didn’t prove who hadn’t actually read the book as you could tell from the claims. So I thought, “1,100 pages is long, so maybe they didn’t want to read all 1,100 pages.”

Dr. Craig Keener:
So this one is 300 pages. It’s easier to read. I didn’t use as much philosophic jargon, philosophy of science, philosophy of religion and so on. So a lot more accounts in the book and because I had to be selective, I focused not exclusively, but especially on those where we could have medical documentation and where that wasn’t possible, at least where we had multiple independent witnesses because sometimes some parts of the world they don’t have access to medical documentation because they don’t have access to doctors. That’s why they needed a miracle to begin with. So yeah, I tried to make this a more helpful and concise book that more people could make use of.

Heidi Wilcox:
What do you hope readers glean from the book after they … Should they be one of the ones who read it and we hope that they are?

Dr. Craig Keener:
What people have shared with me in particular has just been how encouraging it has been to their faith. Just to see, “Yeah. The God that we say we believe does miracles actually does them,” because in the West sometimes I think we’ve come to depend on everything else except on God, and it’s not wrong that we make use of the other things. Those are God’s gifts, and since God has given to them to us, we should make use of them, but always remembering that God is the one who gave them to us and that in many parts of the world where people don’t have those, God is still showing up on their behalf.

Heidi Wilcox:
Absolutely. What have you learned, because you mentioned this book has new material, what have you learned about miracles in the past decade?

Dr. Craig Keener:
Well, there have been more cases that have been medically documented. Actually, there were some that were medically documented before that I didn’t know about, but more has been published since 2011. There have been some actual journal articles, more journal articles with case studies, and that has been really very helpful. Personally, it’s really encouraged me to pray for miracles knowing that, “Okay. God may not always say yes.” It’s just like if faculty asks something to of the administration, they may not always say yes, but it doesn’t hurt to ask, right?

Heidi Wilcox:
Right.

Dr. Craig Keener:
Anyway, but when we know that God actually, He does answer prayer and He doesn’t just answer prayer for the people who are so super confident. One of my students in New Testament here named Ethan, he was praying for somebody because they asked him to in another country. He was sharing this in the New Testament class.

Dr. Craig Keener:
He was like, “Okay. What’s going to happen? Nothing happened the first time.” So he said, “Okay. Well, we prayed.”

Dr. Craig Keener:
They said, “No, no. Pray again.”

Dr. Craig Keener:
He prayed again and suddenly the blind person was healed, and he was like, Really?” and starts testing it out because he wasn’t expecting that. Well, God sometimes works that way, too.

Dr. Craig Keener:
Whenever I cover this in my New Testament survey class or in other classes where this comes up, where you’re dealing with biblical passages about miracles, I’ll have a student or several students who share about miracles that they’ve witnessed. One last semester was a student who prayed for someone who was deaf in a train station in New Jersey, and she was instantly completely healed.

Heidi Wilcox:
Wow.

Dr. Craig Keener:
So it’s not like all of us see this all the time, but God is at work all the time.

Heidi Wilcox:
Yeah. Yeah. So one of my questions was, do miracles still happen today? Obviously, you’ve already given us examples that they do. Can you help us, I guess, see, understand why it’s important to believe that miracles can still happen today, that they didn’t necessarily end in Bible times or that they even happened at all?

Dr. Craig Keener:
Yeah. Yeah. The book is really more addressing the people that say they didn’t happen at all. Most people will say that things have ceased, don’t say that God ceased working. They just say certain gifts have ceased, and I disagree with that, but that’s a completely different story. That’s not what the book is about.

Dr. Craig Keener:
To say things ended in Bible times, who says Bible times have ended? I mean, Peter says in the day of Pentecost, in the last days says, “God, I’ll pour out my spirit on all flesh.” Well, if it was the last days then, it’s certainly not earlier days now. I mean, if anything, it’s laster days to make up a new word. So if God was pouring out the spirit then, God is still pouring out the spirit, and we still have access to the same living God who did things then.

Dr. Craig Keener:
Now Augustine in the early fifth century, he wrote that he had originally thought that everybody that the apostles prayed for got healed, and everybody who got baptized came up speaking in tongues. That’s what he thought. He said, “Well, that doesn’t happen anymore.”

Dr. Craig Keener:
Well, I’m not sure that was always even true in the first century, but that’s what Augustine thought. Then Augustine said, “At one point I thought that we didn’t have these things anymore,” at least not very often because he said, “I did know about a couple blind men who were healed at Milan,” but then he says, “but then I found out, well, these things still are happening.” He himself was healed of something. A friend of his was healed of an anal fistula, and then his diocese started collecting affidavits from people who had been healed, and these included things like healings of blindness, raisings from the dead. After two years, his diocese had collected 70 affidavits, and he knew other people who hadn’t turned theirs in yet.

Heidi Wilcox:
Wow.

Dr. Craig Keener:
So these things have been happening for a long time throughout church history. Big issue in the Korean revival, the early 20th century Korean revivals. John Wesley recounts these things as well. I mean, I think it was 1742, December 15th he reports in his journal. So this is at the time it happened, same day, Mr. Myrick fell sick, so did Wesley. Well, 10 days later, Myrick died as far as they could tell. They prayed for him and he revived and got better. So I mean, and Wesley talks about other things like that, too, but that one is one that he interpreted apparently as a raising from the dead.

