Miracles Today

The Supernatural Work of God in the Modern World

Craig S. Keener

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781540963833
• eBook ISBN: 9781493431380
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Do miracles still happen today?

Leading New Testament scholar Craig Keener demonstrates that miraculous works of God, which have been part of the experience of the church around the world since Christianity began, continue into the present.

In this accessible and concise book, Keener

● discusses the definition of a miracle
● addresses common questions about miracles
● shares many accounts that offer evidence of verifiable miracles
● provides compelling reasons to believe in miracles today
● reminds us that miracles point us to a hope that is eternal

Miracles Today is suitable as a textbook but also accessible to church leaders and laypeople.

Part 1
Perspectives on Miracles

Beliefs are not only a matter of evidence but also a matter of the interpretive grids through which we read the evidence. If a preacher gets struck by lightning, does this mean that God is judging a hypocrite? That the devil hates preachers? Or maybe just that preachers, like other people, shouldn’t run around too much outside during thunderstorms?

The same issue arises with miracle claims. Everyone acknowledges the occurrence of some anomalies—experiences that do not easily fit current understandings of nature. But do we think of it differently if a striking anomaly happens just when some people pray for it to happen? Or if it happens on multiple occasions, just when some people pray for it to happen? Or if a particularly improbable anomaly happens after someone predicts it?

Because of different assumptions, different people require different standards of evidence. Someone particularly gullible may accept as a miracle anything that anyone claims to be such. Someone particularly skeptical may reject an event as a miracle regardless of the attestation and natural improbability. Someone who believes in a God active in the universe allows for the potential of miracles occurring; someone adamantly opposed to God’s existence cannot allow for that possibility. As we shall see, skepticism is no less a historically conditioned assumption than the reverse.

But speaking of miracles occurring, what is a miracle? Good question.

Chapter 1
What Is a Miracle, Anyway?

One problem for anyone writing a book about miracles is that there is no universally agreed-upon definition.1 In popular usage, miracles might include the New York Mets winning the World Series in 1969 or the Anaheim Angels winning it in 2002. While it might indeed take a miracle at least for a team including any Craig Keeners to win a baseball game, this book is using the term in a more precise way. Still, not too precise.

Extraordinary Divine Action

Probably the most common definition of a miracle throughout history, from Augustine to Aquinas, has been a divine action that transcends the ordinary course of nature and so generates awe. By “transcending the ordinary course of nature,” these thinkers don’t just mean an unusually awesome sunset. They mean something you would never expect to happen on its own.

Now, that is a somewhat subjective definition, because some things are more unexpected than others. Likewise, not everybody responds to even the most dramatic “miracles” with awe. In the Bible, when God parted the sea so his people could escape their pursuers, his people were impressed. Their pursuers, by contrast, had a different theology. They didn’t doubt that the God of their former slaves had some power (he was, after all, a god), but they were sure that their own gods (including their king) were stronger, so they continued their pursuit.

David Hume, whom you’ll meet more officially in chapter 3, defined a miracle as a violation of natural law. One problem with this definition is that barely any of the biblical miracles, which Hume has at least partly in view, ever claimed to violate natural law. Even the particularly dramatic miracle of God’s parting of the sea did not work against natural law: the Bible says that God used a strong east wind to part the sea (Exod. 14:21). A strong-enough wind can move water; what meteorologists call “wind setdown” sometimes does. But moving water in such a way as to part the sea, letting all the Israelites cross precisely when their lives depended on it, does not look very much like an accident. The odds of such a coincidence are so low that ordinarily, for practical purposes, we would not seriously consider them. Even in dramatic acts of God in the Bible, God typically uses what he has already created rather than starting over by creating something new.

There are other problems with Hume’s definition of miracle (not least his definitions of violation and natural law), but suffice it to note for now that his definition is unhelpful for the present subject. Apart from creation, the virgin birth, and the new creation introduced with Jesus’s bodily resurrection, the Bible itself does not claim many miracles in the law-violating sense. A book giving examples of such miracles today might prove rather concise.

Theologians today thus often echo the more traditional historic approach to miracles, referring to them as “special divine action.”2 This label is meant to differentiate miracles from divine action more generally, since Christians affirm that God works in all sorts of ways around us all the time. But what is the cutoff where “general” divine action becomes “special” divine action? How do we classify, for example, an extraordinarily fast recovery from surgery?

The boundaries are fuzzy, but we can at least provide paradigmatic examples of each. By analogy, the boundary between “long hair” and “short hair” may be unclear, but most of us would at least recognize Samson’s proverbial hair as long and the hair on a mostly bald head (mine, for example) as short. In the same way, those of us who believe in God regard life as God’s gift to everyone who is alive, but if someone comes back to life who has been clinically dead for an hour, and suffers no brain damage, most of us regard that as a miracle. Between examples that would convince nearly everyone and those that would convince scarcely anyone exists a broad middle range that will probably include some inauthentic cases and exclude some genuine ones; but enough genuine and convincing ones should remain to make the point. Miracles don’t always happen—but sometimes they do.

Burden of Proof

Many passages in the Bible speak of miracles as “signs,” experiences that get people’s attention. The Bible does speak of some less extraordinary events, such as circumcision or a rainbow, as signs that signify or communicate something. But often the Bible speaks of more extraordinary signs as special acts of God that get attention and communicate something about him. These include events such as the exodus plagues (e.g., Exod. 10:1–2; Ps. 78:43), kingdom healings (e.g., Acts 2:22, 43; 4:16, 22, 30), and nature miracles (e.g., John 2:11; 6:14). Again, not everyone responds positively to such signs. In one town where the apostle Paul and his colleague Barnabas preached, signs got people’s attention, but not all the attention was positive. Some, to be sure, responded to the signs by accepting their message; others, who refused the message, just became more hostile (Acts 14:3–4).

