John Piper, (2006) What Jesus Demands from the World, Wheaton, IL: Crossway BooksJohn Piper is the pastor for reaching and vision at Bethlehem Baptist Church in Minneapolis. Recently he received a gift of a five-month sabbatical from his church for serving as pastor in the church for 25 years. He spent the sabbatical in Tyndale House in Cambridge, England. Tyndale House with its excellent library resources and community of scholars and pastors is an excellent place to be. John used his time there fruitfully and wrote this excellent book on what Jesus demands from the world.
John is conscious that he is contributing to the ongoing quest for an authentic historical Jesus debate. He is aware that there have been three Quests for the Historical Jesus. Numerous scholars have tried to redefine our understanding of who Jesus is by using the most modern scholarship tools.
The first Quest period was arbitrarily started by Benedict Spinoza (1632-16770), Herman Raimrus (1694-1768), David Friedrich Strauss (1808-1874), William Wrede (1859-1906) and ended with Albert Schweitzer (1875-1965). This ‘quest’ collapsed under its own weight as they realize that the reconstructed historical Jesus is not ‘the biblical Christ.’
The second Quest for the historical Jesus started in 1953 by Ernest Kasemann, a student of Rudolf Bultmann. However this second quest was heavily influenced by the social and psychological theories of the time. The reconstructed Jesus appears as an existential political figure (Milan Machovec) or as ‘collective process of consciousness’ (Niderwimmer).
The third Quest begins in the 1980s. Ben Witherington III observes that scholars involved in this third Quest are all in a hurry to say something ‘new,’ another product of our modern society where new gimmicks sells.
John Piper comes to the conclusion that “The growing conviction in me is that life is too short and the church is too precious for a minister of the Word to spend his life trying to recreate a conjectured Jesus.” (p32) To him, all that is required to know the real Jesus can be found in the four Gospels. That is truly a revolutionary yet simple statement. This he set forth in this book by revealing the real Jesus in terms of the demands or commands he gave to his disciples to observe and teach (Matt. 28:19-20). He resolved to use only materials from the four Gospels.
In this book, he has summarized the hundreds of Jesus’ commands into 50 and these are worth studying. Each demand is in a short chapter and hence can be used as a daily devotion.
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