The old liberals all wanted to reduce Jesus Christ to something a little more palatable to their own prejudices and presuppositions about piety and religion. The tweedy university professors all took their swing at remaking Jesus into a pattern they preferred. They deconstructed Him and reconstructed Him with all their academic brilliance and skill. What did the reconstruction look like? Lo and behold, He looked like a tweedy professor; just like them. They had proved Schopenhauer correct that our view of divinity is merely a projection of ourselves. The Jesus the professors projected became a proponent of social justice, an activist for tolerance, and a supporter of the climate change theory, gay marriage, or whatever the most recent politically correct mania might be (it is something of a moving target).

These cultured despisers of our faith were doing everything they could to remove the offensive aspects of the life and ministry of Jesus of Nazareth, so that they could piously speak of Jesus, but in such a way that they would not suffer the ridicule of the world. His death by crucifixion was ignored or at best heralded as a sacrificial act worthy of our emulation. They failed to speak of that one death as the bloody atonement for the sin of the world. They declined to mention that He came not to be merely emulated but to serve us sinners by His substitutionary atonement. They refused to laud the divine plan that called for God to die on the cross. They mocked the idea that His incarnation had as its goal his sacrificial death. No, their Christ was much more sedate and wise; he was a philosopher king, a faculty doyen, and a deep thinker. Certainly not a lamb led to the slaughter for sinners.

Then what is all the fuss about Christianity? Why then do Jesus and His Apostle Paul both warn that there will be persecution for those who profess Him? Why do the wise of the world desire to portray Him as a buffoon who died an accidental, if tragic, death? If He is a man like other men, what then is offensive about His ministry? If He is but a kindly professor patiently teaching ethics to the poor benighted peasants of first-century Palestine, why were his followers so viciously persecuted? And why were those same followers willing to be torn apart by wild animals rather than abjure His name? No, the offense of the cross is not in the cross itself, for the cross has devoured thousands of victims over the centuries of man's inhumanity to man. The offense of the cross is that these things were done to God and that He suffered them to be done to Him (Jn 12:16). The offense of the cross is that God in Christ had these things done to Him in our place. The tweedy professor's Jesus is an offense because he creates none.

John Cassian