Dr. Craig Keener:
Actually, the late second century, Irenaeus, one of the church fathers writing around the year 1 A. D., he’s speaking against the gnostics, which was a group of sects that were not considered Orthodox. He says, “Look, you gnostics, you don’t have anything on us. You talk big, but, look, where are your miracles? Hey, we got this one church up here in France where people get raised from the dead periodically. So yeah.” So these things have been going on for a long time.

Heidi Wilcox:
Yeah. Yeah. So before we get too much further, we’ve talked about some examples, a little bit of examples of miracles, but I think it’s important that we have a working definition of what a miracle is. I’m guessing there are maybe more than one definition, but what’s the definition that we’re working from?

Dr. Craig Keener:
Yeah. There are lots of definitions, but probably the dominant definition used by theologians today is special divine action. The way we come at that is that, well, everything around us is God’s work. So I mean, you want to define a miracle as God’s work. Well, DNA, I mean, you can’t get much more miraculous than that, and just the way the universe is set up and the world is set up so that human life can exist and any life can exist, but certainly human life.

Dr. Craig Keener:
So you have general divine action, but for people who are, I’m nearsighted physically, for people who are too myopic, too nearsighted to see the big picture of the universe or the microscopic picture of DNA and everything else, God also has special divine action. That’s something that’s not according to the regular, repeated, working of nature, the way things God set them up to work, but rather a one-off here and a one-off there.

Dr. Craig Keener:
From the eyes of somebody who would be a skeptic, they would call that just an anomaly, but when you have a pattern of those, not a replicable pattern where it happens all the time, everybody prays any more than an event in history or somebody’s personal choices is they’re necessarily predictable all the time, but we have special divine action in a way that gets our attention that differs from the general divine action, so things that don’t usually happen on their own.

Dr. Craig Keener:
Now, that’s an amorphous ambiguous definition in the sense that some things are more special than others, but I tried to focus in the book, especially on the kinds of things that most people would consider special. So sometimes I’ve had somebody tell me, “Well, look. I won’t believe unless you have medical documentation.”

Dr. Craig Keener:
I say, “Okay. There’s medical documentation for this, this, and this.”

Dr. Craig Keener:
They say, “Well, I won’t believe unless somebody’s been raised from the dead.”

Dr. Craig Keener:
So I give them evidence for that.

Dr. Craig Keener:
They say, “Okay. Well, okay. Now, that could have happened. I won’t believe it unless the Lord writes my name across the sky and says, ‘Repent.'”

Dr. Craig Keener:
Well, that’s not going to happen. I mean, God is not obligated to jump through our hoops, but He has given this evidence and most people would consider something like being raised from the dead with nothing wrong with you after being dead for under clinical conditions for 40 minutes. People would usually consider that pretty extraordinary since after six minutes with no oxygen, irreparable brain damage normally starts in.

Dr. Craig Keener:
So we have a number of cases like that, and I think they can be really encouraging to those who want to bolster their faith, and they can get the attention of people who are really open to exploring faith.

Heidi Wilcox:
After you came to know Jesus, was it a struggle for you to then believe in the miraculous?

Dr. Craig Keener:
Yeah. Yeah. I was converted from atheism. So I brought over some of that skepticism with me into the faith. I know they say a lot of times converts are socialized into the faith and gradually get rid of their skepticism. Not me. Mine was pretty sudden and I still had a lot of questions. Some things dramatically happened. God was real, but after a while, I guess my skepticism kicked in and then I saw some things like at my church, they were praying for somebody with back problems. I know you can manipulate the legs in such a way. It looks like one grew out, but they were just holding both legs together and one just shot out visibly without anybody moving it, and that got my attention.

Dr. Craig Keener:
Then there was another case the same night when they prayed for somebody who was deaf. I was talking with her afterwards and she was like, “I wish I could hear.” All of a sudden I noticed that she didn’t have her hearing aid in. She hadn’t noticed it. Anyway, those things got my attention at the beginning.

Dr. Craig Keener:
Then there were times when we prayed for people. There was one lady who had a cyst in her ear and her kidneys had failed, and she was healed of both. Then there were other times early on, one of them I helped with a nursing home Bible study, and this was a couple years after my conversion. There was a lady named Barbara, who every week said, “I wish I could walk. I wish I could walk.”

Dr. Craig Keener:
One day, the Bible study leader, who was a seminary student and, by the way, I do not advise my seminary students to do this. Like I said, this is a one-off. This is just something God led him to do, but he got up out of his seat, walked over to her, said, “In the name of Jesus Christ rise up and walked.” Took her by the hand, walked her around the room, and if faith is a bias, I can’t be accused of it in this case because I thought she was going to fall flat on the floor, and looking at the expression on her face, if you say it was psychosomatic, well, it wasn’t her psycho because she was clearly not expecting it. I mean, she looked as horrified as I felt, but from then on, she would walk to the Bible study and say, “I love my Bible study. I love my Bible study.”

Dr. Craig Keener:
Another case, this was when I first began my teaching career. I had been teaching maybe a couple years at this point. I was teaching at a seminary that was attached to a college. There was another college that was joining us, a campus ministry group, to do outreach on this college campus, but the day that we’d scheduled it for it was pouring down rain, and it was scheduled to pour down rain all day long. We were drenched, and a sophomore biology major said, “Well, let’s pray that the rain will stop.”

Dr. Craig Keener:
I thought, “Oh, it can’t hurt.”

