Miracles: The Credibility of the New Testament Accounts

by Craig S. Keener

Gregory shows the specific commitment to metaphysical naturalism in the work of Émile Durkheim (1912), whose approach helped shape the discipline of sociology of religion (ibid., 139–40). A social approach to religion is invaluable, but a reduction of all religion to social structures simply assumes metaphysical naturalism (141, 144; so also for reducing religion to politics, 144–46). Durkheim’s successors felt no need to demonstrate a methodological premise they now took for granted (142–43). Even past the mid-twentieth century, challenging Durkheim seemed risky, but eventually multiple challenges brought his views into disfavor (Turner, “Advances,” 39–40). Gradually religious anthropology emerged, relinquishing anthropology’s previous “tight positivism,” sympathetic to rather than suspicious of the sincerity of much religious experience (44); Turner regarded the old approach of Durkheim as imposing atheism on other peoples (51–52), the sort of behavior for which anthropologists sometimes castigated missionaries (cf. her comments about Christianity in 51). For more open antecedents, see Poewe, “Rethinking,” 253