Craig S. Keener Quotes
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If we must “feel” God's presence before we believe he is with us, we again reduce God to our ability to grasp him, making him an idol instead of acknowledging him as God.
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The fact that our traditional method of extracting doctrine from Scripture does not work well on narrative does not mean that Bible stories do not send clear messages. Instead, it suggests that the way we apply our traditional method of interpretation is inadequate because we are ignoring too much of God’s Word.
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Until those charismatic churches who have poor teaching can supply both spiritual empowerment and sounder teaching, many of them will continue to be only a way station for Christians who need a fresh spiritual experience but who end up taking it elsewhere once they have it.
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...the early church fathers provide abundant evidence that gifts such as prophecy and miracles continued in their own time, even if not as abundantly as in the first century. Christians in the medieval and modern periods continued to embrace these activities of the Spirit. It is, in fact, cessationism that is not well documented in earlier history; it seems no coincidence that it arose only in a culture dominated by anti-supernaturalism.
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Using only nonnarrative portions of the Bible to interpret narrative is not only disrespectful to the narrative portions but also suggests a misguided approach to nonnarrative parts of the Bible.
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... a bland Jesus who simply told people to look at the lilies of the field - such a Jesus would threaten no one, just as the university professors who created him threaten no one.
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As a young Christian, I was praying fervently one day for guidance on a particular issue when I felt the Spirit gently interrupt. I was shocked to think I heard him suggest that I was too busy seeking his will. How could that be? Then I heard the rest of his suggestion. “Don’t seek my will in this matter. Seek me—and then you will know my will.” Seeking God’s will is important, but in this case my focus was wrong.
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Any student of the New Testament eager to understand its Greco-Roman setting will profit greatly from this excellent book. I commend it highly for its up-to-date perspectives and usefulness. Jeffers writes with a breadth of expertise on the Greco-Roman world that few New Testament specialists can match.
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God alone is God, and he alone merits first place—beyond every other love, every other anxiety, every other fear that consumes us.
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Every Christian generation learns equally the lessons of Revelation—that God is in control, that the powers of the world are minuscule when compared with God, that God is as likely to work through apparent weakness and failure as through strength and success, and that in the end God’s people will prevail.
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As Elijah’s mantle fell on Elisha and as other prophetic disciples sought to emulate their mentors, so the ascending Jesus empowered his church with the Spirit to carry on his mission to the ends of the earth (1:9–11).
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The mention of faith is also missing in many accounts (e.g., Matt 8:14–15; 14:14; Mark 1:30–31; Luke 7:12–15; 13:11–13; John 5:6–9; 9:4–7); one dare not argue from silence, especially since Jesus himself supplied faith in many cases, but it is nevertheless clear that miracles can occur despite some participants’ lack of faith (Matt 8:26; 14:17, 26; 16:8–10; Mark 4:40; 6:49; 8:4, 17–21; 9:24, 26; Luke 2:9; 5:4–9; 8:25; 11:14–15; especially Luke 1:20; cf. Luke 10:18). The disciples themselves are often the ones chided for their little faith (Mark 4:40; Luke 8:25; 12:28; cf. Luke 17:5), albeit especially in Matthew (6:30; 8:26; 14:31; 16:8; 17:20).
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The book of Revelation is a book of worship that summons us to recognize the awesome majesty of our Lord.
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Revelation announces that God is still in control and that he will conclude this stage of history the way he has promised.
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Some persons whom I had interviewed had instantaneous “spontaneous recoveries during prayer, including one case in which other cases of such spontaneous recoveries were not known, but their doctors classified the recoveries as anomalies and refused to admit that a miracle had occurred. One doctor also told me of a dramatic, medically inexplicable healing that occurred after prayer, in which case he was an eyewitness, but the surgeon was content to label it a “spontaneous healing.” This approach to classifying data to fit existing naturalistic paradigms inevitably obscures all potential evidence in conflict with the paradigm.
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The image of keys (plural) perhaps suggests not so much the porter, who controls admission to the house, as the steward, who regulates its administration (Is 22:22, in conjunction with 22:15). The issue then is not that of admission to the church (which is not what the kingdom of heaven means; see pp. 45-47) but an authority derived from a delegation of God's sovereignty.
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The keeper of the keys was one of the most important roles a household servant could hold (Mark 13:32-34). A higher official held the keys in a royal kingdom (Is 22:22) and in God's house, the temple.
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Respect for one’s government and the expected obligations of citizenship have limits (though as a modern Western reader I am probably overly inclined to emphasize this qualification). Paul cooperated with the Jerusalem church’s identification with their culture (which was also his culture, Acts 21:20–26), but not to the extent of honoring such nationalism above his commitment to the Gentile mission (Acts 22:21–22). When Christians are more loyal to our ethnicity or nation than to Christ’s body, when nationalism or racism corrupts our love for fellow believers, we have gone beyond giving Caesar what is Caesar’s to giving Caesar what is God’s.
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When one employs a method of verifying miracles that insists that they be replicable in controlled settings, yet regards as natural and nonmiraculous any event that is so replicable, one has framed the method so as to secure the expected antisupernatural outcome.
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Spiritual mentors or peers who are mature in their relationship with God and whose present walk with God we trust can seek God with us and provide us with a sort of “safety net.” If we feel the Spirit is leading us to do something but recognize that much is at stake if we are wrong, we may do well to talk the matter over with other mature Christians. Proverbs advised rulers that wisdom rests in a multitude of counselors, and that advice remains valid for us as well. In the end, we may not always settle on the counsel others give us—like us, they too are fallible—but if they are diligent students of the Scriptures and persons of prayer, we should humbly consider their counsel.
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The Gospels often do connect faith with healings (Matt 8:10, 13; 9:2, 6–7, 22, 28–29; 15:28; Mark 2:5, 11–12; 5:34, 36; 9:23–24; 10:52; Luke 5:20, 24–25; 7:9; 8:48, 50; 17:19; 18:42; John 4:50; 11:40; cf. Mark 16:17–18; Acts 3:16; 14:9) or other answers to prayer (Mark 11:23–24; Matt 14:28–31; 21:21–22; Luke 17:6; cf. Mark 16:17–18), and sometimes shortage of healings due to a culture of disbelief (Mark 6:5–6; Matt 13:58; Luke 9:41) or Jesus’s agents’ disbelief (Matt 17:20; cf. Mark 9:29; Luke 9:41). (John more typically emphasizes basic faith following signs; John 1:50; 2:11, 23; 4:39, 48, 53; 7:31; 11:15, 42, 45, 48; 12:11; 14:29; 16:30; 20:30–31; cf. John 9:35–38; 10:25; Acts 13:12.)
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So pervasively has Enlightenment culture’s anti-supernaturalism affected the Western church, especially educated European and North American Christians, that most of us are suspicious of anything supernatural.
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Sure, sir, I will,” I promised, “but I just want to tell you first that Jesus loves you.”
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If the early Christian accounts of dramatic signs make these works seem foreign and foreboding to segments of modern Western academia, they are nevertheless welcome in many of the dynamic churches of Africa, Latin America, and Asia, which believe that they share their experiences.