Eric Miller of Geneva College takes a quick survey of some recent books on the Jesus issue in Christianity Today – from Marcus Borg to Craig Evans. That is, from the Jesus Seminar gestalt to refutations of same.

Not surprisingly, it is a pastoral burden that drives many Jesus writers, the desire not to clear away scholarly debris so much as to recover Jesus as a touchstone—the one, the only one, capable of correcting our error and folly, of restoring our lost identity. If our understanding of Jesus is our most important measure, then much hangs on the quality of that understanding. CT managing editor Mark Galli, in Jesus Mean and Wild (Baker), reacts against contemporary conceptions of a "kind, benevolent being who knows nothing of discipline, character, or tough love." Could this image possibly square with the Gospel accounts of Christ? On pages alleged to abound with sweetness and light, Galli finds "a tornado touching down, lifting homes and businesses off their foundations, leaving only bits and pieces of the former life strewn on his path." So much for Jesus meek and mild. So much for our cheery, pluralistic faith.

For his part, pastor-scholar John Piper unveils a Christ whose authority forces us to stand and salute—or weep and kneel down. "Jesus is not a tribal deity," he reminds us in What Jesus Demands from the World (Crossway). "All authority in the universe is his; all creation owes its allegiance to him." This is a Jesus who doesn’t roam the pages of the Gospels—he haunts them, with an authority that hits people like an arctic blast, freezing them to a standstill, snapping their heads around. The parade of folk in Matthew 8, for example—the leprous, the infirm, the ill, a Roman officer, would-be disciples, demons, even the elements—treat him, remarkably, as if he is, indeed, the one in whom all things consist. No wonder that chapter closes with a "whole town" assembling to "plead with him to leave their region."

If Piper and Galli are right, it’s this voice, with an authority strangely divine and strangely human, that we outrageously free postmoderns must finally confront, whether we wish to or not. We, mere creatures who consist only in Christ, have no choice in this matter—no "freedom" to ignore Christ, whatever our national constitutions or political philosophies may proclaim.

The contrast of this Christ to the Jesus of our times, the Jesus of Marcus Borg, could not be more stark.

No mention of the current best-selling treatment of Jesus. Yeah, that one.

Now, you can say, "Oh, silly, CT is Protestant. Well, sure. But the thing is in comparable treatments of the issue from the Catholic end (which would be hard to identify, since there is no publication comparable to CT in terms of circulation or informal authority on the RC side – and yes, I know a lot of evangelicals have no truck with CT.) …you will not find a blackout of treatments of the issue from Protestant scholars and theologians. Heck, if you did, no one would have anything to say, particularly in terms of Scripture scholarship related to Jesus and the popularizing thereof. (I’m in the midst of reading the Evans and the Bauckham myself. Actually, I think I finished the Evans, since I knew most of it and was reading to see how he treated and organized the material. The Bauckham is original scholarship so it’s a slower read.)

So even though The Pope would give some heebie-jeebies and worse, and the Pope’s treatment is grounded in a different sense of church, I have to say it strikes me as a failure of nerve for Protestant treatments of this issue for a popular audience to ignore what one of the foremost living Christian theologians has to say about Jesus in a globally best-selling book, a book that is also "driven by a pastoral burden," quite explicitly.