It is a distinctive aspect of Christianity (as I understand it) that Jesus was an historical person, who changed the world - such that things were qualitatively different after Jesus than before.
Being located in history, Christianity is a religion that has a time-line. For Christians, time is quite naturally understood as sequential - before Christ; his life and death, and what came after.
This is why I find fundamentally wrong the long-standing, classical and mainstream theology, desire to make Christianity into a quasi-Platonic spirituality, rooted-in a God conceived to exist in timeless/ out-of-time eternity.
However necessarily historical, Christianity is also about the living and future Jesus Christ. This is expressed in many ways - but the essential point is that Jesus is alive and active in this world; and can be felt by those who follow him as a daily, hourly, influence, guidance, inspiration.
The historical and living Jesus have mostly been combined by practices like Holy Communion (whether as re-enactment or as memorial), reading the Gospels, reflecting on the life and teachings of Jesus, and by iconography and symbolism.
But all these share the primarily backward-looking perspective: the living Jesus is experienced by first attending to the historical Jesus. Whatever the subsequence experience, this is to regard Jesus at one remove, the present seen through the past.
And therefore all these share the disadvantage of requiring assertions about the past, which have by 2021 become extremely clouded by a vast accretion of rival interpretations - whether theological, traditional, scholarly, or whatever...
My conviction is that from here and now we need to strive for a contact with the living Jesus Christ that is primarily direct, and therefore independent of the historical evidence and theories.
Having established such primary, direct, living contact; it can (and for most people will) be strengthened and enriched secondarily with whatever is found valuable - and this is where scriptures, churches, and the vast mass of practices, symbolism and art through the ages may come-in.
But some will probably find that many or most of these referents of the historical Jesus are unhelpful or counterproductive; and certainly a primary focus on the historical Jesus can be very off-putting to the prospective convert, for whatever reason - anything from personal or aesthetic preferences to socio-political prejudices; or simply from the confusing and disorientating morass of controversy that surrounds every statement.
The search for Jesus Christ has thereby, I feel convinced, become an unprecedently personal and experiential matter. As such, there is always the danger that Jesus will simply be invented to support pre-existent socio-political assumptions.
Yet nowadays this is less of a problem than ever before; since the evil of the mainstream, official and dominant socio-political assumptions is so extreme and separate from that Good which we know by inner intuition of our divine selves and from direct contact with Jesus Christ (by the Holy Ghost); that confusion and conflation by a sincere, truth-seeking and virtuous spirit is ever less likely, with each passing month.
Also, the kind of person who wants a Jesus to fit and sustain the assumptions of this modern world is not likely to want Jesus very much; except as an expedient pseudo-belief to support a job or position: that is, as a religious leader. And we observe that Christian leaders (as with leaders of other religions) are almost all exactly thus corrupted.
But for someone seeking Jesus for himself or herself and who will not profit by it in terms of salary or status; there is a greater chance of knowing the truth of Jesus primarily by inner and direct intuition than ever before.
Note added: the above can serve as a brief encapsulation of what I mean by Romantic Christianity.
