This is the final installment of an interview series with Craig Keener, who is a professor of biblical studies at Asbury Seminary in Wilmore, Kentucky, as well as, the current president of the Evangelical Theological Society.
JR: Go ahead and tell us about George Ladd's influence on you. I know readers will be fascinated.
CK: Thanks for asking me that question that I sort of hinted that you should ask me (smile). The
George Eldon Ladd
eschatology issue that attracted me to Gordon Fee also attracted me to George Ladd, and a bit earlier. From another part of my testimony, you may rightly gather that I was initially suspicious of scholars, my freshman year in Bible college. Yet I noticed that it was scholars (rather, a particular group of them) who were pointing out the same things I saw in Scripture itself, in contrast to their critics. Thus I decided that perhaps scholarship might also be a good thing. I had also felt led to take Greek and Hebrew starting my freshman year, though I had not yet seen the connection with scholarship.
There were a few other evangelical scholars talked about at our school, such as F. F. Bruce and I. Howard Marshall. But George Ladd's books were widely available at that time, and I devoured them. I never met him, but I later heard descriptions of him from those that knew him. One told me how he (Ladd) grieved whenever he heard what he felt was bad exegesis. I can identify with that! It sounds to me like he faced so much criticism, saying things that contradicted both secular scholarship and popular evangelical ideas, that he was personally wounded, though he kept saying what he believed was right. I believe that God really raised him up, and he could not have known the wide impact he has had on scholarship of all stripes, including even in circles once dominated by his critics. When the criticisms come hard, I need to remember his example; it is not about popularity, but about faithfulness to God's call and the foundations that lays for the future.
One of those foundations was obvious in his work on the kingdom: Jesus not only proclaimed God's reign; He demonstrated it by healing the sick and casting out demons. Now I don't know where he stood personally on expecting such signs today, but his theology does not easily fit cessationism. One of our professors, who was pre-tribulational and I think not happy that so many of us liked Ladd, pointed out that he had been at Harvard with Ladd decades earlier and Ladd was anti-Pentecostal. I don't know if this professor had had some unexpected influence on Ladd, or if it was simply his exegesis or something else, but Ladd's published work on the kingdom puts signs and wonders in their biblical place so well that his work was not at all anti-Pentecostal.
If the Kingdom is already/not yet, and the kingdom is demonstrated by healings and exorcisms in the Gospels and Acts, and if you do not hold to a dispensational schema, then the kingdom should be demonstrated in healings and exorcisms today as well. John Wimber, provoked by reports of what was happening in evangelism in other parts of the world, agreed with Ladd's theology and simply started putting it into practice, as a practitioner. This in turn shaped both the early Vineyard movement and, if I'm not mistaken, the New Wine renewal within the British Anglican church. It offers one of the sound, biblical models for Pentecostal/charismatic experience and theology today, keeping us centered on Christ and the kingdom. As a good biblical scholar, Ladd gave us important foundations. He took a lot of criticism and did not live to see all of the fruit of his ministry, but God used him greatly. When discouragement with my task overwhelms me, Ladd's example (and that of other evangelical scholars who paved the way for us today) encourages me as a biblical scholar to stay faithful to Scripture and not be moved (at least try not to be).
JR: Thank you for your time, Craig, and for being faithful to the ministry the Lord has given you. That ministry has blessed many.
In 2019, Craig published a massive commentary on Galatians. The nine-minute video below gives viewers a walk through the commentary.
This is the fifth part of an interview series with Craig Keener, who is a professor of biblical studies at Asbury Seminary in Wilmore, Kentucky, as well as, the current president of the Evangelical Theological Society. A new post in the series appears every Saturday.
JR:Knowing that you have great admiration for Gordon Fee (as I do, as well), I can't let this interview close without giving you an opportunity to explain what Dr. Fee has meant to you.
CK: When I was an undergraduate, three people most influenced me toward scholarship: Gordon Fee, Ben Aker and George Eldon Ladd (two Pentecostals and an evangelical whose theology of the kingdom informs the Vineyard movement). Ladd was extremely influential on me (through his writings), and I doubt that I would have become a scholar without his influence as well as that of the other two. Nevertheless, given the main issue at hand in this interview, I will focus on Gordon - and, if you permit me, Ben.
