Craig Keener, Signs of the Kingdom: Miracles in the NT and Today

[Music] [Applause] and i'm glad you took that contaminated microphone so anyway i you know some people they've just started doing this but i carry it all the time so anyway lord thank you i knew we prayed but i always want to acknowledge my dependence on you again so thank you for being with us we we pray that this will be meaningful the way that you want it to be in our lives in jesus name amen so normally i write commentaries as he mentioned i'm a new testament scholar so i'm a little bit out of my discipline in in this way except that the bible talks so much about miracles and so originally i was writing a commentary on acts and i was just going to have a footnote explaining you know why it's it's plausible to accept the miracle accounts and acts as you know historically plausible but the footnote grew and grew and it became an 1100 page book so i'm not always good at keeping things under control but anyway what one objection to the gospel's historical reliability comes from modern western academic thought knowingly or unknowingly most people who voice this objection and say well you know you can't trust the gospels as referring to eyewitness material you can't trust acts as referring to eyewitness material because look they include miracles and i've actually had people voice that objection to me well if it were if for another kind of work we've accepted this historical material but now you can't look it's full of miracles so the the assumption that those things can't be historically reliable knowingly or unknowingly follows the argument of david hume many doubt that authentic miracle reports could actually go back either directly or indirectly to eyewitnesses and therefore they doubt that the reports in the gospels reflect early tradition well there's a couple different issues here the first one i dealt with more in my first book i didn't want to digress too much on the second one because it's the more controversial but the first one was and i and i've been able to persuade i think many skeptics at least of this because it's so obvious can such reports come from eyewitnesses well the unequivocal answer ought to be yes today there are hundreds of millions of such reports from eyewitnesses so to say that eyewitnesses can't report these things a person's head has to be in the sand not all of these are equally verifiable but they do come from eyewitnesses now the second question is a question in philosophy of religion that's actually debated in philosophy or religion do these reports reflect special divine action and of course in philosophy of religion they debate is there a god who can engage in special divine or any kind of divine action no one would say that all these reports actually are special divine action nobody would say all of these are actual miracles whether we affirm or deny that some or many of them our special divine action depends on and reveals our presuppositions miracles and exorcism accounts comprise over half of mark's narrative before the passion in roughly one-fifth of the book of acts and they're a common reason for skeptics doubting the historicity of these works and it's not just mark but it's every layer of early christian tradition i mean for people to say yeah we only know a little bit about the historical jesus well this would have to be among those things that we know because it's it's there in queue or at least what many of us call q it's it's in mark it's in material that's exclusive to matthew material that's exclusive to luke material that's exclusive to john uh it's in it's in paul uh he doesn't describe it on a regular basis but when he's describing his his ministry uh groundbreaking evangelism he talks about signs and wonders happening all over the place and in second corinthians 12 12 it's in romans 15 19. in second corinthians 12 12 he says you yourselves are witnesses of these things um of course you have it in acts you have it in detractors of early christianity as well and revelation talks about it church fathers talk about continuing miracles in their own times the historical modern western reason for denying miracles the one that that gained traction in western academic thought was hume's essay was essentially denies that any credible eyewitnesses exist for miracles and in in my discipline of new testament you have some famous deniers like david friedrich strauss who actually improved on the previous rationalistic argument the previous rationalistic argument was when jesus walked in water he just knew where the stones were in the lake of galilee strauss rightly said that's absurd but strauss's solution was to say these are myths that merely developed over generations of time myths and legends that you know he he recognized those couldn't come overnight but he said you know give it enough time they can evolve and rudolph was a more recent detractor david friedrich strauss argued that the gospel miracle stories are legends but interestingly enough strauss should have known better from his own experience which he basically ruled out from his heritage of human philosophy strauss had a friend by the name of edward morica but edward morica had a diagnosed spinal problem that made it very difficult for him to walk he wasn't even a new testament scholar been over his manuscripts all the time but anyway edward morica spent time visiting german lutheran pastor johan christophe bloomheart who was known for a ministry of healing and exorcism in the black forest region of germany in the mid-1800s he actually was called by bart one of his mentors and and uh moltmann looked back to him very respectful looks back to him very respectfully too but uh bloomhart had this ministry strauss strauss thought that was absurd but after his friend morika had spent time with bloomheart morika was hiking in the mountains well what did