Miracles: The Credibility of the New Testament Accounts

by Craig S. Keener

These estimates make the charismatic branch of Christendom, which unanimously endorses healing, second in size only to Roman Catholicism, with which it overlaps and which also embraces supernatural beliefs.

charismatic Christians have multiplied by more than 600 percent in three decades and by some estimates constituted 27.4 percent of world Christianity by 2006.[137]

While miracle claims also proliferate far beyond Pentecostal and charismatic circles, especially in the Majority World, Pentecostals and charismatics alone would offer sufficient numbers of miracle claims to illustrate the pervasiveness of the claims that some modern scholars have doubted that eyewitnesses would make.

Popular sentiments cannot define scientific or historical plausibility,[145] but charity toward others’ worldviews can invite us to at least reevaluate the primacy of old philosophic assumptions that we have often simply taken for granted without consideration. These Christians do not represent a single theological approach to the miraculous, but the vast majority of them do affirm miraculous phenomena.

Those who are ready to dismiss all miracle claims should keep in mind that they are dismissing hundreds of millions of miracle claims—usually without having examined any of them.

(In one U.S. study, 86 percent of charismatics involved with Catholic charismatic healing services claim to have experienced divine healing,

though from my research I suspect that the majority of those who claim to have witnessed some miracles could specify some fairly substantive claims.[156] My point here is simply to invite attention to what this survey indicates about the vast numbers of people worldwide who claim to have witnessed supernaturally effected healings. The examples that I offer in the following chapters may make this observation more concrete, but my examples obviously pale before the statistics.

What may be more interesting in this survey, however, is the category of “other Christians,” with somewhere around 39 percent in these countries claiming to have “witnessed divine healings.” That is, more than one-third of Christians worldwide who do not identify themselves as Pentecostal or charismatic claim to have “witnessed divine healings.” Presumably many of these claimants believe that they have witnessed more than a single case. Note that these are not simply people who say that they believe that supernatural healing occurs; these are people who say that they believe

that they have witnessed or experienced it.[157]

Of course many of these claims would not withstand critical scrutiny, and presumably an even higher percentage would fail to persuade others predisposed not to believe. But those who would simply reject all healing claims today because Hume argued that such claims are too rare to be believable should keep in mind that they are dismissing, almost without argument, the claimed experiences of at least a few hundred million people. (Even if one were to err extremely on the side of modesty, one could easily speak boldly of “tens of mill...

complained that Americans he prayed for were rarely healed, but almost everyone he prayed for in north India was healed.

Indigenous readings of Scripture often noticed patterns there “that the missionaries did not want [local believers] to see.”[166]

Although the most visible growth has occurred in the last three decades,[167] already in 1981, at one large U.S. seminary with students from many nations, Christiaan De Wet of South Africa wrote a thesis on signs involved in church growth around the world. He surveyed more than 350 theses representing most of the world and interviewed countless missionaries. He complained, “My research has turned up so much material on signs and wonders that are happening and churches that are growing, that it is impossible to use all of it.”[168] He noted that miracle claims help drive Christian growth in many parts of the world.

Among my limitations, first, I am addressing only in passing non-Christian supernatural claims, which are also fairly numerous, especially at the popular level.

The minimal point on which there should be agreement here, however, is that extranormal events do occur in reality and not merely in fiction.

When anthropologists suspend their own worldview to learn from indigenous informants, they “consistently report extraordinary experiences that are consistent with the ones described by the people they ‘study.’”[212] These experiences also provide bonding with the host culture.[213] Thus some note their experiences of unusually autonomous images[214] and vivid dreams.[215] “Native informants” often feel that observers’ refusal to participate forgoes experience,[216] and conditions of maximal participation have given anthropologists “dreams and visions that reflect their absorption of the local realities.”[217] Worldview boundaries also may shift; in a work published by the

experiences,” including healings, apparitions, and the like, reported by sixteen anthropologists, all highly educated persons from and trained in the West. Their reports display significant consistency despite the great variation in cultures and independence of the reports;

Nevertheless, the experiences transformed the belief structures of some anthropologists as well as others.

