More on this book
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
January 10 - March 15, 2018
rampant in historiography. In particular, historian Brad Gregory warns that historians presupposing pure metaphysical naturalism have produced a sort of “secular confessional history, parallel to traditional religious confessional history only with different embedded metaphysical beliefs.”[123] These beliefs, he warns, are so deeply ingrained at the unconscious level that those writing with this bias are far less apt to acknowledge their bias than writers of other confessional histories are.
Others also argue that the traditional social-scientific grid that reduced religious experience purely to cultural shaping has been shown untenable in light of subsequent research.[131]
He contends that a better approach would be to avoid imposing “any metaphysical beliefs” on our subjects.
Indeed, the assumption that modernization would inevitably lead to secularization reflected an ethnocentric extrapolation from earlier Western trends for a global reality that never corresponded to it.[137] One might suppose that this failure of predictions could warrant a rethinking of the theoretical foundations that produced them; we often evaluate hypotheses based on whether their predictions succeed. Butler thus argues that history needs to
grapple afresh with theory concerning religion to produce an interpretation that better accommodates actual social realities.
anything beyond our own very limited experience. Despite Western culture’s individualism, making direct experience of events a requisite for knowledge about them, as Hume seems to require for miracles, would postulate an autonomy more severe than any normal person would sanction in practice.
gullibility.[145]
That some Enlightenment thinkers revolted against the epistemological constraints of prior religious tradition is not surprising in view of their milieu; in the academy today, however, it is dogmatic nontheism that offers narrower epistemological constraints.
neutrality in the historical quest demands that one must not find data that could be construed as favoring the truth claims of any particular religious movement or movements, one potentially subordinates the objectivity of one’s method to desired conclusions.
supporters having examined the reasons for their belief. We would also be using “consensus” in terms of majority practice rather than unanimity; indeed, I believe that there are far more scholars in our discipline who allow for divine activity than such a statement of a consensus would warrant.
unproved assumptions? (One would hardly expect an officer at an accident scene to exclude all eyewitnesses as biased and thus turn to nonobservers for the most reliable information.)
Resistance or not, a shift in worldview has been occurring, and Bultmann’s once ready assumption that no one in the modern world believes in miracles is even more demonstrably false today than when he claimed it.
Likewise, historical Jesus scholar Marcus Borg rightly points out, The primary intellectual objection to it [supernatural activity] flows from a rigid application of the modern worldview’s definition of reality. Yet the modern view is but one of a large number of humanly constructed maps of reality. It is historically the most recent and impressive because of the degree of control it has given us; but it is no more an absolute map of reality than any of the previous maps. All are relative, products of particular histories and cultures; the modern one, like its predecessors, will be
...more
Some biblical scholars, too, have long questioned whether Bultmann’s approach risked demythologizing away not just the form but the content of the message.
statement that would exclude not only antisupernaturalists but even the strictest conservative Christian cessationists, who accept biblical miracles but do not believe that miracles occur in the same way today).
More surprisingly, 34 percent of Americans claim to have witnessed or experienced divine healing;
I will offer some even more dramatic figures internationally in the next chapter: hundreds of millions of persons alive today claim that they have witnessed or experienced miraculous healings.
Bultmann’s position summarily dismissed such worldviews—easily the majority of the world’s population—as not part of the modern world.
instinctively moved,[219] but to extrapolate from his personal sphere to all modernity suggests a major induction based on a comparatively small range of data—a move reminiscent of Hume. Such summary dismissal of the supernatural without appeal to satisfying contemporary philosophical arguments or concrete scientific data may have succeeded among those who shared the assumptions held by Bultmann’s mid-twentieth-century Western academic setting, but evidently does not satisfy most of those outside that fairly elite subculture.
As another scholar complains, Bultmann and others excluded miracles without considering any of the strong concrete evidence for miracles; “Yet, if the hallmark of empirical science is impartial openness to evidence, such a way of proceeding can hardly be called scientific.”
Barring unforeseen shifts, this trend toward greater openness will probably continue and grow in light of the larger context of global thought (addressed in chs. 7–9, 12). Philosophic approaches from the Majority World will bring to the table many interests, and, at least in most of Africa, Latin America, and much of Asia, the Western Enlightenment antipathy to suprahuman activity will not likely be among them.
At the least, given the vast number and variety of claims, one can no longer simply take for granted that uniform human experience a priori excludes extranormal events for which many observers would find a specifically theistic interpretation particularly persuasive (see discussion in chs. 13
Plausibility structures—what intuitively strikes us as rational—are culturally determined.
Suffice it to note here that, as we shall observe soon in greater detail, hundreds of millions of people in the world claim to have witnessed supernatural healings.
our Western academic culture.[6] Many other cultures (as well as much of Western culture, including academic Western culture, historically) have worked from different assumptions, and the labels traditionally employed to denigrate those assumptions by modernity no longer sound charitable in a postmodern, and particularly a multicultural, world.[7]
and primary advocate of skepticism toward miracle claims.) The claim that no one in the modern world believes in miracles (a claim once seriously offered by some scholars as an answer to the question of miracles, as I have noted) is now too evidently irresponsible to be seriously entertained.
At present, however, the primary issue is whether witnesses can claim firsthand knowledge of what they believe are miracles, and here the evidence is overwhelming from the outset.
Thus many scholars today observe that the principle of analogy, historically used against the reliability of eyewitness miracle reports in the wake of the radical Enlightenment, now favors their probability.
