The Academy and the Miraculous¶

The claim¶

The objection is familiar: no serious scholar takes miracle reports seriously. They are the stuff of revival pamphlets and credulous biographies; the university has moved on; the only people who study them are the people who need them to be true.

The claim is false, and it is false in a way that can be documented. There is a field — small, contested, but real — of historians, anthropologists, sociologists, and physicians who study miracle claims as a serious subject. Some of them are Christians; several of the most important are not. Their existence does not prove that any particular miracle occurred. It does change the shape of the argument: the sceptic can no longer say that no one has looked.

Craig Keener and the catalogue¶

Craig S. Keener is a New Testament scholar long associated with Asbury Theological Seminary. He published Miracles: The Credibility of the New Testament Accounts with Baker Academic in 2011 — two volumes, over a thousand pages. The book does two things.

First, it assembles reports. Keener has collected accounts of healings and other extraordinary events from Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the West, from published sources and from his own interviews, and he presents them as a body of data that a historian of the New Testament has to reckon with. The reports are not all of equal quality, and he knows it; the argument is not that every report is true, but that the sheer range and persistence of the reports makes the blanket dismissal of the category untenable.

Second, it argues about method. Keener's target is the philosophical assumption, common in the modern academy, that miracles cannot happen and therefore reports of them must be explained away. That assumption, he argues, is not a conclusion from the evidence but a prior commitment brought to it, and it is applied to miracle reports in a way it is not applied to other historical testimony. He also presses the cross-cultural point: a discipline that treats the testimonies of the global South as superstition while treating its own scepticism as neutral is not being neutral.

The book has been criticised, including by reviewers sympathetic to its project, for the uneven quality of its sources and for the gap between collecting reports and verifying them. That criticism is fair, and it is part of why the book is serious: it is a catalogue with an argument, not a proof text.

Candy Gunther Brown and the STEPP study¶

Candy Gunther Brown is a scholar of religion at Indiana University. Her book Testing Prayer: Science and Healing (Harvard University Press, 2012) asks a different question from Keener's: not "are there reports?" but "can the effects be measured?"

Her best-known study, published in the Southern Medical Journal in 2010, is the STEPP study — the Study of the Therapeutic Effects of Proximal Intercessory Prayer — conducted in rural Mozambique. The design was simple. People with hearing and vision impairments were tested, prayed for by nearby intercessors, and tested again. The study reported statistically significant improvements in both hearing and vision.

It is important to say what the study is not. It was small. It was not randomised and had no control group of the kind a drug trial would require. Improvements in hearing and vision can be affected by attention, effort, and the testing situation itself. Brown herself has been careful about the limits of what such a study can show, and she has argued for better and larger research rather than for the conclusion that a miracle has been proved.

What the study does show is that the question is testable, that someone with academic standing did the work, and that the result was published in a medical journal rather than a revival newsletter. That is a different kind of contribution from Keener's, and the two belong together: one assembles the reports, the other submits a sample of them to measurement.

The historians: Mullin, Wacker, Jenkins¶

Robert Bruce Mullin, Miracles and the Modern Religious Imagination (Yale University Press, 1996). Mullin is a historian of American religion, and his book is about how the idea that miracles ceased became a settled Protestant assumption — and how it came apart in the nineteenth century. The point for this casebook is historiographical: the "cessation" position is not the church's immemorial teaching but a construction with a date and a set of controversies behind it. That is a claim about history, made by a historian, and it can be checked.

Grant Wacker, Heaven Below: Early Pentecostals and American Culture (Harvard University Press, 2001). Wacker is neither a debunker nor an apologist. He takes early Pentecostalism seriously as a religious world, and he shows how ordinary believers sustained the expectation of healing and tongues in daily life — the funerals that did not happen, the prayers that were answered, and the ones that were not. A historian who can describe a movement's miracle claims without either mocking them or endorsing them is exactly the kind of witness this argument needs.

Philip Jenkins, The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity (Oxford University Press, 2002). Jenkins is not writing about miracles. He is writing about demography, and his argument is that the centre of Christianity has moved south, where the supernatural is not a embarrassment but an assumption. The relevance is indirect and important: the Western debate about whether the gifts have ceased is being conducted in a part of the church that is no longer the majority.

The point of these books is not that historians believe in miracles. It is that the phenomena are part of the record, that serious scholars study them, and that the claim "no one who knows the evidence takes this seriously" is false.

The survey¶

In 2006 the Pew Research Center published Spirit and Power, a ten-country survey of Pentecostals. In most of the countries surveyed, a majority of Pentecostals said they had personally witnessed or experienced divine healing; in several, the share was much higher. The survey measures report, not occurrence — it tells you what people say happened to them, not what a doctor would conclude. But it establishes the scale of the claim. This is not a fringe of a fringe. It is the normal religious experience of a very large part of the world church.

Why this matters¶

The existence of the field shifts the burden in a precise way. The sceptic's rhetorical advantage has always been the claim that the evidence is beneath consideration. That claim is now false. Keener, Brown, Mullin, Wacker, and Jenkins can be disagreed with, and are. But they cannot be waved away, and the person who wants to dismiss miracle reports now has to say why these books are wrong rather than why the subject is unworthy.

There is a further point, and it is the one that matters most for this casebook. The field is not confessional. Wacker and Jenkins are not Pentecostals; Mullin is an Episcopal historian; Brown is a scholar of religion; the STEPP paper appeared in a medical journal with referees. A body of work that includes unbelievers taking the subject seriously is harder to dismiss as wishful thinking. That does not make it true. It makes it a field.

What this does and does not prove¶

It proves: that the claim "no serious scholar takes miracle reports seriously" is false; that the subject is studied by historians, physicians, and social scientists, some of them not religious; and that the reports have been catalogued, measured, and historicised rather than merely asserted. It proves that the conversation exists.

It does not prove: that any particular miracle occurred. Keener catalogues reports; he does not verify them all. Brown's study is small and limited; Wacker describes without adjudicating; Jenkins is making a demographic argument, not a theological one. The existence of scholarship is not the same as the truth of the claims, and the casebook does not confuse the two. What the scholarship does is remove an excuse: the evidence can no longer be dismissed on the ground that no one has examined it.