I had been an atheist since at least age nine until my conversion, and had connected that posture to my other intellectual pursuits. After I was converted through an encounter with Christ, I initially viewed my mind as an idol and tried to suppress it while I let the church teach me. Unfortunately for that plan, as I was reading the Bible I kept noticing conflicts with what I was being taught, and having questions about what I was reading in the Bible. It was actually in my charismatic experiences with the Spirit that I began to hear God teaching me that I should use my mind. It was not my god, but a tool I could use in serving God. I still had all my unsettled questions left over from atheism that I then had to confront, which was a painful and lengthy process.
Ben Aker
I had enrolled at Central Bible College in Springfield, Missouri, and one of my teachers was Ben Aker. I heard some prosperity-teaching-oriented students complain that Ben Aker just cared about the Bible, whereas real people of faith ought to be able to see the sick healed. (I later learned that my professors' rate of people being healed was comparable to that of the prosperity teachers.) So I was praying for Ben Aker that God would convict him, when suddenly the Holy Spirit convicted me instead. "I have given him the gift of teaching," I felt the Lord say, "and you need to listen to him." I signed up for three classes with Ben Aker the next semester. Things that God would teach me in prayer, I would hear from Ben's exegesis the next week in class. I realized that one could hear God exegetically as well as charismatically, and learned from the Scripture that the Spirit is behind both ways.
I had planned to attend Bible college for two years, then go out and preach, since God had called me to minister in His Word. But toward the end of those two years, I felt increasingly drawn to the example I saw in Ben Aker: a ministry of the Word that equipped other ministers of the Word. As I kept praying, I felt increasingly this direction in my calling, and felt that I should finish college. If I had known that the Lord was going to lead me through seminary and a Ph.D. after that, I might have balked! (But He did pay for it, though I needed to live very simply.)
Gordon Fee was about the only model we had for Pentecostal scholarship in the wider world that we
had at the time. We had Pentecostal scholars who had given their whole lives to the Pentecostal movement, so we could have the opportunities we had in Bible college. But as far as an example of an open Pentecostal who was making a difference in larger evangelical and mainstream scholarship, Gordon Fee was the only one we knew of. Some people did not appreciate Gordon's determination to grapple with Scripture honestly in the larger academy, and one particularly dogmatic teacher was heard to denounce him as a "heretic." Once we heard that, those of us who were annoyed by that particular teacher's ranting against honest exegesis found Gordon Fee's New Testament survey tapes in our library. I listened to them over and over, taking notes more copiously than I could have if he were my professor.
One of my pet peeves at the school was that those who could voice their views publicly were pretribulational. With all due respect to those that disagree, including close friends of mine, I couldn't see it. I had tried to believe it, but as I kept reading Scripture it became clear to me that every single text used to support that teaching was out of context. An evangelist browbeat me into believing it as a young Christian, around 1976 or so. I answered every text he give me with its context, but exasperated, he finally warned me that all men of God, like Jim Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart, were pretrib, and I had been a Christian for just a year. Who did I think I was? I reluctantly conceded his point, but a few months later learned that no one until 1830 had even heard of the doctrine, so most men and women of God through history, as well as many today, did NOT believe the doctrine. That was a turning point in my life: I decided never to believe what someone told me the Bible said without honestly grappling with it myself. The Bible's authority was not just a doctrine to be placed alongside our other doctrines: it was the source for all true doctrine.
When I was going through Gordon Fee's tapes, he declared that someone who asserted that the church would not go through the tribulation had simply never read the New Testament. Because that was such an issue in my environment, I gravitated toward Gordon and toward Ladd's books, because I felt that they would do honest exegesis no matter what the popular opinion was. If my calling was to call believers back to Scripture, then that has to mean Scripture over denominational tradition, as well as Scripture over culture (a problem in some liberal churches) and over experience (a problem in some charismatic churches).
