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God’s precious Word—Ps 119:82, 86-88

There are many reasons to treasure words from God. Just in a few verses of Psalm 119, we can get a sample.

  • God’s Word (in context) brings comfort (Psalm 119:82)
  • God’s commandments are faithful, a Hebrew idea related to truth and trustworthiness, in contrast to the lies brought against God’s servant (119:86)
  • We must hold to God’s precepts despite opposition (119:87)
  • In addition to why we treasure God’s Word, we pray for God to revive us so that we may continue to obey what God has said (119:88).

We could elaborate on each of these points, and praying through the entire psalm supplies yet further motivation. In brief, this psalm reminds us why God’s Word is so important to us, and why we honor the God who gave it by observing it.

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Provoking Israel’s jealousy—Romans 11

Paul certainly cared about Gentiles; his letters are replete with signs of his intimate concern for the members of the many congregations he started, many of whose members were Gentiles. The Bible also suggests that the Lord will return after the good news has been proclaimed among all peoples (Matt 24:14), probably related to Paul’s idea about the “full number of the Gentiles” (Rom 11:25).

Yet Paul also had a special concern for his own Jewish people, and he even viewed his Gentile mission as somehow also a witness to his own people. Building on a passage from the Old Testament (which he quotes in Rom 10:19), Paul explains that the conversion of the Gentiles should make his own people jealous (Rom 11:11, 14). Thus the full measure of Gentiles being saved would precipitate his own people turning to God, hence the completion of salvation history (11:25-27).

It would have made sense to Paul that his people would recognize God at work through his and others’ ministry in converting Gentiles. After all, Paul’s people knew the biblical promises about vast numbers of Gentiles coming to acknowledge Israel’s God (Isa 19:19-25; Zech 2:11); if these new followers of Israel’s God came through recognition of Jesus as Israel’s king, surely Israel itself should recognize its own king. Many scholars even believe that Paul intended his own offering from his Diaspora churches, brought for the needs of the Jerusalem church (Rom 15:26-27), as a partial fulfillment of the promised gifts from the nations (Isa 60:9).

Surely the Jewish people today can look around, see the more than two billion Christians in the world, and see how Gentiles now worship their one God and use their Scriptures because of Jesus? Surely Israelis can see all the tourists pouring into the land and see the nations streaming to Zion, as Isaiah promised, fulfilled through Jesus?

That would be nice. Through much of history, however, a large proportion of Jewish people have affirmed that regarding the Jewish teacher Jesus as Messiah is a belief suited only for Gentiles, not for their own people. Although many more Jewish people affirm Jesus as Messiah today than through most of history, the response of his people clearly did not go as Paul hoped.

Why did the proliferation of faith in Israel’s one true God among the Gentiles not serve as a witness to Israel? Largely because Gentile Christians ignored Paul’s other teachings in the same context.

Paul portrayed Gentile Christians as grafted into Israel’s heritage (Rom 11:17), as fulfillments of the promise that Abraham would be a father to many nations (4:16-18). That is, Paul viewed them as spiritual proselytes, who recognized that in accepting Jesus as Lord they were also embracing the king of Israel, the God of Israel, and the heritage and promises that belonged to Israel. He warned Gentile Christians not to boast against the Jewish people into whose heritage they had been grafted (11:18-21).

Yet this is precisely what most Gentile Christians ultimately did. Much of Christendom, through most of Christian history, viewed the church as a replacement for Israel, and viewed formal membership in the church as salvific in the same way that the Jewish community had viewed membership in Israel as salvific—the very sort of arrogance that Paul denounced.

For Paul, salvation was through faith in Christ, not through ethnicity or membership in a particular group. This was especially true when parts of the church implemented rules that excluded those practicing certain ancestral customs that were not genuinely antithetical to faith in Christ. (That is, Messianic Jews were unwelcome in both most Jewish and Christian communities, instead of being welcomed to form a bridge between them.)

Anti-Jewish sentiments were common in the Greco-Roman world, especially among Greeks; indeed, Gentiles in places like Alexandria and Caesarea genocidally slaughtered local Jewish communities in the years and decades after Paul wrote. Many converts to Christianity retained this pagan anti-Judaism when they became Christians, ignoring the Jewish heritage of their faith.