Bultmann denied that modern people who use scientific inventions can believe in miracles,[16] yet “what Bultmann declares to be impossible is not just possible, but even frequent.”
Cross-cultural studies suggest that socialization rather than exposure to science accounts for most of the skepticism in some circles.
contrast starkly with modern Western critics’ readings.[30] These readings from other social locations often shock Westerners not only because others believe the early Christian miracle narratives to be plausible but also because these readers often take these narratives as a model for their ministries.
Hwa Yung, the above-mentioned bishop of the Methodist Church in Malaysia, notes that the charismatic, Pentecostal character of Majority World churches reflects not so much direct influence by Pentecostals or charismatics as simply the worldview of the majority of humanity. They have simply never embraced the Western, mechanistic, naturalistic
Enlightenment worldview that rejects the supernatural.[33] Referring to the analogous
Christians? There is no intrinsically historical reason to think that the Gospel writers had to invent such miraculous claims, or that Luke had to invent them even in the eyewitness “we” material in Acts (Acts 16:18; 20:10; 28:4–6, 8–9; cf. 21:4, 11, 19).
Indeed, some physicians now partner with some spiritual healers due to the observed effectiveness of some of the latter, regardless of views of the causes.
have increasingly challenged the hegemony of many assumptions that the Enlightenment treated as universals.[60] Thus even various Western scholars are increasingly challenging the hegemony of the traditional Western approach of demythologizing, in light of the very
different hermeneutical approach of African readers.[61]
Regardless of the explanations given, hundreds of millions of people around the world sincerely believe that suprahuman forces are at work or that miraculous healings occur. Indeed, those who deny such forces (however defined) are clearly a minority of the world’s population.[62] Whether one likes it or not, it is neither charitable nor plausible to simply dismiss the existence of such sincere claims, however one chooses to explain them. By analogy, it is plausible that many ancient claimants also sincerely believed that they reported such phenomena accurately, rather than that they were
...more
The danger of reading biblical narratives solely through the grid of modern Western assumptions is not a merely theoretical one. Traditional Western academic approaches to other cultures have often proved ethnocentric,[63] including through derogatory Western assumptions about “religion.”[64] If research is guilty of ethnocentric assumptions when addressing cultures contemporary to us, we run an even greater risk of compounding that ethnocentrism with anachronism as we study ancient cultures.
As one of Hume’s modern critics complains, Hume offers no reason why “ignorant and barbarous” Jews would have failed to distinguish “between a corpse and a dinner guest” (in the case of Jesus’s resurrection) more than “the wise and civilized Gentiles of Athens or Rome” that Hume would have more happily owned as his forebears.
Polkinghorne warns, people today might not separate “civilization” and “barbarism” so neatly as in the heyday of the Enlightenment; “it might be that other cultures provide, through their different practice and different kinds of openness, regimes more conducive than ours to certain types of experience.”[70]
Yet as we saw in chapter 5, Hume interpreted individual claims in light of what he believed to be patterns in nature rather than allowing individual cases to readjust his views of nature.
Hume was a child of his day,[83] but his argument against trusting testimony for miracles based on its presence among “ignorant and barbarous nations” should never again be admitted; its origins are inseparable from his ethnocentrism.
“Signs and wonders” are among the most prominent factors drawing people to faith in Christ in the Majority World today,
Historian Mark Noll observes that Western Christians working in the Majority World “consistently report that most Christian experience reflects a much stronger supernatural awareness than is characteristic of even charismatic and Pentecostal circles in the West.”
people in Panama.[118] The wife of his host, Aureliano, was dying from what was obviously pneumonia; Loewen sent to a nearby town for relevant medicine, only to discover that none was available. While Loewen had translated the promise of healing in Jas 5:14–15, he knew that he did not have faith to pray. Nevertheless, reading this passage, the local believers prayed with him for her healing, and she rallied slightly. By the next morning, however, she was dying again, so the local believers anointed her with oil, without inviting Loewen, and this time she rose from the bed completely well,
...more
are in the circle. You and David don’t really believe.” The writer remarks that he knew few Christians more consistent than Loewen, yet even Loewen found “himself unable to transcend the secular assumptions and understandings of his particular birth society.”[119] More positively, one Christian anthropologist, learning from Majority World Christians, began to overcome his traditional “rationalism” and to pray for the sick, with some attendant healings.[120] A leading missiologist, researching reports of causes of church growth in countries around the world, was forced to relinquish his
...more
school’s John Wimber, later a Western Third Wave leader, open to charismatic phenomena.[122] A disabled minister in Malawi, unable to walk, asked prayer for healing from British Anglican Michael Green (at the time of his writing, senior research fellow at Wycliffe Hall, Oxford). Reluctant but unable to avoid the challenge, Green prayed for him, and “the man got up and started dancing around, just as the Lystra cripple is recorded as doing.”[123] The parallel to Acts is not coincid...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
and anthropologists studying healing claims among various cultures have become increasingly willing to include Christian charismatics among the objects of their study.[127] Harvard theologian Harvey Cox notes that whereas observers once attributed Pentecostal cures to “mere trickery, self-deception, mass hypnosis, or evidence of the placebo effect” (which could account for some cures), most now approach Pentecostalism’s contribution to cures more positively.
I shall observe more fully in chapter 8, the conversions swelling this growth often involve a costly change in lifelong religious affiliation, and hence would be undertaken only on the basis of a firm new conviction that something seriously out of the ordinary happened.