strauss say about this he said well his diagnosed spinal problem must have been merely psychosomatic but notice what he did not say he did not say that this report was merely a legend that evolved over generations boltmann said that mature modern people don't believe in miracles it's impossible to use the telegraph and to believe in the new testament world of spirits and miracles and he dismissed the stories of bloomheart as legends so at least he was consistent right but today we have first-hand accounts letters journals and so on of miracles that took place in bloomheart's ministry this material directly from eyewitnesses so these were not legends says that the modern world denies miracles it's just a mere fiat a mere presupposition excluding from the modern world the majority of humanity all traditional jews christians muslims traditional tribal religionists spiritists you know i mean at least he's even-handed dismissing pretty much all of humanity but by by mere assumption he limits the modern world to westerners shaped by the radical enlightenment now housto gonzalez citing latino churches declares that what bulman declares to be impossible is not just possible but it's even frequent why young retired methodist bishop of malaysia and a seminary professor says that bhutan's philosophic problem is an exclusively western one and a number of other scholars not not all associated with evangelical tradition but just from these various other cultures who haven't been shaped so much by western academia have pushed back against bolton most deniers ultimately depend on the arguments of david hume david hume himself was rehashing the arguments of radical deists has been shown very fully in the dissertation by robert burns but basically david hume's argument is that there's no genuinely credible eyewitnesses for miracles and of course if anybody claims to be a credible eyewitness well they're not really credible because look what they're claiming so his essay consists of two major arguments the second i believe defend depends on the first but super simplified version of his first argument miracles violate natural law but his prescriptive view of natural law doesn't fit any view of natural law that's held today and therefore actually shouldn't carry any weight today and he also claims to be depending on isaac newton's mechanistic universe the problem is that newton didn't believe that the legislator was subject to his own laws newton believed yes in in a sort of uniformity in nature but it was a uniformity that god was free to to sidestep i mean if if i i'm not breaking the law of gravity i'm not violating the law of gravity if i catch something that i drop god is not breaking laws he's not violating laws if he functions as an actor within the universe uh he may be outside the universe but for him to not be able to act within the universe makes him weaker within the universe than we are his second argument uh so uh yeah just to say that it wasn't a scientific argument that he was making he actually didn't agree with the early english scientists on this it was a philosophic argument and it didn't even follow his own normal epistemology the the second argument is that uniform human experience excludes the plausibility of miracles therefore well-supported eyewitness claims for miracles must be rejected because we don't have any reason to believe that miracles happen that's a circular argument if there ever was one so for example he cites something from fairly recent history i mean he's ready to dismiss arguments from any non-white cultures and non-western cultures he was very ethnocentric he actually supported slavery and all sorts of other stuff but we'll leave that aside for the moment but he he even rejected accounts from within you know close to his own culture so how many of you had heard of hume before before now that's that's good um and you may think i'm picking on him because he's dead making this a posthumous critique that was a slight bit of humor or but anyway uh how many of you have heard of blaise pascal yeah if you if you hadn't heard of blaise pascal he's sometimes considered the father of the modern computer how many of you have heard of computers so blaise pascal had a wonderful experience with the holy spirit but his his niece uh i think bernadette perriere was at it his niece had a a running eyesore that emitted a foul odor it was public knowledge and she was touched with a holy thorn from jesus christ now how many of you think it was really a holy thorn from jesus crown neither neither do i i think luther was probably right when he said there were enough nails from the holy cross to shoe every horse and saxony and and when he protested why 13 of the original 12 apostles were buried in germany but anyway pascal's niece was touched with this it was a contact point for her faith she was instantly and publicly healed the queen mother of france sent her own physician and verified this so it was medically documented pascal says look this has all the criteria that i ask for it's medically documented it was public it was organic and he says we don't believe this so why would we believe anything else and then he goes on that's his argument is there a problem with that argument i mean he hasn't demonstrated anything but he got away with it because of the polemical character of catholics versus protestants in his era you know protestants didn't like catholic miracles and and this was associated with the jansenist movement who were too augustinian for the jesuits and they were too catholic for the protestants and so he could get away with dismissing it there have been a number of recent major philosophic challenges to hume on miracles published by cambridge cornell the one published by oxford is called hume's abject failure his essay on miracles and someone responded to this in a review and says you just don't