Though few went as far as Marcion (who rejected the Old Testament and the God of Israel outright), many Gentile Christians accepted Christ (the Messiah) while rejecting his people. The subsequent history of Christendom in the west is stained with the blood of vast numbers of Jewish people drowned in “baptisms,” crucified, tortured by the Inquisition, and so forth. While God’s grace is evident in much of Christian history, the Christian doctrine to which it often testifies most eloquently is human depravity. (We should pause to note that many church leaders tried to protect Jews from such pogroms; but on a more popular level anti-Jewish ways of preaching combined with indigenous human prejudice to promote violence.)

Paul’s ideal vision for his people’s salvation never succeeded because it was never really implemented. What might happen today if Gentile Christians were to show the Jewish people that we have come to faith in Israel’s God? What might happen if we expressed appreciation to the Jewish people for sharing their God with the rest of humanity, most of whom once worshiped or feared many lesser gods? If we affirmed that we embrace rather than usurp their heritage?

Whatever the response might be in our day, after so many centuries of anti-Semitism, we owe it both to the Jewish people and to our Lord Jesus to offer this recognition.

(P.S., I strongly disagree with those who use honoring our Jewish heritage as an excuse to be anti-Arab. But that is a subject different from this post.)

Craig Keener is author of a short (yes, short!) commentary on Romans (Cascade, 2009), in a commentary series he coedits with the brilliant and exceedingly humorous Michael Bird. (OK, short compared to his stuff on Acts …)

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A multicultural church—Acts 13:1-3

The church in Antioch spearheaded the mission to the rest of the world beyond Judea. Nearly all Christians today, and certainly all Gentile Christians, have spiritual roots in this church in Syria. Apart from this mission, the church could have been stillborn in the first century, had the Holy Spirit allowed such a thing to happen.

But the Antioch church’s mission began as an accident—or better yet, simply grew naturally. Once it began, however, the church became intentional about carrying out the task further.

Some of the first followers of Jesus were apparently ready to wait for God’s kingdom in Jerusalem—until Saul of Tarsus began persecuting the church there (Acts 8:3). Then the believers from there were scattered (8:4), and the Greek-speaking, immigrant Jewish believers in Jerusalem scattered to other places where they could speak Greek. Although rural Syria spoke Aramaic, the dominant language in cosmopolitan Antioch was Greek.

Eager to share their experience with others, these scattered, bicultural believers became unintentional missionaries (11:19-20). International migrations today often spread the gospel also. In some Western nations where traditional Christianity has been on the decline, for example, African, Asian and Latino/a Christians are growing new, evangelizing churches.

Unintentional missionaries—Christians scattered due to persecution but sharing Christ where they traveled—started the first house-churches in Antioch (Acts 11:19). These first Antioch Christians, living and working among Gentiles as well as Jews, began sharing the gospel with Gentiles (Acts 11:20). (The likeliest Greek reading of 11:20 speaks of “Hellenists,” a term used earlier for Greek-speaking Jews in Jerusalem in 6:1. Here, however, Hellenist Gentiles were in view—Greek-speaking Syrians.) Thus it was not surprising that they would eventually consider evangelizing Gentiles elsewhere. In fact, they embraced among them a former leader of the persecution that scattered them to begin with: Saul of Tarsus (Paul), who now had a call to evangelize the Gentiles (Acts 11:26).

Antioch was the major cosmopolitan center of the eastern Roman Empire, attracting a wide range of people from various parts of the Empire. Antioch’s various residents, already experiencing geographic and cultural transition, often tended to be more open to new ideas than those who had remained for a long time in their traditional location. Ministering to such a wide range of immigrants, the leaders of the Antioch church reflected similar diversity among themselves.

The leaders of the church were prophets and teachers (Acts 13:1). (Some think that the first three names, including Barnabas, were prophets, and the last two were teachers; but Barnabas also taught, according to 11:26. Probably all had both gifts, although they may have varied in their emphases.) Some of these leaders presumably came from Jerusalem (11:27), including Barnabas (11:22). Most, however, at least had significant cross-cultural backgrounds. For example, Barnabas, though from Jerusalem most recently, was originally from Cyprus (4:36); he probably had ties with some of the Cypriotes who helped evangelize Antioch initially (11:20).

Besides Barnabas, the leadership team included Simeon called “Niger” (13:1). Simeon was a common Jewish name, and “Niger” a common Roman name, which could suggest that he was a Jewish Roman citizen like Paul. But in this case, the expression “who was called Niger” differs from the other names in the list, perhaps suggesting a nickname. In this case, it would be meant descriptively: “Simeon the Dark” or “Simeon the Black,” observing his dark complexion, perhaps from northern Africa.

