I am grateful to the scholars who read and responded to a book that did not always make for easy reading. The generous and irenic nature of their comments invites a reply in kind. I especially appreciated what seems to be a general recognition among these readers (possibly representing the totality of its audience) that the…

Luke Timothy Johnson is rightly known as one of the more thoughtful New Testament scholars in our country. He is well known for going his own way on issues and calling them as he sees them with a clarity of expression as he does so. This has certainly been the case in Historical Jesus study…

Merriam-Webster defines a miracle as “an extraordinary event manifesting divine intervention in human affairs.” How can a modern, educated Western adult believe in miracles? Miracles are a hard sell in our modern secular age. We know better—or so we are told. More personally, how can a scientist believe in miracles? Isn’t “believing scientist” something of…

The saying is trustworthy and deserving of full acceptance, that The Princess Bride (1987) is a cinematic masterpiece, and a virtually limitless source of helpful quotations, from scene after scene. About two-thirds through the film, Inigo and Fezzik take the (mostly) dead Man in Black to Miracle Max asking for, well, a miracle: the resuscitation…

A close friend recently told the story of his daughter coming home from a kindergarten class in a mainline Protestant Christian school. Her teacher, also a pastor in the church, had taught the children that the miracle of the feeding of the five thousand was that because of Jesus’ influence, people shared their food with…

In his Miracles: God’s Presence and Power in Creation, Luke Timothy Johnson argues that at the heart of the Christian faith is the claim that God has revealed himself and acted to accomplish his purposes through signs, wonders, and miracles. The mighty acts of God—from Creation to Exodus to Christ’s resurrection to the outpouring of…

In answering this missional and practical question, after a sampling of supernatural experiences, I would propose the following two main explanations. This list is based on my own missionary experience, observations, and research. A Sampling of Experiences of Supernatural Power This section showcases empirical supernatural experiences in the non-Western world. Historical records attest that in…

A number of years ago at a conference in Hamburg, Germany, a European theologian asked me a question after my presentation on African Pentecostalism and World Christianity: “Why do your people [Africans] spend so much time praying about everything?” My answer was simple: “unlike you, when we pray ‘give us this day our daily bread,’…

Christians understand God to work in various ways. God created and sustains the universe, an ordered universe. The fact that gravity works in consistent, rather than capricious, ways is God’s good gift. As with sunshine and rain (Mt. 5:45), gravity is given through providence both to the just and unjust. When, through science, we study…

The accounts and experiences of miracles are pervasive among Christians in Africa. Millions of people claim this experience. It is incontrovertible that the miraculous is a significant part of the Christian experience in Africa. As Craig Keener says in his two-volume work Miracles, this phenomenon cannot be easily dismissed. The experience of miracles in Africa…

The topic to be discussed in the present Areopagite is quite intriguing: why do Christians outside the West experience God’s miraculous activities more than Western Christians? This question can be crucial to understanding the quintessence of Christian faith. Before trying to answer it, I would like to define the popular word “miracle” first in light…

Anyone who has talked to missionaries or has heard Christians from majority world cultures give their testimonies knows the experience. Such believers often have remarkable stories to share, supernatural encounters with God and with other spiritual entities: speaking in tongues, miraculous healings, exorcisms, witchcraft, you name it. Meanwhile, here you are, trained at a Western…