like you just don't like his argument because you're a christian to which he responded actually i'm not a christian in any traditional sense i just thought it was a bad argument science as science pronounces on repeatable events it doesn't pronounce on unique events in history such as miracles by definition are journal articles usually treat only what's replicable miracles aren't again by definition skeptics demand replicability and so this gives a problem because they're demanding something that almost by definition can't be provided and hard skeptics demand something that can never happen naturally something that can never happen naturally but often god works through nature i mean think of the parting of the sea sometimes we think of that as a prototypical miracle the parting of the yamasuf but exodus 14 says god sent a strong east wind and blew it back now normally a strong east wind wouldn't do that but you can't say well he didn't work through natural causes because the bible says he did so i mean humes the way hume has it set up and the way some skeptics have it set up there's no evidence that they're willing to accept virtually no evidence that they're willing to accept but for each subject we use the appropriate method much science involves experimentation but not all of our knowledge can come through experimentation for example if somebody dies and you want to see how they died you don't kill them again to ascertain that that would be that would definitely be malpractice events in history including miracles are not subject to experiments we can say well they they fit a certain kind of activity that's true but that only rules out miracles if you say that miracles don't happen because otherwise they can fit in that category eyewitness testimony is a form of evidence in sociology anthropology law journalism and of course historiography and in some of these cases we also have medical records especially in in some of the western cases and this semester i've been working on collecting more of the medical records but history works by analogy so sometimes skeptics say well it has to be the same kind of events as recorded elsewhere and they say miracles are unique and kind well not if we have other examples of miracles so unless you opry or i rule out miracles we do have other cases and we have good evidence for them but one principle that i'm following with regard to eyewitnesses is that a smaller number of eyewitnesses should count more heavily than a greater number of skeptical non-witnesses what i'm saying is this is something we would apply to claims in general if there's a traffic accident and the officer is interviewing witnesses and somebody comes up and contradicts those other witnesses and says that's not what happened i know that's not what happened and the officer says well can you tell me what you saw happen well i didn't see anything happen i wasn't there that's why i know it didn't happen we normally wouldn't take that very seriously right but sometimes with miracles people do that well i didn't see it we need to be willing to accept eyewitness evidence on some of these things humes and boatmans samples are pretty monocultural and they limit experience a very narrow range hume declared that only ignorant and barbarous nations this is a he's taking this almost directly from earlier deists only ignorant and barbarous nations affirm miracles now somebody said this today we would rightly call them an ethnocentric bigot which hume was his anti-semitism is well known he said all great inventions in art and so on came from white civilizations you know totally ignorant of chinese civilizations indian civilizations african civilizations and so on he supported slavery the abolitionists had to argue against him people pointed out to him that there was a jamaican who could repeat poetry recite poetry and compose poetry both in english and in latin this this was francis williams of whom they were speaking and he he said ah any parrot can repeat what a tears he was a bigot so his you know he's dismissing a lot of the world's credibility are there some credible light witnesses for miracles today yes and all around the world if we start with churches known for that emphasis global pentecostal and charismatic healing there was a study on that published by oxford a number of studies are being published on this now there was a 2006 pew forum survey of pentecostals and charismatics in just 10 countries and in these 10 countries alone you you total up the stats for these somewhere around 200 million pentecostals and charismatics in these 10 countries alone claim to have witnessed or experienced divine healing what's more surprising is because as a control group they were they were figuring out other christians who weren't pentecostal or charismatic so if you don't like pentecostals or charismatics it shouldn't affect the argument around 39 of other christians who didn't claim to be pentecostally charismatic also claimed to have witnessed divine healings so you know this is just 10 countries but we're talking about globally we're talking about hundreds of millions of people who claim to witness this and even in the u.s around one-third of of americans claim to witness to experience divine or supernatural healing and that includes not just christians it includes hindus and and others now the point is not what proportion of these claims involve genuinely divine activity or miracles whether for theological reasons or logistical reasons or philosophical whatever our reasons nobody would say that all of these were divine action but the point is when you have hundreds of millions of people claiming to have witnessed special divine action hume's starting premise can't work as a starting premise that eyewitnesses don't claim these things and no credible eyewitnesses claim these things i hume was a smart guy if he were around today i don't think this would be the basis of his argument and yet it's the basis of the argument that is usually assumed as having proved that miracles don't happen so we need to explore claims rather than dismiss them another point is that it's not just christians who claim to have witnessed christian miracles millions of non-christians have been convinced through these things so it's not just a christian bias or an apologetic to make christianity look good there are people who have changed centuries of their cultural allegiances their ancestral beliefs about religion because of extraordinary healings some have suggested jp moreland suggested based on other statistics that that 70 percent of global evangelical growth in the last few decades has been due to signs and wonders conversions in china china was not in the survey of the 10 nations above but one source from within the china christian council suggested around the year 2000 that roughly half of all conversions to christianity in the previous 20 years have been due to what they termed faith healing experiences within the house church movement the statistics were even higher and again there's no way to verify exactly what level this what percentage it is but one estimate there was closer to 90 percent now these were people not starting with christian premises but who became christians because of what they witnessed or experienced dr balkrishna sharma in nepal shared with me that 80 of converts in nepal are due to healings and exorcisms and he has first-hand experience with it his his own wife was healed of a brain tumor now this stat surprises me i don't know how they got it or who they interviewed but uh 10 of non-christians in chennai had experienced this was this was in 1981 in madras 10 of non-christians who were interviewed claimed that they had been healed when somebody prayed for them in the name of jesus um some people got converted some people were still holding on to their ancestral tradition pastor israel one of my not that all ancestral tradition is wrong but i mean regarding jesus and monotheism pastor israel was one of my past seminarians from india through prayer for the sick his baptist church grew from a handful to about 600 all from hindu or muslim backgrounds now i found out about this because in the in the very room where this picture was taken i came in one time with a splitting headache and he said oh brother let me pray for you and he prayed for me and nothing happened although it has gone away since then i i said um ah it's because i don't have any faith he said no no brother it doesn't work here everybody i pray for in india gets healed because because god just wants to lavish his his his love on these people who who have no access to the gospel so it's not saying he doesn't love us here but you know god's blessed us in in various other ways uh now some of you may have heard of psy anchem so am i saying your name right who's a student here at ted's his family became christians when his father who was dying was healed when they prayed to jesus some of you may know ebby ebenezer paren barrage who is a phd student here he he uh he worked with bari malto is is ebby or esther here i thought i said yesterday okay um he's now a phd student here he worked with barry malto now everybody locally knew the story bari malto had been a shaman but he contracted leprosy he was cast out of his village well a couple christians came and prayed for for him and he uh had a dream that night where an angel came and touched his hands he woke up in the morning completely healed went into the village the entire village was converted by the time that abby got there to work with this movement half the region had already been converted and various other miracles had taken place it was god reaching out to them in a special way in miseology we call it a people movement as a result of a miracle in terms of of lepers being healed oh yeah this that was one of the cases of that this isn't a new thing many church fathers claim to be eyewitnesses of of healings and exorcisms that we're converting many polytheists in fact irenaeus talks about a church in france he says you know you gnostics you don't have signs and wonders look we got this church in france where people get raised from the dead often ramsey mcmullen the yale historian who was otherwise you know he he wasn't happy with what he found but he said that this was the leading cause of conversion in the 300s healing and exorcism and i know i'm skipping over a lot of history but for the sake of time there's also a prominent feature of the korean revival many of the western missionaries in korea in the early 20th century did not believe that miracles happen today and they believe that demons were merely psychological problems not in one caveat here i do believe that there are psychological problems that are not demons so i'm not saying that but but they didn't believe in demons and they were they were converted to believing these things are real because of what happened in the korean revival now another caveat i'm not limiting divine action to dramatic miracles healing doesn't have to be dramatic to be an answer to prayer from a theistic perspective natural or medical healing these are also god's acts they're god's gifts you can't get much more miraculous i think than the information content in dna but everybody takes that for granted uh if they know about it so not everybody but a lot of people do so my focus here is on what we call extraordinary or special divine action which is what christians usually mean by miracles where you draw the line between those depends pretty much that's kind of subjective but dramatic miracles today most often appear in the same kind of settings in which they appear in the bible groundbreaking evangelism in relatively new areas god can answer prayer anywhere but special signs most often