Less debatably, Lucius was explicitly from Cyrene in North Africa (13:1), and thus was perhaps one of the original founders of the Antioch church (11:20). Cyrene was in an area earlier settled by Phoenicians, with indigenous North African inhabitants and many Greek and Jewish settlers (sometimes estimated at one-third each). The culture included a mix of these various elements. “Lucius” was a common Greek name, but non-Greeks also used Greek names in places where Greek was spoken. Many non-Jews converted to Judaism, so we do not know the ethnic background of Lucius’s ancestors.

Between Lucius from North Africa and Simeon the Dark one may find significant African representation in leadership in this Greco-Asian church. (Greeks and Romans considered both Judea and larger Syria to be in Asia, so the entire leadership team likely comes from Asia and Africa. Europeans and their descendants should not feel left out, however, since in Acts Paul is eager to preach in Rome, and Romans 15 shows that he also wanted to evangelize Spain.)

Perhaps of special interest to many African-American Christians, the list may also include those descended from slaves. That Manaen was “brought up with” Herod Antipas could mean that he was a playmate from another noble family, but it could also suggest that he was a family servant. In that culture (as opposed to U.S. history) an aristocratic family’s servant could wield great social power and wealth, whether before or after being freed. Often aristocrat boys freed their servant playmates when both grew up, providing them powerful positions.

In Manaen’s case, this is merely a possibility. In Saul’s (Paul’s) case, however, it is likely. A majority of Jews who were Roman citizens were so because their ancestors had once been slaves in Rome. (In the first century BCE, Rome enslaved many Judeans and brought them to Rome.) Once a Roman citizen freed a slave under certain conditions, that slave became a Roman citizen, as did the slaves’ descendants.

Saul of Tarsus was probably one of the Cilicians who belonged to the synagogue of Freedpersons in Acts 6:9. The term translated Freedpersons there designates those freed by Romans, hence signifying this synagogue as a prestigious institution in Jerusalem—a congregation started by Jewish Roman citizens. Acts 6:9 notes that this synagogue of Freedpersons included Jewish people from various locations (including Cilicia, where Tarsus was, and where Saul’s ancestors may have migrated from Rome). It thus seems likely that Paul was a Roman citizen (16:37) because, several generations earlier, his ancestors were slaves in Rome.

In any case, this list of leaders shows a great diversity of backgrounds. What matters more than all the differences, though, is what binds them together. These leaders worship God, praying and fasting, and are ready to hear His call when He speaks (Acts 13:2). Whatever our diverse backgrounds on other points, the one God we serve unites us by his Spirit. This diverse, cosmopolitan church, with its diverse leadership team, birthed a vision that Jesus had already imparted in Acts 1:8. Empowered by the Spirit, two emissaries from this church were preparing to reach the world!

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Problems with Hume’s argument against miracles: part 2

Continued from part 1: http://www.craigkeener.org/?p=4311

To be credible, Hume believed, eyewitnesses must be educated, socially respectable Western white persons such as Hume and his circle; he avers that only such people have something to lose by lying. Today, of course, I can cite numerous witnesses who meet all his criteria, including medical doctors, philosophers, and plenty of fellow PhD’s. Not all of the witnesses began as Christians before the events they claim to witness, contrary to suspicion of religious bias (as if bias is endemic only to persons with religious convictions; as a former atheist, I can attest firsthand that bias is not limited to a single ideology).

A particular case allows us to understand more concretely how Hume might apply his criteria. Hume takes an example from then-recent history: Marguerite Perrier, niece of the famous mathematician and theologian Blaise Pascal, had a long-term, organic fistula in her eye that emitted a foul odor, seemed to accompany bone deterioration, and separated her from her peers because of the smell. She was instantly and publicly healed when touched by a relic (and few of us today would defend the relic’s authenticity), and the Queen Mother of France sent her own physician to examine this event. Hume points to this experience, noting that it was public, widely attested, even medically verified. It is far better verified than biblical miracles. Yet, he says, we do not believe this account; so why should we believe any other?

And then Hume moves on. He offers no argument; he simply takes for granted that no one will defend this account. Why? The setting in which Marguerite Perrier was healed was the early Jansenist movement, and nobody liked Jansenists; they were too Augustinian for French Jesuits, and, more to the point of Hume’s primary audience, they were too Catholic for Anglicans and Presbyterians. His Christian contemporaries who were accustomed to dismissing each others’ miracle claims without contrary evidence would not argue Hume’s point. But what if their sectarian dismissals were premature?