Dr. Craig Keener:
We joined hands and prayed. As soon as she said, “Amen,” the rain stopped. After a few minutes, the sun came out. It didn’t rain another drop the rest of the day. Now, you can say that’s coincidence, but from a standpoint of where you see these things happen, especially in terms of outreach, and I’ve seen other things, but those are just some of the things early on just to say I have some reasons for what I believe about these things.

Heidi Wilcox:
Yeah. Definitely. I’m curious about the role of faith when we pray for a miracle because you said that the woman who then was able to walk, and you even, were very surprised when the miracle happened. There’s been other people that I’ve heard about that they’re, I don’t want to say just going through the motions, but kind of that, if you will, saying the words but not really believing in God honoring that. So how do we pray for a miracle and what is the role of faith in that?

Dr. Craig Keener:
Yeah. In Acts 12 after James, the brother of John was executed, it says that the church was praying that Peter would be spared. After an angel delivers Peter and he shows up and knocks on the door at the prayer meeting, they’re like, “That can’t be Peter. Oh, no! It’s his ghost maybe.”

Dr. Craig Keener:
So sometimes God does that. I think he does it probably more often where there’s a greater expression of faith, but sometimes to teach us faith. You see in the gospels often your faith has made you well. That may be partly because Jesus doesn’t want people … He’s trying to keep down the paparazzi who are following Him around all over the place. At the same time, you also have the case in Mark 4, I think it’s 35 to 41, where you’ve got this storm and the disciples are like, “Lord, don’t you care? We’re perishing.” They wake Him up and He stills the storm and then He turns in and says, “Where is your faith?” Well, they weren’t the ones with faith in that case. So Jesus had faith, obviously. So yeah.

Dr. Craig Keener:
Another example I could give is from Andrea Anderson in Canada. She’d been blind for 12 years due to her diabetes. She attended a church service, in this case it was a Pentecostal church, although I have stories from all sorts of different ones, but she was attending this church. The preacher was walking through the aisle and suddenly stopped where she was.

Dr. Craig Keener:
He said, “You spirit of blindness, come out of her.”

Dr. Craig Keener:
Now, I don’t know if it was a spirit of blindness. It looks to me like it’s an offshoot of the diabetes, but whatever it was or maybe it’s a combination. I don’t know what it was, but in any case, he said, “Now, look at me.”

Dr. Craig Keener:
She’s like, “I can turn to you, but I can’t look at you. I’m blind,” but she looked at him and suddenly she could see. Everybody in the church knew her, knew she was blind. Everybody in the church knew that now she could see because he called her upfront. They demonstrated it. The pastor of the church where she attends tells me that he still keeps her old white cane in his office because she doesn’t need it anymore. She still has diabetes, but she was healed of blindness on that occasion, and everybody there knew it.

Heidi Wilcox:
Yeah. How do we know when to pray for a miracle like that because it seems risky for the other person involved? Say, he would’ve prayed that prayer and she hadn’t been healed. It seems like you could be setting up for disappointment. How do we know when?

Dr. Craig Keener:
I mean, as long as the person welcomes prayer and wants prayer, I think it’s always all right to pray. I mean, we’re standing with them, but, yeah. In his case, he wasn’t just praying. He was saying, basically, “You are healed.” You better have a word from the Lord, very clear word from the Lord. It’s just like when Don took Barbara by the hand, lifted her from the wheelchair. If he hadn’t been right, that would have been disastrous, but it never hurts to pray. It does happen more often when people pray than when people don’t.

Heidi Wilcox:
Yes, and that is true. Before we get into what you’ve called the heart of the book, I want to ask you for a couple of examples of miracles that you personally have experienced.

Dr. Craig Keener:
Oh, I just gave you some of those.

Heidi Wilcox:
Oh, okay. Okay.

Dr. Craig Keener:
Oh, actually, I could give you some other ones. These aren’t the big ones. I mean, the book talks, well, big ones. The book talks about the more dramatic ones mainly, but, yeah, there’s some I’ve experienced. I mean, I broke my, my ankle.

Heidi Wilcox:
Yes. That’s what I meant. Now that you’ve done witnessed other people but have happened to you.

Dr. Craig Keener:
Yeah. Yeah. There was a time when I I’m pretty sure I broke my ankle because it didn’t heal right. So I didn’t have any money. I couldn’t go to a doctor. I was a seminary student. So for two years I just limped. I’d always run before that, but at this point, I could walk, but if I I tried to do anything faster than that, it would hurt so bad, I’d start limping.

Dr. Craig Keener:
So one day, just I felt like God’s assurance He was going to do it. I prayed and was healed. The next day, I was at the seminary. It was on the sixth floor of the building. I ran up six flights of stairs to test out my being healed. So things like that I’ve experienced and others like that.

Dr. Craig Keener:
Then there are things that are not medical, but the day before I was going to call Duke and tell them I couldn’t come to do my PhD because I had a dollar. It wasn’t enough.

Heidi Wilcox:
Right? No money.

Dr. Craig Keener:
The Lord for provided. Actually, it was the day before. So if God hadn’t acted on that point, I wouldn’t be here talking to you. I would be working in the department store. Nothing wrong with working in a department store, but I wouldn’t be doing what I’m doing.

Dr. Craig Keener:
Then the day that, yeah, when I was about to, actually, when I finished my PhD, well, anyway, let’s save it for the other stories. I don’t know how much time we have. I don’t want to waste time with my own little stories.

