I want everyone to read Duane Litfin’s great book “Conceiving the Christian College”. I’m so excited about this book, I just have to share. But I warn you, there are spoilers below!
Our University bought a copy of this book for every faculty member last Spring and it was the book that we discussed at our faculty retreat. Unfortunately, they brought in an outsider who didn’t understand the book very well and tried to negate some of Litfin’s points. About this attempt, I will borrow a phrase I often hear my theological hero in the Biblical and Theological Studies department here use: “there was a lot of rhetoric and no real content.”
In today’s blog, I will only deal with a few pages of Chapter 3.
The first two chapters of the book are the introduction and a description of the two academic models within Christian higher education. They are the Umbrella model and the Systemic model. That’s the easy part.
Litfin uses the phrase “Christ-centered education” throughout the book. This would be confusing if he didn’t spend a chapter telling us exactly what he means by “Christ”. What or who is the “Christ” around whom we are centering our education?
Christ: pre- and post-resurrection
In Chapter 3: “The Centerpiece: CHALLENGE To See More Fully Whom We Serve”, Litfin really begins to shine as an evangelical thinker. Some secularists reading the title of the chapter might be confused by something. It is natural for secularists to be confused by evangelical thinking since only through a knowledge of God is the veil taken away from one’s mind.
Their confusion may come from the statement, repeated often by Litfin, that we evangelicals serve Jesus Christ. Why would this confuse anyone? Well, some secularists have read the Bible (albeit with their hearts hardened). They notice that, before his resurrection, Jesus forbids his disciples to serve him (John 13) and rather insists that, if they want to enter the kingdom they must become poor, help the sick, and so on. Litfin handles this and most of the other little inconsistencies that might be pointed out by secularists very handily in this chapter.
Lesser evangelical thinkers simply avoid talking about what Jesus said and did before his resurrection and hope no one will notice. Litfin, on the other hand, attacks this problem head-on in Chapter 3. This is why evangelicals around the world need to read this book: so that they will have a well-reasoned answer to those secularists who notice when evangelical teaching and practice is opposed to that of the pre-resurrection Christ.
On pages 48 through 50 of the Eerdmans 2004 printing of the book, Litfin gives us a biblical basis for discounting, if not ignoring, the teachings and life-example of the pre-resurrection Jesus. Here is the outline of his argument.
Fact 1: The gospels never give us a physical description of Jesus.
Fact 2: The book of Revelation does give us a physical description of Jesus after his resurrection.
Conclusion: We cannot know and are not intended to know the pre-resurrection Jesus.
Well, now that I’ve given away his theologically and ethically freeing conclusion, I will go back and give Litfin credit by letting him explain the conclusion, and then the two facts on which the conclusion is based in his own words. My summary above is a joke compared to his words.
Conclusion:
…Jesus does not appear today the way he did in the Gospels. A theological watershed was crossed when the Father answered Jesus’ Upper Room prayer (John 17:1-5) by returning him to the glory he had with the Father before the world began. Within hours of praying this private prayer Jesus publicly announced, “From now on the Son of Man will be seated at the right hand of the power of God” (Luke 22:69). Thus the only Jesus we know, the only Jesus we have ever talked to, the Jesus we serve, is the Jesus after this prayer, not the Jesus before this prayer, the Jesus who is seated at the right hand of the Father. It is the same Jesus, to be sure, but the acknowledgment of this watershed theological event, this “from now on,” is nonetheless an important one for our own understanding of who it is we serve.
It may be no accident that the only fulsome description of Jesus we have in the Bible is that of the exalted Jesus of heaven. The impression begins to form that if anything, this is the way the Father wishes us to picture him…
Litfin lays the foundation for this conclusion with some important observations about the Bible:
Fact 1:
One way to assess our own understanding of these issues is by thinking about how we picture Jesus. On those occasions when we conjure up an image of Jesus, what does he look like? …
Yet every one of these renderings is merely the product of someone’s imagination. We do not know what Jesus looked like. It is perhaps startling to realize that, while we have four Gospels targeted on the person of Jesus Christ, each one designed to tell us what we need to know about him, not one of them provides a physical description of his appearance.
You see, while the gospels tell us “what we need to know about [Jesus]“, they don’t tell us what he looks like. This is the foundation of his argument. The reason the Gospels don’t tell us what Jesus looked like before his resurrection is that we don’t need to know. And if we don’t need to know what he looked like, then neither is it important what he said or did.
How embarrassing it would be to serve a Lord when the only thing you knew about his appearance was “merely the product of someone’s imagination”? Litfin reminds us evangelicals that we are not in this sad position. In order to remove any questions about the biblical foundation for this conclusion, Litfin quotes an extended passage from the first chapter of the book of Revelation to prove Fact 2:
I was in the Spirit on the Lord’s day, and I heard behind me a loud voice like a trumpet… Then I turned to see the voice that was speaking to me, and on turning I saw seven golden lampstands, and in the midst of the lampstands one like a son of man, clothed with a long robe and with a golden girdle round his breast; his head and his hair were white as white wool, white as snow; his eyes were like a flame of fine, his feet were like burnished bronze, refined as in a furnace, and his voice was like the sound of many waters; in his right hand he held seven stars, from his mouth issued a sharp two-edged sword, and his face was like the sun shining in full strength…
The book of Revelation goes on to give eye-witness descriptions (none of which are merely the product of someone’s imagination) of God (he looks like jasper and carnelian [Rev. 4.3]), the Devil (he looks like a red dragon with seven heads and ten horns, like a leopard with bear’s feet and a lion’s mouth [Rev. 12.3,9, and 13.2]), Jesus again (besides looking like a guy with a sword coming out of his mouth, he also looks like a dead lamb with seven horns and seven eyes [Rev. 5.6]), and all of the characters and events that are most important in our lives today and in the future.
Now that we have a sound biblical foundation for discounting or ignoring what Jesus said and did before his resurrection, we are left with the post-resurrection Christ as our Lord. At least now our Lord is something that we know all about and are not bound in our knowledge of him to biblical passages that tell us anything about him (other than that he has a sword coming out of his mouth).
The importance of the freedom that this gives evangelicals in developing our teachings and practice can not be overestimated.
As you read Litfin’s book, you must keep in mind that it is the Christ with the sword coming out of his mouth that is the center of his education and his theology.
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