Challenging Hume’s Argument Today

David Hume was a smart man, and I do not believe that if he were around today, even he would argue his case the way he did in his day. (Admittedly, that is a postHUMous argument—sorry for injecting a bit of HUMor here.) It was one thing to deny credible eyewitness claims when the available sample size was so limited, and when most of his largely Protestant context relegated miracles to the distant past.

It would be a quite different to dismiss miracle claimants’ credibility a priori, or to make claims about uniform human experience, if there were millions of people who claimed to be witnesses. This is especially the case if one does not exclude witnesses based on sectarian or ethnic considerations.

Today, in fact, we have a fuller knowledge of global human experience, or at least the claims about such experience, and we can readily say that hundreds of millions of people claim to have witnessed or experienced divine healing. No one would argue that all of these claims represent genuine miracles, much less that they can be explained only in this way. But with hundreds of millions of claimants, it is simply not possible logically to start with an a priori claim about human experience on the matter being uniform.

In 2006, a Pew Forum survey of ten countries (representing most continents, including North America) interviewed Pentecostals, charismatics, and Christians who claimed to fit neither category. Given the percentages in the 231-page report’s executive summary, it appears that hundreds of millions of people in these ten countries alone (i.e., not even including other countries) claimed to have witnessed divine healing. Nor are such claims limited to one religion, although other surveys show millions of people with centuries of non-Christian background converting to Christianity, often despite great social pressures to the contrary, because of extraordinary miracles in Christian contexts. A 2004 survey of U.S. physicians reports that over half believed that they had witnessed miracles during their practice. (We can keep in mind here that those with scientific training tend to define miracles more narrowly and rigorously than do many others.)

My own sample size of hundreds of sources is more limited, but from written sources and my own interviews, I conclude that many of these cases are significant. They include most of the range of miracles reported in the New Testament, including instant disappearances of blindness, resuscitations from apparent (and sometimes clinically documented) death, the instant vanishing of goiters, and the like. Again, some of these are medically documented. Although I initially collected such accounts much more deliberately for my book on miracle accounts (Miracles: The Credibility of the New Testament Accounts [2 vols.; Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011]), I have since come across many more, and often with fuller documentation than available at the time.

I will not digress from my main point here to elaborate examples, but I conclude by reinforcing the point of my brief response to David Hume here. Hume’s a priori dismissal of credible eyewitness support for miracles, and thus his argument from the uniformity of human experience and nature, does not work in a twenty-first century context. That is not to say that Hume might not have tried to argue against miracles from a different standpoint, or to seek other ways to counter his contemporaries’ apologetic use of biblical miracle claims. It is to say that the case that Hume argued, on which most modern assumptions that dismiss miracles are based, is no longer logically tenable.

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False prophets

Lamenting that some people are taken in by false prophets, teachers, etc. Christ’s REAL servants sacrificially serve others and seek Christ’s honor. Those who seek the honor for themselves are liable to become false prophets, teachers, etc. The video is 8 minutes and 41 seconds.

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Problems with Hume’s argument against miracles, part 1

Most people today who start from the premise that miracles don’t or won’t happen knowingly or unknowingly depend on the influence of Scottish philosopher David Hume (1711-1776).

Hume did not originate the key ideas in his essay on miracles; most are recycled from arguments of some earlier deist writers, as Robert M. Burns has demonstrated (The Great Debate on Miracles: From Joseph Glanvill to David Hume; Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1981). It was Hume, however, whose influence mainstreamed these ideas so that some subsequent thinkers simply took for granted that he had established the case. Many thinkers from his own time forward offered strong responses to his case, including more sophisticated challenges based on mathematical probabilities, but Hume’s reputation in other areas lent credibility to his argument on this one.

Today scholars have published major academic critiques of Hume’s work. Oxford philosopher Richard Swinburne has been influential (The Concept of Miracle; London: Macmillan, 1970), and more recent critiques include J. Houston’s Reported Miracles: A Critique of Hume (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), David Johnson, Hume, Holism, and Miracles (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1999), and John Earman’s Hume’s Abject Failure: The Argument Against Miracles (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). Against criticism that Earman critiqued Hume’s argument because of Christian bias, Earman replied that he is not a Christian; he simply thought Hume’s argument was a poor one.

