My wife bought me this book for my birthday. It’s the second time she’s bought me a good book about the family of a noted New Testament Scholar, and both times it was an excellent gift. (The other was DA Carson’s book about his Dad, Memoirs of an Ordinary Pastor.) It seems to be an unexpected and emerging genre among conservative evangelical Bible scholars, and I like it. It’s right to get to know a scholar’s life and family as I learn to trust the quality of his research more. See e.g., 1 Thes. 2:8.
We became keenly aware of Craig Keener when his 2 volume book Miracles came out. There was an article about his book and his marriage in Christianity Today. Though I haven’t completed reading the Miracles book yet, I began thinking of Keener as perhaps the best researcher I’ve ever read. I was reading sections of Miracles to prepare to preach about Acts 3 this past Sunday. It struck me that whenever God heals a body, in the Bible, he also heals a broken heart. So reading this Love book about Keener’s divorce, heartbreak, loneliness, and remarriage gave a very interesting angle to his more academic work on the subject of healing. The book also tells about how the door finally opened for him to marry Médine right at the same time as Keener’s body suffered a breakdown from overwork and exhaustion. I’ve long thought that New Testament scholars must work themselves to the bone, and wondered at what must have gone into Keener’s finished works.
Craig Keener shows his heart for God, seeking him diligently through prayer and fasting, his openness to the Holy Spirit, hearing his voice distinctly, and his devotion to serving the church through his Bible research. Earlier in the book, he shows his zeal to share the knowledge of Jesus with people through street evangelism, often in some very rough neighbourhoods. There is one point where the reader wonders whether it is better to be in war-torn Congo where Médine’s life is in danger, or in the drug-infested ghetto where Craig is living at the same point in the story, in Missouri.
Basically the second half of the book is the story of Médine and her family’s long effort to stay clear of civil war in Congo (Congo Brazzaville, not the DRC). Over and over, God answers prayers and provides healing and escape for them, but the suffering is acute. Near the end of it, they are so malnourished that her hair and fingernails are falling out. She was pregnant and then nursing as a refugee, and she points out how Jesus himself warned of the terrible difficulty of being a pregnant or nursing refugee, in Matt. 24:19.
The good Christian character of Médine’s elderly father shines brightly throughout her story.
The charismatic gift of prophecy is exercised over and over throughout the book. It’s interesting that there are times when Craig bemoans how bad it is when the gift is not used in a mature way. However, this particular gift delivers from danger and death over and over throughout the story. It makes me want to seek God more, and at least to be more attuned to His still small voice.
Near the end of the book, there is a concise statement about the place miracles and healing do have in our age: “Miracles are a wonderful foretaste of the future Kingdom, but they are merely a sample, sparks of the future. They are not meant to be a panacea for all the world’s sufferings. What goes deeper than miracles is the mystery of the cross. That God can transform this harshest of tragedies, this epitome of brutal human injustice, reminds us that He has a plan even in the heart of suffering. Even the climax of the world’s rebellion against Him does not nullify his plan. If God can be found even in the cross — indeed, especially there — then we can trust God’s plan for us in our own stories, even if they are filled with deep pain and brokenness.” pp. 230-231
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