A lot of our graduates were going off to Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary to study with Gordon; I could not afford the move at the time, so I stayed, and Gordon soon left for Regent College anyway. It was only years later, while I was doing my doctoral work at Duke and he came to speak in the area, that I was able to meet him in person and tell him what his example meant to me. In subsequent years I have gotten to know him better in person. When he mentored me, however, it was not in person (like Ben Aker) or through his books (like George Ladd). It was, amazingly enough, through his New Testament survey tapes in our library, which circulated like contraband in defiance of an overly dogmatic professor's criticisms. I guess that should be an encouragement to us that if we are faithful to what God has called us to do, He is able to make a difference through us for the kingdom even in ways we cannot yet see.
Next week, in the concluding segment of this interview, Craig elaborates on the influence of George Eldon Ladd.
This is the fourth part of an interview series with Craig Keener, who is a professor of biblical studies at Asbury Seminary in Wilmore, Kentucky, as well as, the current president of the Evangelical Theological Society. A new post in the series appears every Saturday.
JR: Tell us about some of your ministry experiences in Republic of Congo, the home country of your wife, Medine.
CK: Ministry went well but I personally learned a lot more from those doing ministry there.
Let me tell one story, about Mama Jeanne. Because she prays for us regularly, my brother-in-law said she wanted to meet with us. We went to the tin structure outside her home where she meets with people much of the day to pray for their needs. She is not a pastor, but is a deacon in one of the local evangelical churches. (Although the "evangelical church" is the country's mainline Protestant church and is not Pentecostal, there is great openness to any of God's activities in Scripture.) Mama Jeanne prayed for us and began to prophesy at length, and what she shared about my work was deeply encouraging to me. When we were parting I told her I have always had very high respect for prophetesses. She responded very humbly.
A few days later we returned, because I was collecting some healing testimonies for a book that I was writing, and my brother-in-law assured me that Mama Jeanne had some. This humble woman began to narrate various healings in a matter-of-fact way (as if to say, who wouldn't expect Jesus to heal people?), including three people raised from the dead directly through her prayers. (In one case, there was someone in the room who was present at the time and could verify the story; my brother-in-law knew some other people in her stories.) I was dumbfounded. "Mama Jeanne, if I write these stories in this book, you will have people from the U. S. wanting have you pray for them!" She broke up laughing and pointing to an old picture of Jesus on her wall. "It's just Jesus!" she said. In other words, Jesus is the same in the U. S. as he is in Congo.
As I have said about the other questions, I have a lot of growing to do. Some of my fellow charismatics may think, "Keener is a charismatic scholar; that's great." But Keener has a long way to go in the Spirit. I thank God for giving us examples like Mama Jeanne.
J. P. Moreland, from the Talbot School of Theology, says of Miracles, "Seldom does a book take one's breath away, but Keener's magisterial Miracles is such a book. It is an extremely sophisticated, completely thorough treatment of its subject matter, and, in my opinion, it is now the best text available on the topic. The uniqueness of Keener's treatment lies in his location of the biblical miracles in the trajectory of ongoing, documented miracles in the name of Jesus and his kingdom throughout church history, up to and including the present. From now on, no one who deals with the credibility of biblical miracles can do so responsibly without interacting with this book."
In the video below, Keener gives a talk on miracles during a chapel service at Biola University's Talbot School of Theology.
This is the third part of an interview series with Craig Keener, who is a professor of biblical studies at Asbury Seminary in Wilmore, Kentucky, as well as, the current president of the Evangelical Theological Society. A new post in the series appears every Saturday.
JR: You have also written more slender commentaries. Given your proclivity to thoroughness, is that type of writing somewhat frustrating for you?
CK: The smaller Matthew commentary I wrote was frustrating for me because I had to leave so much out - that is why I wrote the bigger one for Eerdmans. Because it started that way, it did keep it from being as big as it might have been otherwise. I think the bigger one for Eerdmans uses over 10,000 resources from ancient sources besides the Bible, and the John commentary uses about 12,000 (a bit more or less, depending on whether one counts the Apocrypha as extrabiblical - smile). The Revelation commentary was a bigger frustration - I wanted to put in enough that I would not have to write another scholarly commentary later. Some material was cut in the notes, and it tempted me to write a scholarly one later (though I think it has enough background material to satisfy most readers, and I can probably live with it).