Heidi Wilcox:
You’re fine. You’re fine. In your book, you talk about, well, the Bible says, and you are referencing the Bible in your book, the blind received their sight, the lame walked, the lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear. Can you give us example? You’ve already given us some. Can you give us examples for each of those categories?

Dr. Craig Keener:
Oh, sure. So for blindness being healed, there was a medical journal article actually done about a case study. This woman also had been blind for 12 years, not the same woman as the one I talked about before, though. She was blind for different reasons. I think it was related to macular degeneration or something like that. I need to go back and reread the article, but she and her husband were Baptists in this case. They had never seen a miracle. It wasn’t that they didn’t believe in one, but she was just wishing she could see so much and her husband just in anguish, he just prayed, “God, please open her eyes,” and suddenly she could see. The journal article includes the before and after medical documentation. This wasn’t just temporary. This was decades ago, but they have all the documentation in that case.

Dr. Craig Keener:
There’s a another case of, and this one was in the US, but also another case from the US, Greg Spencer. He was going blind from macular degeneration. He’d already gotten on disability. He’d already been through training for the blind, so to be able to read Braille or whatever. He was at a retreat for the healing of the mind, and God healed his mind but gave him a bonus on top of it. When he opened his eyes, he could see.

Heidi Wilcox:
Wow.

Dr. Craig Keener:
The only problem was, and this is actually why we have the medical documentation, because most people don’t know how to get it, but he had to get it because the Social Security administration said, “Well, you’ve been on disability and macular degeneration doesn’t undegenerate. So we’re going to investigate you for fraud.” So for a year they checked into it, but they had all the documents and all the documents said, I mean, the documents were clear. So finally, after a year of investigation, he receives a letter from the Social Security administration saying, “You’ve received a remarkable return of your visual acuity. You are no longer quality for disability. So downside everything, you have to go back to work.”

Heidi Wilcox:
He’s like, “I’ve been trying to tell you this for a year.”

Dr. Craig Keener:
Yeah. Exactly. Oh, there’s actually a newspaper article in the UK, where a news outlet was complaining about government waste, and they gave the example of somebody who she was never supposed to be able to walk again. She went to a healing meeting with somebody who prayed for her. She came back completely healed, said, “Okay. I need to get off disability.” The government couldn’t take her off disability because it was supposed to be incurable. So the computer didn’t know how to compute that. It’s just, “No. You can’t be taken off this.”

Heidi Wilcox:
I love that. I love that.

Dr. Craig Keener:
UK, in this case, United Kingdom, not University of Kentucky.

Heidi Wilcox:
Yes. I was tracking with you. So we’ve done the blind. The lame walking, lepers cleansed, and then the deaf hearing.

Dr. Craig Keener:
Oh, actually, that wasn’t meant to be my example with the disabled walking. That was just-

Heidi Wilcox:
That was just a bonus.

Dr. Craig Keener:
That just occurred to me because, yeah, and I could think of some other ones, too, but, yeah, in the case of the disabled walking, one of my favorite is somebody else coincidentally named Barbara. This one actually made a lot of news back when it happened. Barbara had been deteriorating physically from a severe case of multiple sclerosis for about 15 years, and she’d spent about half that time in the hospital, but this time they sent her home and it was just to try to keep her comfortable. They said, “She won’t be back here.” They’d already agreed to not try to resuscitate.

Dr. Craig Keener:
She was, in her words, curled up like a pretzel. She’d gone blind. Her diaphragm didn’t work. She was hooked up to a machine to help her to breathe. When she heard a voice saying, “My child, rise up and walk,” now she couldn’t move her muscles, but suddenly she jumps out of bed.

Dr. Craig Keener:
The first thing she notices is that she sees her feet flat on the ground. Second thing she notices is her hands are uncurled. Third thing she notices is that she can see these things. She’s shouting out as she’s pulling out some of the plugs from her and her mother runs in and then she starts calling, “Dad! Dad!” Their dad thinks it’s her sister and says, “I’ll be there in a minute.” So she just runs out to him. I mean, normally, after you haven’t been able to walk for years, your muscles are too atrophied. It’s going to take you time to build up enough muscle tone, but in this case, the healing was so dramatic and so complete that she didn’t even have, I mean, her muscles weren’t even atrophied, so that she ran out there.

Dr. Craig Keener:
Now, I corresponded with two of her doctors, interviewed two of her doctors, and there were also I think two or three of her doctors also have published on this. This was 1981. So 40 years, no recurrence of multiple sclerosis.

Heidi Wilcox:
Wow. That’s incredible.

Dr. Craig Keener:
Yeah. She did pass away very sadly recently from COVID, but she was, in terms of what she was healed from, it never recurred.

Heidi Wilcox:
What about leprosy and then the deaf hearing?

Dr. Craig Keener:
Leprosy is a little bit harder partly because most parts of the world they don’t have leprosy in terms of Hansen’s disease. Now, when Jesus was talking about it, it meant any kind of skin condition, which would include my eyebrow here. So it was a wider category in biblical times, but it included Hansen’s disease. There used to be a debate about that, and then they found some DNA tissue from a burial near Jerusalem from the first century and the person had leprosy, so modern leprosy, Hansen’s disease, but we do have cases of Hansen’s disease being cured.

Dr. Craig Keener:
One of them is a case, actually, again, this is from one of my students here. He, well, he was here and then he went to TEDS and did his PhD there. He’s from India and he worked with a friend named Barry Malto. Now, Barry Malto had been a shaman, but he contracted leprosy, the modern, what we mean by that today. He was cast out of his village.