Violating Nature

Scholars reconstruct Hume’s argument in various ways, though Burns is probably right that we should fill the lacunae based on Hume’s assumptions of then-current deist debates. At the fundamental level, Hume’s argument is twofold: miracles violate natural law, and we lack credible eyewitnesses for miracles. In sum (acording to the most common understanding of Hume’s argument), miracles contradict uniform human experience.

The second part of his argument (the lack of credible eyewitness support for miracles) is probably meant to support the first part: lack of experience of miracles points to the ordinary course of nature (or, Hume would say, the uniform course of nature). Hume is trying to use induction to establish a negative, deductive argument—an argument that does not fit even his own normal approach. Hume normally did not believe that a finite number of examples could establish with certainty that something would always be the case—except when it came to miracles. (He could argue that it is improbable based on his circle of evidence, but his sample size proves too limited, as we shall see.)

Modern conceptions of natural law tend to be more descriptive than prescriptive, but Hume’s conception of natural law did not even fit the dominant paradigm of his day. Newton and his early followers were theists who affirmed biblical miracles; they did not regard God, the Legislator, as subject to his own laws. For Hume to argue that we cannot expect miracles because a God could not or would not “violate” natural law is an assumption, not an argument. It assumes without argument what no Christians believed anyway: a God subject to natural law. Defining miracles as “violations” of natural law lends the impression that God breaks such laws when he acts in nature; but this requires one to assume an uninvolved creator (as in deism) or no God at all.

A human who act in nature, by, for example, catching a falling object, does not “violate” the law of gravity; persons can act within nature without violating it. Why must God be less an actor than human persons? Moreover, most biblical miracles do not even fit a tamer definition of miracle that requires an action without nearer (as opposed to more distant) natural causes: when God used a strong east wind to blow back the sea in Exodus 14:21, the proximate cause was the east wind, and Moses and his rod functioned as agents, even though God was the ultimate cause.

No Credible Witnesses

The second part of Hume’s essay, probably meant to support the first half, is particularly problematic. To argue that uniform human experience absolutely excludes miracles, one must have comprehensive knowledge of uniform human experience. Instead, Hume argues that there are no credible eyewitnesses for miracles, but circularly uses the uniformity of human experience to challenge the credibility of witnesses. By almost everyone’s definition of miracles (as opposed to less conspicuous divine activity) they are not part of nature’s ordinary course; we don’t call them “miracles” when they are our common, easily predictable experience. But in some kinds of circumstances, what we consider ordinary is not ordinary: in black holes and cases of superconductivity, physical laws appear different than under many other conditions, inviting broadened definitions of overarching laws. If we do not a priori rule out the possibility of special divine activity, it would be rational to even expect special experiences during such activity.

Various subsidiary arguments inform Hume’s argument against reliable eyewitnesses. These arguments help him to narrow the field of evidence that should be acceptable, excluding testimony from nonwhite peoples and from antiquity. He excludes, for example, claims from non-Western and nonwhite civilizations. Hume considers such peoples “ignorant and barbarous,” fitting his ethnocentrism in his other work. One could elaborate at length on his ethnocentrism, e.g., his denial of any truly great achievements in Asian and African civilizations, his widely-used support for slavery, and so forth. See e.g., C. L. Ten, “Hume’s Racism and Miracles,” Journal of Values Inquiry 36 (2002): 101–7; Charles Taliaferro, and Anders Hendrickson, “Hume’s Racism and His Case against the Miraculous,” Philosophia Christi 4 (2, 2002): 427–41; and my “A Reassessment of Hume’s Case against Miracles in Light of Testimony from the Majority World Today,” Perspectives in Religious Studies 38 (3, Fall 2011): 289–310.

Since all religions claim miracles at the beginning, he mistrusts miraculous claims from the beginning of religions. Hume’s target here is fellow Enlightenment thinkers, such as John Locke, who used early Christian miracles as evidence for Christian faith. But Hume is not correct that all religions claim miracles at their beginning, nor would the claims of some religions automatically cancel out those of others, any more than the discrediting of one witness for a case would discredit all the witnesses. (Moreover, Hume merely presupposes, with some of his contemporaries, that religions’ claims are mutually exclusive, so that genuine superhuman activity could not occur in more than one.) Excluding testimony in religious contexts presupposes what it would hope to prove.

Continued in part 2, next week …