But I am also old enough now to realize in cannot do everything I once dreamed of doing. I have so much material that I wanted to write on the entire New Testament - and be done by 40. I didn't realize that even if one is sitting on mounds of information, it still takes time to write a good commentary, and then one has to proofread, plus check the editor's proofreading, plus do indexing. The John commentary took about 3 - 4 months of 60-hour weeks just for indexing, and sleep was very difficult once I started dreaming about indexing at night!
After all that, shorter commentaries become somewhat more appealing, and I will probably do some more of them in the future. For awhile now my friend Ben Witherington has been suggesting that I move in that direction, and it's no coincidence that I wrote my most concise commentary (on 1 - 2 Corinthians) for his series. I had to choose judiciously among my information, using maybe one-tenth to one-seventh of my sources. What I discovered, though, was that if I didn't try to do everything, I could write a commentary informed by ancient sources in a few months. I hoped to do a scholarly commentary on 1 Corinthians some day, so I didn't feel like my readers we missing out too much.
Encouraged that I might realistically finish publishing my notes on the NT and might be able to retire and go back to some other form of ministry, I calculated how long it would take me to finish the NT if I did short volumes. It still looked like it would take me until I was 70 at that rate, so I have narrowed my focus regarding which books I'll write commentaries on. The big thing is that life is too short to duplicate someone else's effort (if I can't offer something significant that isn't already offered, I'll just recommend what is already offered). So whether a commentary is short or long, I want to offer some fresh material that readers wouldn't likely get on their own. Even in the short 1 - 2 Corinthians commentary, I was able to illumine a lot of turns of phrase in Paul's letters from other ancient letters and various other sources.
There is so much to do and my heart burns for God's Word. I am also aware that many brothers and sisters would have loved to do what I am doing, but the doors were not open to them. For many years as I went through college, seminary and doctoral work I did not know where the money would come from; God supplied my needs. He did the miracles I needed at all the decisive moments, or I would not have the opportunity to do what I am doing now. Because I know that God blessed me to do what I love so much - handling His Word - I feel keenly the responsibility to do my best. I try to be diligent in providing as much of this work as I can to the rest of the body of Christ. That is the main reason God gives us gifts in the body of Christ - to use us as conduits of His blessing to others.
I know that many people pray for their pastors and for prominent ministers of the Word. I hope people will not forget to pray for us scholars, too. We need God's leading and God's blessing.
In addition to writing his Revelation commentary for Zondervan, Craig has also recorded 22 lectures on Revelation for that publishing company. They are available as part of the Master Lectures streaming service offered by Zondervan Academic. In the video below, you can see Craig introduce the course.
This is the second part of an interview series with Craig Keener, who is a professor of biblical studies at Asbury Seminary in Wilmore, Kentucky, as well as, the current president of the Evangelical Theological Society. A new post in the series appears every Saturday.
JR: In his New Testament Commentary Survey, Donald Carson gives your large commentaries on Matthew and John his laudatory, "Best Buy," designation. He says the Matthew commentary "in some respects sets new standards" and praises your commentary on John because "the breadth of learning and the bibliographic richness combine to make the work indispensable for the serious student."
However, he does note that in the Matthew commentary "Keener's focus on the socio-historical context comes at the expense of penetrating comment on structure, grammar, and sometimes theology."
Was it simply the case that a commentary can only be so big?
CK: Yes, keeping a commentary from getting too big is a major issue.
I am very grateful to Don Carson for his kind comments about the commentaries. His criticism is a fair one. I don't deal in detail with some of these other issues, especially the grammar and structure (I do deal with theology, but usually as concisely as possible. Sometimes, especially in the Matthew commentary, I was so concise that I was simply citing other passages where the theme recurs.) The reason is to keep the commentary from being too large, and because there are some things I trust a reader can and should get on their own.
If someone loves the Bible, they will read it in context and not take shortcuts. I deal with the passage in
Dr. Craig Keener
its context but I also assume that the reader will examine its context on their own, and come up with their own sermon from the biblical text, etc. If they don't love the Bible, a commentary can't really help them. (I could write sermons for them, but so could 100,000 other people, and there are other commentaries that can do that.)
Likewise, regarding grammar: if you have a laptop with a good Bible program it can parse the Greek and Hebrew verbs for you and even tell you everywhere those terms occur in that tense elsewhere in Scripture. Plenty of commentaries do that, and there's no need for me to make the commentary longer (and make my publisher charge more for the cost of paper) for something your computer can do for you even more conveniently.