Dr. Craig Keener:
Well, then a couple ladies came and prayed for him. Nothing happened at the moment, but that night in the dream, an angel touched his hands. He woke up in the morning completely healed, went into the village where he was from. The entire village became Christians.

Heidi Wilcox:
Wow.

Dr. Craig Keener:
By the time my student, Ebi Paranbarage got there, half that region had already become Christians.

Heidi Wilcox:
Wow.

Dr. Craig Keener:
There were other things that happened in the meantime like people being raised from the dead and so on, but then he worked with Barry Malto for a number of years. So these weren’t people who simply started with Christian premises. These were people with their own indigenous healing traditions but who witnessed something so dramatic that they actually were willing to abandon at great social cost centuries of tradition.

Dr. Craig Keener:
Also, one of the visiting scholars here shared with me that when she was a girl in India, her father had washed the foot of a leprose man named Selvan, and the next day Selvan came to them. His leprosy was gone. That had big impact in that area also.

Heidi Wilcox:
Yeah. Yeah. That’s amazing. Do deaf people still hear today?

Dr. Craig Keener:
Oh, yeah, yeah. No. The study I’m about the cite actually was in the first book, but in Mozambique, there’s been a revival in Northern Mozambique. There’s a lot of persecution going on there right now, too, but there were completely unchurched villages where they would go in and sometimes they would start. Well, they show the Jesus film, then they’d pray for the sick. Sometimes people would start getting healed before they’d even start praying for them. Just as God reaching out to these people who hadn’t heard the message before so that so many people in that area were healed of deafness and blindness that a region that was once mapped out as largely another faith came to be mapped out as largely Christian demographically by the government.

Heidi Wilcox:
Oh, wow.

Dr. Craig Keener:
I mean, Wendy Deichmann at United theological Seminary and Andrew Sung Park, they actually visited this on the ground and they saw this. Wendy mentioned it in Good News Magazine. They went into a village with these people who are going out and witnessed somebody healed of blindness. Wendy shared with me the next day that they started the church in that village. That was the normal pattern.

Dr. Craig Keener:
Well, anyway, Southern Medical Journal published a study on this. It was done. That was in September of 2010. Some people on the internet complained, “Well, you don’t have ideal testing conditions in rural Mozambique.” That’s true enough, but something that’s not in my 2011 book, because it wasn’t published yet in 2012, one of the authors of that study, Candy Gunther Brown of Indiana university published a book with Harvard University Press called Testing Prayer. In a chapter in that book, she documents what they did in terms of testing these people who went from not being able to see to being able to see, not being able to hear to being able to hear, and there are a number of other examples.

Dr. Craig Keener:
I mean, one case where the audiologist said, “That’s not possible. I just tested her. She had an auditory nerve damage. That doesn’t just go away,” but they said, “No. She prayed. She was instantly healed,” and he’s like, “Yeah, right.” He tested it again. He says, “I have no explanation for this.” That one was in the UK. I mean, there are a number of cases, but I’m just giving you some examples here and there. There’s plenty more in the book.

Heidi Wilcox:
Yes, but these are documented or documented by medical people or witnessed by a large enough group. Yeah. That’s incredible. Are dead people still raised today?

Dr. Craig Keener:
Yeah. One of the ones I mentioned in the book before was what was shared by a cardiologist in West Palm Beach, Florida. Dr. Chauncey Crandall prayed for Jeff Markin, who had been flat-lined for about 40 minutes. He prayed for him. They shocked him with a paddle one more time. Well, if you’re flat-lined even for a couple minutes, you’re not going to get a normal heartbeat right away, but suddenly, he’s got a normal heartbeat.

Dr. Craig Keener:
This is somebody who was not just dead. He was very obviously dead. His face and hands had turned black from cyanosis. So the nurse starts screaming, “Dr. Crandall! Dr. Crandall! What have you done? Frankenstein’s monster?” because, again, six minutes with no oxygen you’ve got irreparable brain damage, but it turned out he doesn’t have brain damage and he hadn’t been a believer before, but he became a believer. So now Jeff Markin and Chauncey Crandall go around and share the testimony.

Dr. Craig Keener:
Now, the backstory to that is that maybe a year or two before that, Dr. Crandall’s own son, Chad, had died of leukemia. So they had prayed. He wasn’t healed, but Dr. Crandall said, “You know what? God is worthy of my trust no matter what, and I’m not going to give up believing that God can do this.” When God led him to pray for this other person, it happened.

Dr. Craig Keener:
Another example that it wasn’t in my earlier book, but it’s in this one, Sean George, a consultant physician at Kalgoorlie Hospital in Australia. He suffered a heart attack and then went into full cardiac arrest. This was in an outpatient clinic, so his friends from Kalgoorlie Hospital were coming to try to get to him, but by the time they get to him, and his wife was one of them, she was also a physician, he had been clinically dead for about an hour and a half, am hour and 25 minutes.

Dr. Craig Keener:
So they get there and they said to his wife, and by this time it’s an hour and 55 minutes, almost two hours, his wife, Sherry Jacob, “Just say your goodbye to him because there’s nothing more we can do.” Instead, she just cried out to God. Again, we know this doesn’t always happen, but, again, this was more than six minutes. This was close to two hours.

Heidi Wilcox:
Way more than six minutes.