What such research would contribute, however, is an empirical challenge to the assumption that such phenomena cannot be sincerely reported by eyewitnesses.

For this reason, I believe that interviews with those who claim to have been healed in the past may be more useful than those who claim to be healed on the spot in public meetings.

Having said that, examples can readily refute misinformed claims that people do not experience many highly unusual recoveries that they attribute to prayer. In particularly extraordinary cases (or an accumulation of mildly extraordinary ones), they may also shift the probability toward supernatural explanations, if one’s starting assumptions do not rule out such explanations.

Likewise, most who work within the traditional Western academic paradigm in some disciplines would face severe pressure from their academic peers for professionally documenting healing claims in any way that seemed to grant them credence.

testimony; as one anthropologist notes, “The more reliable the witness the better, the greater number of witnesses the better. Nevertheless, judgments concerning ‘truth’ rely always upon the experience of another.”

Many would view healings as vindicating God’s mercy toward the

afflicted rather than an intermediary’s theological acumen.

Nevertheless, only a small minority of my examples could fairly be accused of coming from groups that appear to use miracles in this way.

But I respond here briefly with respect to the matter at hand: if God lavishes miracles more freely at some particularly significant points in salvation history (a reasonable observation from Scripture), one still cannot conclude from the nt that no such significant points would continue to occur.

The evangelization of previously unevangelized people groups, where we encounter many miracle reports today, seems analogous to the kinds of settings we have in Acts.

What the radical Enlightenment excluded as implausible based on the principle of analogy, much of today’s world can accept on the same principle of analogy. Hundreds of millions of people worldwide claim to have experienced or witnessed what they believe are miracles. Eyewitness claims to dramatic recoveries appear in a wide variety of cultures, among Christians often successfully emulating models of healings found in the Gospels and Acts. Granted, such healings do not occur on every occasion and are fairly unpredictable in their occurrence; yet they seem to

appear with special frequency in cultures and circles that welcome them. Radical Enlightenment antisupernaturalism is far from the majority view in the world and thus henceforth ought to argue rather than presuppose its case. I have merely introduced Majority World perspectives in this chapter. In the following two chapters, I turn to a number of concrete examples.

Western theology invariably asks the question: Are miracles possible? This of course addresses the Enlightenment problem of a closed universe. In much of Asia that is a non-question because the miraculous is assumed and fairly regularly experienced.—Hwa Yung[1]

From the perspective of church history, it is true that Pentecostal Christianity within Latin America, Africa and Asia resembles the primitive Christian Church as recorded in the Acts of the Apostles.

All Christian churches in China practice some form of healing, including Three-Self churches. In fact, according to some surveys, 90% of new believers cite healing as a reason for their conversion. This is especially true in the countryside where medical facilities are often inadequate or non-existent. —Edmond Tang

In Gujarat and Maharashtra, many tangible miracles have happened such as the healing of the deaf and dumb and incurable diseases which strengthened the ministry in its initial stage.—Abraham Pothen

One could undoubtedly document even larger numbers of people who are not healed,

Although not by any means the cause of all church growth, it is widely documented that reported

miraculous healings have abetted church growth in much of Asia.

Despite diversity of some other elements, most of those whom I interviewed struck me as deeply sincere; some people wept as they shared from their hearts how grateful they felt that God had helped them. As for theology, most whom I queried on the point responded that they believe that God is sovereign and do not expect healing on every occasion. None stood a chance of profiting financially from their story, yet they sacrificed their time and, for many individuals particularly in one cultural setting, had to overcome some cultural barriers to talk openly with me about these matters. Whereas some healing ministries might have self-serving reasons to exaggerate, and I have only their published reports, interviews with more random eyewitnesses afforded me little impression of such motives.

The healing of a child in Laos reportedly brought a village to believe in Yesu (Jesus), of whom one villager had heard, as a powerful “spirit” before any outsiders brought teaching about Jesus.

