the sermon on the mount

Craig Keener, in his excellent commentary on Matthew, says "more than thirty-six discrete views exist" on the Sermon on the Mount.

Seriously.

He quotes Blomberg (1992) summarizing the most critical of these:

The predominant medieval view, reserving a higher ethic for clergy, especially in monastic orders;
​
​Luther's view that the sermon represents an impossible demand like the law;
​
​The Anabaptist view, which applies the teachings literally for the civil sphere;
​
​The traditional liberal social gospel position;
​
​Existentialist interpreters' application of the sermon's specific moral demands as a more general challenge to decision;
​
​Schweitzer's view that the sermon embodies an interim ethic rooted in the mistaken expectation of imminent eschatology;
​
​The traditional dispensational application to a future millennial kingdom; and
​
​Blomberg's and others' view of an "inaugurated eschatology", "in which the sermon's ethic remains the ideal or goal... but which will never be fully realized until the consummation of the kingdom..."