Dr. Craig Keener:
Yeah, and all his systems had already shut down. She just cried out to God and suddenly the heart monitor sprang to life with a normal heartbeat. They were like, “Uh-oh. This is the worst thing that could happen because he’s already dead. I mean, he’s vegetable. What can we …” but they did what they could do, his physicians.

Dr. Craig Keener:
Three days later, so this wasn’t instant, but three days later, he wakes up, reads his own chart. He’s back to work, and this is not done in the closet somewhere secretly. I mean, he’s a doctor. He knows how to get medical documentation. He has it posted publicly in his website, including the defibrillator logs. I mean, it’s all there. Some of his colleagues there were Hindu and Muslim, and they agreed this is a miracle.

Heidi Wilcox:
Wow.

Dr. Craig Keener:
No other way this could happen.

Heidi Wilcox:
Yeah. So it seems obvious how we can check that miracles are true happening today now because there’s medical journals. You’ve given examples from sometimes there’s a big enough group of people who see the results, and you know it’s true, but not always. I don’t want to say not always.

Dr. Craig Keener:
Right. There’s some that are more ambiguous we can say between whether it’s general divine action or special divine action. We give thanks either way. We pray. We count it an answer to prayer either way, but, I mean, medicine is God’s gift. Doctors are God’s gift. Medical technology is God’s gift. We thank God for all of that, but sometimes it’s like God seems to be sending a special message, and it seems to happen most often like in Mozambique where they say like in that one region, they estimate somewhere on 90% of the deaf people there have been healed, and they still have programs for those who haven’t been. I mean, they still are trying to serve them every way they can, but on the cutting edge of evangelism, those are the kind of circumstances you have in the gospels in Acts. Those are where it seems to happen most dramatically most often.

Heidi Wilcox:
Yeah. How do we know that those miracles are true? How do we fact check them, if you will, to know that they’re true because none of us were there?

Dr. Craig Keener:
Well, the example I gave you from Mozambique, actually, the medical journal, the chapter in that book, and then Wendy and Andrew Sung Park who were witnesses of that, and I have other friends.

Heidi Wilcox:
Oh, yes.

Dr. Craig Keener:
PhD friends who are witnesses of it. They invited me to come, but I’ve been a lot of places. I haven’t been there yet.

Heidi Wilcox:
I understand.

Dr. Craig Keener:
So I got things from other places. In fact, when I was in Congo I got eyewitness accounts. In terms of eyewitnesses, it’s like if there’s a traffic accident and the police officers interviewing witnesses and somebody comes up and says, “Well, don’t listen to them. That’s not what happened,” and the officer says, “Well, tell me what you saw happened.”

Dr. Craig Keener:
The person says, “I didn’t see anything happen. That’s why I know it didn’t happen. I wasn’t there.”

Dr. Craig Keener:
Normally, we’re not going to take that very seriously. Why would we do that? I mean, my area of focus, where my scholarship is is more in the primary sources, is in historiography. In historiography, we could not do it without eyewitness material. We don’t have enough artifacts from the first century to just do it from artifacts. In law, journalism, sociology, anthropology, historiography, in all those areas, you have to be able to depend on witnesses. They’re not always right, but when you have multiple independent witnesses and where you can check it, and where enough of the information proves to be correct where you can check it, then the burden of proof is on somebody who’s being skeptical of it.

Heidi Wilcox:
So is that the multiple sources? Is that how we can prove that biblical miracles actually happened as they say?

Dr. Craig Keener:
Prove is different from give evidence for.

Heidi Wilcox:
Give evidence for. We’ll go into give evidence for.

Dr. Craig Keener:
Yeah. The main reason for skepticism historically about the gospels in Acts was that they include miracle accounts, like one-third of Mark’s gospel or one-fifth of the book of Acts. The main reason for disputing miracle accounts was this goes back to an 18th century Scottish philosopher, David Hume, who didn’t believe he would have credible eyewitness accounts.

Dr. Craig Keener:
If you actually read his essay instead of just depending on Hume’s reputation, his argument is really bad. I mean, philosophers, there’ve been a number of philosophers who published refutations of it, including one published by Oxford Universal Press called Hume’s Abject Failure, his argument for miracles. Somebody said, “How can you call it that?” because most authors we don’t get to name the books anyway but, “How can you call it that? You have a Christian bias.”

Dr. Craig Keener:
He said, “I’m actually not a Christian. I just thought it was a really bad argument.”

Dr. Craig Keener:
The first part of Hume’s argument is miracles are violations of natural law. Natural law can’t be violated. Therefore … So he defines two things and then by fee out of the way, he defines them and says, “Miracles can happen.” The way he defines natural law doesn’t fit the way it’s defined today or even the way Newton and others in whom he depends defined it back then because they believed in biblical miracles.

Dr. Craig Keener:
Anyway, the second part of his essay is all about how you can’t trust eyewitness accounts for miracles. He says, “Okay. You can’t trust anything from people who aren’t White.” So a little bit of racism. Well, actually, Hume was not racist. Then there were other things.

Dr. Craig Keener:
By the time he’s excluding people or finally gets down, he’s got this example from Pascal’s niece in the 1600s. Pascal’s niece had a running eye sore, emitted a foul odor, and everybody knew about it, but she was publicly and instantly healed at a contact point of faith. The Queen Mother of France sent her own physician to check it out. So Hume says, “Okay. This is medically documented. This is attested by multiple witnesses. It was public.”

Dr. Craig Keener:
In other words, everything he demands that you have to have for it to be a miracle, how does he address that? He simply says, “We know this didn’t happen. So why would we believe anything else?” and then moves on.

Heidi Wilcox:
Wow.

Dr. Craig Keener:
Yeah. So, I mean, but that’s the prejudice that informed David Friedrich Strauss, who was a New Testament scholar who said, “Miracles don’t happen, so any miracle accounts that can’t be explained psychosomatically in the gospels in Acts must be due to legendary accretion over the process of many generations.”

Dr. Craig Keener:
Yet, Strauss himself had a friend by the name of Edward Morica, and Morica spent time visiting German Lutheran Pastor Johann Christoph Blumhardt in the Black Forest Region of Germany, who was known for his ministry of healing and exorcism in the mid 1800s, and Morica, next time that Straus hears from Morica, is hiking in the mountains.

Dr. Craig Keener:
So Straus says, “Okay. His medically diagnosed spinal problem must have just been psychosomatic,” but what he can’t do is say that it was merely a legend that it rose over generations of time. Straus cannot be consistent with his own methodology, and the same with some other scholars. I won’t bore you with all those details, but once you remove the prejudice against the possibility of miracles, then we should approach these documents the way we would approach other full length biographies of figures from living memory from the early Roman empire because biographies of figures from the early Roman empire were information-based. They were not novelistic.

Dr. Craig Keener:
I mean, they had evolved beyond what proto biography had been a few centuries earlier and they hadn’t descended into hagiography of late antiquity. This is the historical apex of ancient biography. When they’re talking about events within living memory, within the past generation or two, usually, living memory is defined or oral history is defined as the position 60 to 80 years. So I mean, all four first century gospels fit that for Jesus’ ministry. So we have good reason to take these accounts very seriously.

Heidi Wilcox:
Yeah, definitely. How do we start paying attention to miracles when they happen today so that we can, I don’t even know if it’s important to determine this, but sometimes I struggle with this, “Is it a miracle or did it just happen?”

Dr. Craig Keener:
Well, that’s where I say we can give God thanks whether it’s special divine action or general divine action, but in terms of if you’re trying to document something as a miracle for people who are more skeptical, then you want to get the medical documentation and so on, if possible. I mean, sometimes it’s not possible. Again, there are parts of the world where you can’t get it. I had trouble getting some of my own.

Dr. Craig Keener:
Anyway, but we do have this tendency in the West, I think, partly because of the legacy of Hume, the post-Humus legacy, so to speak, a little humor. Anyway, we have this legacy from Hume, and just I think from our dependence on the gifts God has given us, where sometimes we don’t recognize the things when they happen. Also, sometimes we don’t have a whole lot of faith and we want to recognize what God does and give God thanks for that.

Dr. Craig Keener:
Again, whether it’s general or special divine action, I mean, I think there’s enough evidence. Personally, I’m convinced, haven’t always been this way, but in recent years I’ve become convinced. We have enough evidence from general divine action in nature to see that God is God. He often works through intermediary means. I wont get into all the arguments about that, but when Jesus fed the 4,000, he fed the 5,000, those were both emergency circumstances so people could have a meal, but in each case, He told the disciples to gather up the fragments that remain. They weren’t going to need a miracle for the next meal.

Dr. Craig Keener:
So we pray for our daily bread. We thank God for providing it, whether He does it because we got a job or He does it because somebody lent us some food or he does it because we grew it or He does it because He multiplied it. I didn’t even talk about nature miracles.

Heidi Wilcox:
Right, right.

Dr. Craig Keener:
I mean, we have examples of that. The Anglican, the former Anglican Bishop of the Horn of Africa, who is from Canada, and he teaches at a seminary now in the US, he shared with me a miracle of multiplied food that he was there when it happened and witnessed. I mean, it was his food, the food that they had there on site. Yeah. I could give a lot of other accounts.

Dr. Craig Keener:
In fact, two of my doctoral students here, one of them, Kevin Burr, a Church of Christ minster, he and four other friends, Church of Christ friends were coming back from a Church of Christ conference to Harding University when they were caught in a severe storm, hailstorm, where the hailstones were so big. One of them smashed the windshield.

Heidi Wilcox:
Wow.

Dr. Craig Keener:
Softball-sized and baseball-sized. They pulled in under an overhang, but now the hail started flying horizontally, which is characteristic of an F4 tornado. I looked at the date that he gave me and checked online and, yes, there were F4 tornadoes sighted in that area at that time. He cries out of the top of his lungs, “God, help us!” Suddenly, the hailstorm stops, the sun comes out, and they actually took a picture of it. I got the account from him and all the others. He was my former doctoral student. He’s got his PhD now.

Dr. Craig Keener:
Then one of our Hebrew Bible PhD students this past semester in class shared the stilling of a storm account that he witnessed with … Actually, he was in Fiji at the time. He was in a boat and they were caught at the edge of a cyclone. They were all really scared, and the captain signaled to this teenage young lady in the back who had a Christian T-shirt on, “Get up here. Pray.”

Dr. Craig Keener:
She came up to the front, got down on her knees and prayed, and suddenly the storm stopped. I think maybe the moral in that story is if you’re going to wear a Christian T-shirt, you’re ready to pray.

Heidi Wilcox:
That’s true. That’s true.

Dr. Craig Keener:
It’s God who has to do the work, but we can at least pray.

Heidi Wilcox:
Yeah .Yeah. As you said, we’re more likely to receive a miracle when we ask than when not, but what do we do when we pray and we don’t receive a miracle?

