I was listening to one of N.T. Wright’s series on Jesus (it is available on the N. T. Wright website) and he said that the typical view of Jesus is that he just randomly wanders around for 3 years ‘until it is time to die for the sins of the world.’ That was how I had always viewed Jesus – reading the gospels, you get that sense that he just drifts around, bumping into people, doing a miracle here, teaching the crowd there. Then at a certain point, it’s time to set his face toward Jerusalem.

N.T. Wright described Jesus’ ministry in a way that blew my mind. I also read a few articles and books by him on the same subject (The Challenge of Jesus and the longer multi-volume series Christian Origins and the Question of God, of which the first volume is The New Testament and the People of God). He put Jesus’ actions in a context that formed a coherent whole and depicted Jesus’ teachings in the context of what he was actually up to as the Jewish messiah. It made amazing sense. The parables, for example, instead of being obscure ways of teaching fairly trite moral lessons, became powerful polemics aimed at his contemporaries.

Another factor at this period was a comment made in a sermon that I heard, in which the speaker started out talking about where people might get advice for life’s problems – Oprah, Ann Landers, Dr. Ruth, or other so-called experts. But, he said, the teachings of Jesus are like no other. Jesus, his point was, is the ultimate teacher with good advice for living. In one of the cases that were quite common in that period, I went away with the opposite conclusion from that which the speaker desired. “No,” I thought to myself, “Jesus’ teachings about how to live are really quite obscure and have little to do with how you might address the troubles of life. In reality Ann Landers might be superior if you just need to know how to handle your in-laws or arrange your napkins.”

Wright’s description of Jesus’ teachings as in the context of his Jewish and Roman audience in the times in which he lived, made way more sense. Incidentally he might address certain ethical concerns, but those certainly did not seem to be the central focus of his output.

At the time we were going through an interminable series on one of the Gospels, where a tiny slice of the book is examined each week – an atomistic approach that totally loses any sense of the thread of the book. The approach taken was the mining of Jesus’ words for helpful hints on how to live, or you might call it principles for successful living, as the speaker had claimed. The particular mission that Jesus was on as the Jewish messiah seemed not to be a concern. In a desire for relevance to today’s world, perhaps, the goal became to make Jesus speak to our needs in the 21st Century.

This is the origin of my conclusion that preaching of this type, devoid of any theological framework, resembles classic liberalism. Jesus becomes a teacher and an example. The only difference might be that evangelicals might pay lip service to an ‘energizing’ effect of the relationship with Christ whereas Ritschl describes it with a different vocabulary. But they are quite similar in that Jesus is viewed as our model. As was claimed in a sample of this approach, God ‘energizes’ us for what is still our task to imitate the biblical model. The transformation that takes place in a relationship with him seems to be missing from this type of approach.

It seemed to me that the cross seems to be missing. Some essential and critical element that was at the heart of the gospel had been lost.