are reported during evangelism in largely unevangelized regions not exclusively as you'll see but often we have millions of possible examples i haven't interviewed millions but i've interviewed hundreds and so i'm going to give give some examples and as you see many of these are significant examples i'm not claiming that everyone we pray for gets healed you can tell by looking at me i wear glasses i have male pattern balding and my students often say there's something else wrong with my head the point of miracles is not as epinesia for the world's problems in a christian understanding miracles are just samples reminders of the future promise of a world made new they point us to what god cares about most that is about people for us to care about and love one another when we work through science and medicine to improve health care for people this is work that god cares about but having made those caveats i'm going on now to give some examples barbara kamiski snyder doctor sent her home to die she had advanced multiple sclerosis a very severe form of it for 15 years at this point she couldn't breathe without being hooked up to the machine that was making her diaphragm work she tells me that she was blind she was curled up like a pretzel when a voice called to her and said rise up and walk she jumped out of the bed which she couldn't have done because her muscles didn't work but she did it she she jumped out of the bed and the first thing that she noticed was she saw her feet flat on the ground second thing she noticed was her hands weren't curled up anymore and the third thing she noticed was she was seeing all these things now normally if somebody gets healed of inability to walk their muscles are still going to be atrophied it's going to take him time before they can walk normally but in her case even that was healed and she began running around and dancing around the living room with her dad this was not something that was just inspired by adrenaline this was 1981 there's been no recurrence of this and i consulted i consulted her doctors who were her doctors at the time and they verified yes this this was a miracle um the case of lisa larios she had reticulum cell sarcoma the right pelvic bone she had uh hip cancer but it had metastasized by the time they found it so it was already spreading the rest of her body the doctor said she was dying but the the mother hadn't told lisa yet they but under a neighbor's urging they took her to a healing meeting now whatever you think of healing meetings it really doesn't matter too much in this case nobody actually laid hands on her but in this context where people were praying for healing in this context of faith suddenly lisa jumped out of her wheelchair her mother was panicked you can't do that started running around the room again no no momentary burst of adrenaline because lisa shocked her father when she came back home pushing her wheelchair the x-rays afterwards showed that not only did she no longer have the cancer but where her bones had been eaten away by the cancer her bones had been healed that's not something that can happen naturally by the way i mentioned we have medical documentation for some these these are among them greg spencer had had gone legally blind from macular degeneration which doesn't naturally undegenerate he was legally blind he was 2400 in one eye and 2200 and the other he was out of retreat for the healing of his mind he wasn't praying for the healing of his eyesight he was praying for the healing of his mind from stuff he'd witnessed before he was a christian when he worked as a police officer and suddenly he could see god god gave him an extra benefit he healed his mind he also healed his eyesight and greg the people who were there with him at that conference testify about how he he was going around you know reading license plates and showing all the stuff he could do he was so excited and in this case we have the medical documentation most people don't bother to get medical documentation or think about getting it i didn't in times when i was healed um actually i was a poor graduate student i couldn't afford to go to a doctor but anyway uh yeah oh oh take care of you later so uh greg greg spencer was legally blind and he had to get the medical documentation because he tried to get off disability and the social security administration said macular degeneration doesn't go away so if you don't have it now you you're guilty of fraud so they investigated him for a year and finally at the end of the year they sent him a notice saying you know you've had a remarkable return of your visual acuity and therefore you're no longer qualified for disability well downside to everything you have to go back to work my brother chris and i uh he later did a phd in physics so you know hume says no educated person claims this stuff so i'm just telling you some of us are educated but anyway my brother chris and i were helping at a nursing home bible study a couple years after my conversion and he came to christ shortly after me so i i was converted from atheism we were we were the nursing home bible study and there was a lady there named barbara who always came in a wheelchair always said i wish i could walk i wish i could walk and one day the bible study leader said i'm tired of this he was a fuller seminarian studying under george ladd and george loud was talking about miracles the signs of the kingdom and so on so my uh the bible study leader walked over to her grabbed her by the hand said in the name of jesus christ rise up and walk and lifted her by the hand now if faith is a bias i cannot be accused of it in this case because i was sure she was going to fall on the ground and it wasn't her faith either because i could tell by looking her she was she was utterly horrified so if this was psychosomatic it wasn't her psycho he walked her around the room and