Much of we what we learn about Christ comes from the communities in which we worship and the traditions of interpretation and emphasis behind those communities. Though we say we learn truth from the Bible alone, our actual doctrines usually come from other human beings. And this way of learning is not necessarily wrong.

But in time, believers find their assumptions about the gospel challenged. I know many former charismatics who question the mysticism they grew up with, former Baptists who bristle at the legalism of their parents, and former megachurch attenders who have grown weary of the showmanship they used to admire. Such believers find their assumptions threatened by spiritual failures, family struggles, and church conflicts. They either revise their understanding of the gospel or they give up on Christianity.

These crises are often healthy. No community of believers has everything solved, and learning your community's shortcomings can help you grow in Christ. We need to be disillusioned now and then.

But there's potential for a wild goose chase. The crises inevitably raise the question, "What caused my faith to go wrong?"

Believers can search endlessly. The Baptist thumbs through his Bible to rediscover grace-but ends up arguing in his head with the authority figures from his youth. The megachurch refugee knocks on doors until she finds a human-proportioned body of believers. But that body proves not be as caring as she had hoped.

This search for The Problem With Christians Today can be exciting, but yields little. No reform ever quite solves The Problem, and the search often reduces to criticizing the people you hung around during your different phases.

Brian McLaren records his own journey through various communities of faith in a chapter of A Generous Orthodoxy called, "The Seven Jesuses I Have Known" (pp 43-89). He gives us a tour of how Jesus is portrayed by different traditions-which parts of Jesus' ministry they emphasize, which teachings they embrace, which they overlook. His discoveries seem to avoid the wild goose chase of hunting for The Problem.

"The Conservative Protestant Jesus" came to die, says McLaren, to save people from hell. But that's pretty much it. "The Pentecostal/Charismatic Jesus" is "up close, present, and dramatically involved in daily life," but tends to make people proud of their advancement in spiritual experience. "The Roman Catholic Jesus" rises from the dead, and so defeats everything associated with death.

McLaren says that by his mid-20s, he had incorporated all three of these views into his understanding of Jesus. He believed that "each was a new facet, a new dimension, of the Jesus I had met as a child." He proceeds through the visions of the eastern orthodox, the liberal protestants, the anabaptists, and the revolutionaries. He talks persuasively about these communities because he's interacted with each of them directly.

The trouble is that McLaren seems to have come away from his journey with mere snapshots. His criticisms of the Jesus of this or that tradition are mostly oversimplifications (the evangelical Jesus only dies). Even when he praises a tradition, his comments are too often trite and sentimentalized. For instance: "If the Evangelical Jesus saves by dying, the Pentecostal Jesus by sending his Spirit, and the Catholic Jesus by rising from death, the Eastern Orthodox Jesus saves simply by being born, by showing up, by coming among us."

That's like a Hallmark card from Emperor Constantine. Whatever credibility McLaren gains by his generosity, he loses more by his dilettantism.

Our communities can teach good lessons too well. We cannot stop learning, or else the truths we've already learned will make us lame. Other traditions within Christianity serve to remind us that the Bible has unfamiliar passages just as worthy of our devotion as the familiar ones.

I fear McLaren doesn't make this kind of point at all. If orthodoxy is ultimately unknowable and all traditions merely approximate what lies unreachable in God's mind, then his tour of traditions is a revelation of truth in itself.

Which leaves us at the mercy of Brian McLaren's sentiments.