Miracles: The Credibility of the New Testament Accounts

by Craig S. Keener

Developing the magisterial Reformers’ reaction against abuses, some Protestants eventually selectively adopted the dogmatic antisupernaturalism of the radical Enlightenment (addressed in chs. 5 and 6). It proved convenient for them to embrace thoroughgoing naturalism in the present era, in order to reject the miracle claims of “papists” and “enthusiasts” while excepting those recounted in Scripture.[140] Belief that miracles had ceased offered a way to accommodate belief in biblical miracles with a current “orderly and rational universe,”[141] though it could never ultimately satisfy a uniformitarianism that demanded the same hegemony of natural law in the past.[142] This cessationist concession to deism was an internally inconsistent position philosophically.[143] Ironically, opposition to current miracles was one point at which early modern fundamentalism and modernism found common cause, often employing the same arguments, except that cessationists excluded (often comparable) biblical miracles from the critique.[144]