she's she was as stunned as everybody else but from then on barbara could walk and she would come every week to the bible study and say i love my bible study i love my bible study a friend of mine flint mclaughlin director of transforming business institute at cambridge university 2004 he prayed and there were other people with him and i was able to consult them prayed for a blind man in northern india with clouded eyes which i assume had to do with cataracts but i'm not sure and this is where the man ran in circles praising god for his eyesight and here is where he was testifying that night about his restored eyesight and he began to weep and they said why are you weeping he said because i'd always heard the sound of children but i'd never seen their faces dr rex gardner published an article back in the 1980s in the british medical journal giving examples of healings and also he has a book called healing miracles and i'm going to give just one example from this book but there was a nine-year-old girl she was deaf without her hearing aid but she was praying for healing she was instantly healed they called the audiologist well she'd just been tested like the day before they called the audiologist said that's not possible this is auditory nerve damage it's not just going to go away just like that but i guess insurance regulations were different back then we got her in tested her again the next day and he said i have no explanation for this but she can hear perfectly some people say ah well limbs never grow back well not very often but you know once in a while you've got things growing back bruce van notta was crushed under a semi truck that he was working under crushed his abdomen doctors did what they could but basically his small intestine most of it was gone most of it had to be removed it was it was no good um after several surgeries i mean there was one part of his his uh ilium he just had 25 centimeters left it's normally 350 centimeters so as a consequence he was he was starving his his body couldn't process food a friend of his felt led to to actually fly there in person from new york to wisconsin and pray for him and he commanded the small intestine to grow in the name of jesus bruce felt something like an electric jolt the radiologist testifies now that the small intestine was now long enough to be functional he estimated it grew about 2.4 times over now the small intestine in an adult can widen but it can't naturally grow longer so here we have the case of something growing back medically attested eyewitnesses some of whom i know report the healings of deaf non-christians in jesus name in mozambique and actually know the couple here um both and again these are both educated people rollins has a doctor of ministry degree from united theological seminary and heidi has a phd in theology from king's college in london it's led to massive church growth they'll go into a village they'll they'll often show the jesus film they'll pray for the sick sometimes they don't even get to start praying i i talked with somebody who who was doing this preaching in one of these muslim villages in mozambique and people started getting healed of blindness and deafness while while she was preaching about jesus and so she said okay now we'll start praying for the sick but but it was something god was doing extraordinary to to bring the gospel to these people so that entire villages that were once classified as muslim are now classified as christian because of this groundbreaking evangelism that's going on well a medical team went there to explore this and in september of 2010 they published the results in the southern medical journal of a number of people who went from technically blindness to seeing and deafness to hearing immediately after prayer now skeptics on the internet um raise the legitimate critique that testing conditions in rural mozambique are not ideal but one of the authors of the study dr candy gunther brown answers those critics she's a professor at indiana university she answers those critics in a book published by harvard university press in 2012 in in one of her chapters in this book she talks about that study and if you can read that chapter and not believe people went from blindness to seeing and from deafness to hearing you really do not have an open mind to the possibility of miracles because it's it's pretty clear and i've talked with other eyewitnesses there i was invited to go there but i haven't been able to make it there yet but brandon walker as a phd in new testament from university of nottingham was there testifies of miracles he saw wendy dykman and anderson park who are professors at united theological seminary also testify of what they saw wendy wendy reported witnessing blindness healed in one of these villages in mozambique and the next day a church was started there well our healings ever caught on video i give a lecture on this at wheaton some years ago and a science professor says how come these are never caught on video well now we have lots of videos of them some of them i think are faked but this one is definitely not faked delia knox uh i think i'm saying her name wrong dahlia knox originally from buffalo new york i ran into so many people from buffalo and rochester from that area who were telling me about you know how she she definitely couldn't walk for 22 years she was injured in an automobile accident and uh paralyzed from the waist down no feeling from the waist down and it was public knowledge you can you can go online find all these old pictures of her and old videos over she was a gospel singer so there's lots of videos of her when she was in that state and i've met lots of people who knew her in that state um she didn't like going to meetings where people prayed for the sick because she had been jerked out of her chair nothing happened you know made to feel like she didn't have