What I can give is background that you wouldn't get unless you spent a couple of decades working through ancient texts. I didn't get from using a concordance of ancient literature seeing where the terms occurred. I got it from reading through ancient sources in context and looking for parallel ideas, not just parallel terms. No concordance can do that. So I wanted focus on what people could not afford the time to dig out if I didn't make it available to them.
My heart has been in ministry - in evangelism, in encouraging the hurting, and so on. I could not justify all the time spent in front of my computer if I didn't know I was providing something new. There are other resources providing other things and I would rather recommend them than reinvent the wheel.
One of Craig's publishers, Zondervan, has produced a substantive and professionally-presented video interview with him. It is 21 minutes long and can be viewed below.
Craig Keener is one of the premier New Testament commentators today and is going to be featured for
Craig and his wife Medine
the next six Saturdays in an interview that covers his scholarship, as well as, scholars who have influenced him.
He is a professor at Asbury Seminary and also the current president of the Evangelical Theological Society.
In his book Gift & Giver: The Holy Spirit for Today, Craig writes, "I have been miraculously healed, experienced supernatural gifts such as prophecy, followed the Spirit's leading in witnessing, and had deep experiences in the Spirit during prayer (including, regularly, prayer in tongues)."
Among the many books he has published is the widely-acclaimed, Acts: An Exegetical Commentary. That's where we begin this interview series.
JR: Craig, what should a 21st-century reader make of the speeches in the Book of Acts, especially an elongated one like Stephen's?
CK: You have deliberately highlighted a big debate in Acts scholarship. (I wish you would have asked me a good Pentecostal question about tongues in Acts, or healing - smile.)
I spend a few chapters of the introduction establishing that Acts is a work of ancient historiography and showing what ancient historiography was. It was of course similar in many respects to the way we write history today, but different. (There were also different kinds of ancient historiography. The elite historians often spiced things up rhetorically - Josephus does that a lot. But no rhetorical historian would have speeches as short as most of those we find in Acts.)
One difference between ancient and modern historiography is that we want to narrate only clear information, whereas they wanted to really NARRATE their information, to tell a good story. That means that some historians took their genuine information about events and fleshed out scenes. If a historian knew that a speech occurred on an occasion, and something of what the speech was about, the historian would not normally say something like, "Themistocles advised that they build some ships." They would be more likely to flesh out the speech based on both their direct information and their indirect information, that is, what they could infer that he would have said based on what else they knew. Some historians were more careful with speech material more than others (some, in fact, mostly plagiarized earlier historians!) But whereas you can use the genre of Acts to say, "Since this is historiography, Luke reports genuine events," you can't so easily extrapolate from the genre for the speeches.
In fact, Luke does not flesh out the speeches much; most are pretty concise by ancient standards. There are many points where I think we can say Luke knew what was going on in the speeches. In Acts 20, where Luke was likely present in person, I found signs that Luke has condensed what must have been a longer speech (some implicit connections to a particular biblical passage, for example, that Luke never makes explicit). At the same time, no one claims that these speeches are verbatim. Even at the end of Peter's speech in Acts 2, Luke says, "and with many other words" Peter exhorted them. In other words, Luke has selected from the speech; he edits them to make part of his larger work. Everyone expected historians to do that. Also, they didn't have much choice in any case; they had to work with what was remembered of the speeches, or of the kinds of things that the speaker or speakers were known to have said. No one had tape recordings or verbatim transcripts to work from.
So we hear in the speeches both the voice of the speaker and the voice of the inspired writer weaving together common gospel themes in these speeches in the Book of Acts. We can learn from the theology on a couple levels. Since my commentary is on Acts itself, my interest is especially in Luke's theological level, but because of the work's historical genre, I believe that he also invites us to hear the voice of the apostolic church.
I have just summarized about 60 pages of material in a few paragraphs and hopefully not done it too much injustice. But you might want to add the editorial comment regarding my Acts commentary, "and with many other words" he spoke (smile).
If you're a more visual learner, Craig has prepared a 23-lecture series that can be viewed on YouTube. For your convenience, the first lecture can be viewed here:
