After finally reading some N.T. Wright, I find that I can really appreciate his perspective.
The other day in LACI, we had a speaker discussing the trends that anthropologists and the like were noticing regarding the new generation. One of the big markers of the new generation is a desire for decompartmentalization and holisticness, as well as an increased spiritualism. N.T. Wright's writings on knowing the spiritual and historical Jesus seem to reflect the cries of the new generation. While he is not necessarily speaking to this generation, he is critiquing the typical separation of the historical and spiritual aspects of Jesus.
As our generation moves towards holistic understanding of things, less and less Christians (and non-Christians) are willing to accept Jesus in incompatible roles. What Wright tries to do in this article in the "Knowing Jesus: Faith and History" chapter is to encourage readers not to study Jesus in separate contexts, but to try and see how these contexts fit together to either reconcile discrepancies or to, at the very least (as often is the case with studying God) to wrestle with them.
I do not think that Wright is encouraging Borg's approach, however, as Borg seems to take the different facets of Jesus, and instead of wrestling and reconciling them, he just denies some. As I've previously said, this makes Jesus easier to be comfortable with, but Jesus isn't comfortable and putting him in a box doesn't help anyone.
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