any faith stuff like that you may have heard of things like that happening if god isn't in it we don't really need that but um somebody had had shared with her someday when you're praying for somebody else you're going to be healed well after 22 years she was getting kind of discouraged like okay i'm just going to live with this but one day as she was in a a revival meeting and she prayed for a child she had this great compassion as she was praying for this child suddenly she had feeling in her legs and she and she rolled herself up to the front and said pray for me now and they prayed for her and she began to they helped her up and she began to walk now it didn't look like walking to a lot of people but because you know there were people who had to hold her up uh you know her muscles had been atrophied but she was she was actually able to move her hips she was able to walk like that now when she got home she couldn't walk so was it just temporary well her muscles were atrophied she began exercising those muscles and a few weeks later we have another video of her online walking normally uh her feet still hurt some because they weren't used to touching the pavement but she was completely healed and what was the best critic the cr criticisms on the internet for the first video were ah you call that walking and then then the you know if if if she had been walking like this initially they would have said ah must be fake her muscles should be atrophied but a few weeks later when she is walking normally what was the best criticism she faked paralysis for 22 years just so she could claim a miracle when that's the best that a hard skeptic can come up with i would say they're on really thin ice well some say well you've never seen anybody raised from the dead i'm glad you raised that question why examine this category of healings well some some things people say are psychosomatic but people aren't usually psychosomatically dead irreparable brain damage normally begins after just six minutes with no oxygen so uh uh wainina i think is here right yeah uh waina shared with me about his own son who was dead for 10 minutes after birth and they prayed he has no brain damage he's he's fully fully functional fully healthy you can meet him around the campus and it's not just a one-off some people you know sometimes people are misdiagnosed as dead as far as anybody can tell they're dead but maybe we were wrong but if it's a coincidence we have an incredible cluster of coincidences in that i mean most people are dead stay dead but we have incredible cluster of coincidences in my own circle i know 10 people this is in not including my nina but these were people i knew before hearing their testimonies who have witnessed people raised from the dead or have been among them it's multiply attested in early sources about jesus we also have it in quadratus writing in the early 2nd century says that some that jesus raised from the dead lived into his own time presumably late first century we have subsequent raisings including a mesopotamian bishop was converted in the year 99 through witnessing a raising augustine includes that in in the city of god 22 8 among healings that were still taking place in his own time that they had documentation for again i'm skipping a lot of history but john wesley in his journal reports it on the day that it happened mr myrick came back so it's eyewitness from the very day found scores of modern testimonies but i'm running low on time so i'm going to hurry through just a few of these dr chauncey crandall a cardiologist west palm beach jeff markin was dead flatlined for about 40 minutes dr crandall had signed the death certificate went back to make his rounds felt led to come back and pray for the man to have a second chance to know the lord now this guy was not just dead he was very obviously dead dr crandall tells me he had cyanosis his his uh fingers had started turning black that guy was white his fingers started turning black but you prayed for him the guy came back to life no brain damage he did have a second chance to know the lord here is dr crandall participating in his baptism dr sean george dead for uh for about an hour and a half medically clinically dead that that time they shocked him so many times he has all the records because he's a doctor he knew how to get those records and the uh his fellow doctors many of whom were muslims and hindus agreed that this was a miracle i mean they'd done everything they could possibly do his wife who was also a doctor came in and prayed his heart started immediately he has no brain damage uh indonesia from uh okay i have this picture from my neighbor who introduced me to the guy so that i could show you the next picture so i could remember to tell you to close your eyes if you get queasy at the sight of blood but somebody had their neck clearly cut this is after the body's been moved there was a lot more blood at the original site looks pretty dead to me the people transporting him the hospital thought he was pretty dead he did need his neck sewn back but in any case he had an experience of heaven was sent back into his body and the you know the doctors were getting ready to send him the morgue and he squeaked out and i don't know how he did this given the condition to his neck i'm alive and so they they were shocked but they sewed him back and he goes around you know jacob still had his limp and this guy still has his neck scars uh some african samples i'm going to skip a lot of these but um this was uh i presented some of this at an sbl meeting praying with great trepidation but uh presented some of this in an sbl meeting maybe we could look at these narratives a little bit differently if instead of looking at it through a western human lens we we heard it the way that some some people in the majority world heard it and so uh and presented some case studies