We all evaluate miracle reports through our own assumptions. If a person who has not walked for ten years can suddenly walk after prayer, albeit with some support, I would normally see that as divine enablement. Barring an additional miracle, the person will need some support because her muscles will still be atrophied for a time; achieving suddenly what might take physical therapy weeks or months remains extraordinary. Some reject such a healing as incomplete, demanding that divine intervention restore every organ to perfection. We do not, however, live in a currently perfect world; unless you are Superman or the Hulk, even what we accept as normal functionality has limits. Likewise, if after prayer eyesight immediately improves from legal blindness to functional sight, vision need not be 20/20 for us to infer special divine action. If God has improved your sight beyond available human means but you still need glasses, don’t complain. Lots of the rest of us have to wear glasses too. If Jesus resuscitates a twelve-year-old young woman, he may still request that her parents feed her rather than supernaturally filling her empty stomach (Mark 5:43). But again, some people work with different assumptions about how a God must display himself, and they therefore dismiss evidence that does not match their assumptions.

How extraordinary must an event be to get someone’s attention? Further, how much evidence does it take to convince someone? That depends on who the person is and what the person’s starting assumptions are. If I am adamant that miracles are impossible, in principle I might reject any amount of evidence. If I already trust God, I will thank God for even the smallest details of my life.

Most people, even if they do not trust God in details, are open to evidence. Yet standards for evidence vary. It is possible to be too gullible and be convinced by simple magic tricks. Conversely, some people are so opposed to miracles that they keep raising the bar of evidence to evade them. They may say, “There is no medical documentation for miracles.” If I show them medical documentation, they may say, “Just because that was unusual doesn’t mean it couldn’t happen on its own. Show me someone who was raised from the dead.” If I give examples of people raised from the dead, they may say, “Well, I didn’t see that happen.”

Twice I have asked skeptical academic friends, “Would you believe it was a miracle if you did see someone raised from the dead?” and they have replied, “No.” I think what they meant was, “Miracles can’t happen, so I would just say it was unexplained.” But if someone uses this approach, what sort of evidence would they accept? If they say “none,” then it’s clear that they value their starting premise more than any amount of evidence, making it disingenuous for them to ask for any. They had better not accuse all Christians of being closed-minded!

Fortunately, most people are not that skeptical. It is thus helpful to provide solid evidence where we can. And fortunately, there is a lot of evidence for those who are willing to believe.

I should conclude this section with a caution, however: miracles do not “prove” God. If you are inflexibly committed to finding another explanation, you always will. Even if you see the sea part at just the right time, you could choose to dismiss it as a one-chance-in-a-billion coincidence. (In the Bible itself, Pharaoh, at least, did not seem sufficiently impressed to halt his pursuit.) But if you are open to the reality of God, what you recognize as miracles will get your attention and invite your faith in him. And if you already believe in God, they will give you additional reasons for gratitude.

“Ordinary” Blessings

There are greater miracles than the ones this book addresses, but people regularly ignore or even reject them. Because they are part of the “normal” course of nature, available to everybody, most people take them for granted. Hidden in plain sight, they’re not “extraordinary,” hence not what we usually call miracles.

Although this book is about “special” divine action, Christians (and most other theists) believe that general divine action is all around us. The psalmist already marvels at God’s glory in nature (Ps. 19:1). Ancient, non-Christian Stoic philosophers recognized divine design in nature.3 The apostle Paul says that God’s power is evident in his creation, especially in our own selves. He explains that our proper response should be gratitude (Rom. 1:19–21).

One need not believe that God micromanages every detail to affirm that something about our universe seems to exceed random chance. Both the Bible (Gen. 1:24) and our knowledge of the cosmos suggest that God likes to create things that not only exist but develop and replicate on their own. But is their existence an accident? What are the odds of a universe accidentally arising with just the right, extraordinarily precise conditions to support life? Exact calculations vary, but the parameters are so exquisitely fine-tuned that their generation by chance seems utterly implausible—often calculated as far less than even one in a trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion.4 In daily life, none of us would stake our lives on such minuscule odds. From a Christian perspective, it seems a testament to some thinkers’ faith commitment in anything-but-God that they would desperately cling to such minute possibilities. This may be one reason why a far greater number of academic works about theism in philosophy of religion today defend rather than contest the existence of God.5

Some respond that we just blissfully happen to live in the one life-permitting universe that exists out of a seemingly infinite number of (unattested) universes. In terms of economy of logic, however, it seems much simpler to posit a single designer beyond the universe than to posit trillions of trillions o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsements
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part 1: Perspectives on Miracles
• Part 2: Witnesses of Miracles
• Part 3: Videos and Doctors’ Reports
• Part 4: “The Blind Receive Their Sight, the Lame Walk, the Lepers Are Cleansed, the Deaf Hear” (Matt. 11:5//Luke 7:22)
• Part 5: “The Dead Are Raised” (Matt. 11:5//Luke 7:22)
• Part 6: Nature Miracles
• Part 7: Kingdom Mysteries
• Appendix A: Did Prayer Make Things Worse?
• Appendix B: Some of Hume’s Other Arguments
• Appendix C: False Signs
• Notes
• Back Cover