Dr. Craig Keener:
Yes. Yeah. I deal with this in the book, too, and go through examples in the Bible of this as well. What we need to keep in mind is, and this is where also I give the example of Chauncey Crandall when his son died of leukemia, to be willing to have enough faith that you can keep praying because it’s not just faith like, “I’ll see a miracle.” It’s like faith to keep trusting that God does miracles even when you don’t see it.

Dr. Craig Keener:
I mean, Médine and I, I don’t remember if we said this, we may have said this when you interviewed us before, but we went through a series of miscarriages because of our age. Yeah. It’s painful. Of course, in class I’ll joke when I talk about miracles. Now, we’re not saying that every prayer you pray will always get answered. You can look at me. You see I wear glasses, I have male pattern balding, and my students think there’s some other things wrong with my head, but whenever God does a miracle for anybody, and that’s why I think it’s helpful to share these testimonies, whenever God does a miracle for anybody, it’s not a gift only to that person. It’s a gift to all of us because it’s a reminder that there’s coming a day when God’s going to wipe away every tear from our eyes, and there’s going to be no more sickness. There’s going to be no more death.

Dr. Craig Keener:
Obviously, death is still in the world and great 1800’s heroes of the faith like Hudson Taylor and George Mueller and so on are no longer with us or the founders of a Asbury Seminary are no longer with us because those things are still in the world. When Jesus was giving signs of the kingdom, no healing is permanent in a sense in this life. Lazarus was raised from the dead, but he would die again.

Dr. Craig Keener:
Quadratus, a bishop in the early second century says that, “Some of those Jesus raised from the dead lived on into my own time,” but you don’t have anybody saying that in the late second century or third century, “The first century people raised from the dead are still alive.”

Dr. Craig Keener:
The signs of the kingdom are just that. On the cutting edge of evangelism you see more of them in the circumstances like what you have in the gospels in Acts. Their purpose is to point to the kingdom, to remind us that there is coming a day when God will give us resurrection bodies and all this will be taken care of, suffering will be ended, death will be ended. Until that time, these signs of the kingdom are reminders to us of what God cares about. He cares about people’s health. He cares about people’s safety. He cares about people’s hunger.

Dr. Craig Keener:
When we pray and God does a miracle, we praise Him for it. When we pray and God doesn’t do a miracle, we do whatever we can to take care of those same issues of hunger, and healthcare, and so on.

Heidi Wilcox:
Yeah. That’s a lot to think about, Dr. Keener, because it’s easy, of course, when we receive the miracle. I think it takes more faith maybe when we don’t. We have one question that we wrap up the show with, but before we do, is there anything else you’d like to talk about that we haven’t already?

Dr. Craig Keener:
Oh, my previous podcast with Médine. Médine is lovely. Médine is my wife, but you didn’t hear the previous podcast.

Heidi Wilcox:
Yes. We’ll link to that in the show notes. Because the show is called the Thrive With Seminary Podcast, what is one practice that is helping you thrive in your life right now?

Dr. Craig Keener:
Just recognizing God’s presence and cultivating that through prayer. Last night, I had a dream where, actually, in the dream last night, this is just fresh on my mind because it was just last night, but I was walking downtown and there were a bunch of students from I think maybe the seminary and the university. Anyway, people praying for revival, and they were praying right there in the street. I stopped and joined them. Oh, and I fel the spirit’s presence and God started speaking to me. I love dreams like that, but that was just an encouragement to us to pray for our community here at Asbury and wherever we are. God does hear us.

Dr. Craig Keener:
Matthew 7:7-13, Jesus says, “Ask, seek, and knock. Ask for good gifts, your Father will give you good gifts.” Of course, he knows what’s good better than we do, but there were some things even in the gospels where the disciples asked for some things and Jesus wisely, graciously did not give them what they’re asking for.

Dr. Craig Keener:
In Luke 11, it narrows that down to a particular good gift, that God will never say no to. Ask, seek, knock. If you being evil know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your heavenly Father give the best gift, the gift of Himself, the gift of the holy spirit to those who ask Him.

Dr. Craig Keener:
We see in the book of Acts people praying, and then you have the day of Pentecost. People praying in Acts 4, then they’re filled with the spirit again. You have this pattern.

Dr. Craig Keener:
So I mean, let it look the way God wants it to look like. We don’t determine that. It doesn’t always have to look the same revival or whatever we want to call it, but, wow. Let’s open our hearts to whatever God wants to do in our lives. Let’s pray for that and welcome that. When it happens, whether it’s the way we expected it or more often it’s some other way just to show us, “Wow! This is even better,” often, let’s remember to praise Him because these are just signs of His gracious love for us, for things He cares about.

Heidi Wilcox:
Thank you, Dr. Keener. Thank you for sharing these accounts and for the reminder to look for miracles in our everyday life and not to overlook them should they not look like what we expect. So thank you so much for your time today. It’s been an absolute joy to get to talk to you.

Dr. Craig Keener:
It’s been my joy, too.

Heidi Wilcox:
Hey, everyone. Thank you so much for joining me for today’s conversation with Dr. Keener. I hope you found this conversation thought-provoking, encouraging, and inspiring to your faith. If you see Dr. Keener, be sure to thank him for being on the podcast. We are so grateful to him for his work and for sharing his time and what he has learned with us. As always, you can follow Asbury Seminary in all the places on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram at @AsburySeminary. Until next time, I hope you’ll go do something that helps you thrive.