and at the end dr ayo arawuia stood up and said yeah actually my my child was born dead and we prayed for half an hour and came back to life no brain damage he's now got a master of science degree he also has an mba we have a number of examples from my wife's country congo brazzaville this one's from the head of the nomination there at that time we have examples from uh mama jean mabiala she had three accounts which we were also able to verify with other witnesses including my brother-in-law um papa albert beswesway i'd love to tell you more about this one but for the sake of time i i won't but this was somebody was dead for about eight hours and they brought the child he prayed the child came back to life they were so impressed in the village that the next time a child died they came looking for him but he was he was a school inspector he was in another village at that point so they got his wife and she prayed and that child came back to life but this is the one that was a turning point for my own skepticism uh even though it's not the most dramatic antoinette malombe recounted that her her two-year-old daughter cried out that she was bitten by a snake antoinette got to her the child was not breathing there was no medical help available in the village she strapped the child to her back ran to a nearby village where family friend koko and gomo moise was doing ministry coco muis prayed for the child the child started breathing again the next day she was fine the child had no brain damage she now has a master's degree from a summary seminary in cameroon she's doing ministry back in congo now this got my attention in particular it wasn't so much the length of time i asked her how long was she not breathing and she had to stop and think to get from one village to the other she said about three hours well you know six minutes with no oxygen irreparable brain damages started in but you know i had a lot of accounts that were more than three hours this one got my attention though because antoinette malombe is my or was my my mother-in-law and therese is my sister-in-law and the lovely lovely lovely one there that i'm looking forward to seeing hopefully if they don't cancel my flight is my wife um that was a turning point because it really got my attention and we have other accounts from congo and elsewhere and by the way we did uh not to doubt one's mother-in-law but we did confirm it with coco moise the other witness unless we're burying too many people prematurely how often would you say we misdiagnosed death one case in ten probably not one case in a thousand one case in ten thousand what are the odds of any given person knowing somebody who witnessed a raising based on such a coincidence what are the odds of knowing 10 people i mean if if the odds are like one chance in 10 that you would know somebody who was misdiagnosed as dead and just happened to come back to life when somebody prayed for them the odds of knowing 10 people that way i think would be somewhere around like one in 10 billion so but it's like it's the way people do with you know talking about the multiverse instead of saying uh more simply occam's razor there's just one god outside the universe who who did it people will often resort to the most improbable scenarios i mean we we have the problem of evil to deal with but they have the problem of of divine action and if your response to divine action you have to resort to improbabilities like one chance and 10 billion one chance in 10 trillion whatever uh you have to admit that your view is rather improbable uh time time would fail me to to give all the millions of things let me just mention nature miracles uh sai krishna could could give you one here uh kevin burr one of my doctoral students uh talks about a a storm that stopped when he prayed watchmen knee had a story about this emmanuel thompson maybe this is the one i'll tell actually if i if i go real fast he he grew up his father was planting churches in northern nigeria and it was rainy season and they just moved to this one village they needed to get a roof on their hut and the neighbors were laughing at them mocking them saying everything you have is going to be ruined look it's rainy season the rains are coming and the father said it's not going to rain one drop of rain in this village until i have a roof of my house and they and they left laughing and he said oh god what have i done and he fell on his face before god for the next four days it rained all around the village but not a single drop of rain though in the village and in that in that village that knew what rainy season was supposed to look like by the end of the those four days there was only one person who had not become a christian that that we they they still to this day speak of that as the precipitating event that brought about their conversion um and then i also witnessed this praying praying i was doing campus ministry praying with some students we're about to have an outreach it was supposed to be pouring down rain all day long and oh wow i had hair back then anyway pouring down rain all day long and a sophomore said well let's let's pray for the rain to stop okay so we we joined hands and prayed no sooner had she said amen then it was like my my faucet that would just drip after after i turned it off and in within within seconds it cleared within a few minutes the sun was out and it didn't rain the rest of the day and i could go on to talk about power encounters but i need to turn it over to questions now and i i told you i'd get back to you so yes tom you

Channel: Henry Center

Views: 1,674

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: henry center, hctu, Craig Keener, creation, miracles, New Testament, signs and wonders, healing, divine action, Creation Project

Id: x-a9mJYF-AQ

Length: 57min 3sec (3423 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 23 2020