In one study conducted in 1981, a tenth of non-Christians in Madras “had experienced an important cure through prayer to Jesus” and more than twice that number knew about such cures.[81]

thousand reported healed during his ministry.[180] Cures reported included the healing of “blindness, paralysis, and hemophilia,” with the mute speaking and paralyzed walking in his meetings.[181] The commission designed to evaluate the miracle claims astonished the missionaries by confirming that genuine miracles had occurred.[182] In 1923, therefore, “the Korean Presbyterian Church officially abandoned the doctrine” that miracles had ceased, widely held at the time among North American Presbyterians.

Christians have such a reputation for healing that non-Christians, particularly in the countryside, “often seek out Christians” to pray for them when they cannot afford medical help or when medical help has proved inefficacious for them.

Chen Guifang was “bed-ridden for eight years,” fed through a tube because she was “unable to eat”; the day after her conversion, she asked for food for the first time in years, and “after a month she recovered completely,” leading to the starting of a new church.

phenomena. Two China researchers who work from the premise that supernatural healings do not occur[249] complain about superstitious healing claims rife in rural districts.[250] They do note that healing claims are abundant[251] and that they heard several healing claims in a house church in Shanghai.[252] But they emphasize that the nephew of one of their informants noted that the women there “loved repeating such stories, which according to him were just gossip, always unverifiable.”[253] Working from an antisupernaturalist framework, the authors do not count as gossip itself the nephew’s testimony that he regards his aunt’s stories as gossip, and they seem to use this verdict to discredit all healing testimonies. Yet however one chooses to explain them, many stories from China cannot be simply gossip; they derive from persons directly affected by them.

Indeed, the coauthor of the above-mentioned skeptical study served as coauthor for another book published seven years later, less critical of miracle reports. The authors note that most Chinese rural Christians “can provide testimonies of healing and other miracles.”[258] This book recounts numerous healing testimonies from a single Chinese village in southern Fujian Province,

While nonsupernatural explanations are sufficient to explain some of these claims, they are clearly not gossip, but reflect people’s understanding of their positive experiences.

year of life; she recovered and then died a year later.[270] Chen Shaoying was a new believer. When several people she prayed for in the Qingyuan Prefecture in 1991 were healed, “word spread that Chen’s God was a powerful deity able to perform miracles,” and Christianity spread in the region, with Madam Chen as one of the leaders.[271]

healings, I had time to write down only a sample of the accounts that they had available.[273] One account, independently reported to me by two individuals present,[274] involved a prominent atheist family. The elderly mother was diagnosed in three hospitals as having inoperable, terminal, and rapidly spreading brain stem cancer; walking soon became impossible in this state. Within a month after prayer, however, the tumor had shrunk from two centimeters to the size of a grain of rice, and she soon began walking and carrying on normally, to the astonishment of her physicians. The entire family are now believers, and the elderly mother has testified widely of her recovery.

elderly woman pastor, with a year of medical training, lamented to me her small faith in seeing only seven or eight dramatic healings, plus many less dramatic ones, over the years.[277] When I asked her if she had ever witnessed healings of eyes or ears, she immediately told me the story of a non-Christian elderly woman about ten years earlier, who had not been able to open one of her eyes for twenty-seven or maybe twenty-eight years due to a nerve problem. As soon as this pastor laid hands on her, the eye opened. The healed woman immediately became a Christian and remains one today. Another woman from a particular urban area told me of her classmate, who after eight or ten years of marriage remained childless. The doctor discovered that the classmate had two uteruses, one with a defective tube to the ovaries, and the other apparently without a tube. Although doctors repaired the defective tube for the first uterus, no pregnancy resulted. My informant prayed for her persistently, and her classmate did become pregnant—in the apparently unconnected uterus! My informant said that because this uterus was also unconnected to the normal birth canal, the surprised doctor had to remove the baby surgically, but the daughter is healthy.[278] The same informant told me about the mother of another classmate

The healings occur especially among the poor, who trust God, the observer notes, when the system cannot help them.[283] Against a traditionally fatalistic culture, the new hope motivates them not to resign themselves to fate.[284]