Sitting by a Christian Zionist on my last flight from Tel Aviv to Newark brought me to the conclusion that all of these conversations with Christians need to start with (or include early on) an honest look at how all Christians who have any use for scripture use scripture, i.e. (1) that we all choose which passages/themes are authoritative for our lives, relativising other passages/themes, (2) that we all use some hermeneutical principle for doing this, and (3) naming that principle is part of knowing ourselves and communicating with others. I think it is worth a LOT to get this on the table, because otherwise politically conservative Christians claim to respect the authority of scripture and discount social progressives as “not believing the Bible.”

So state the themes that seem most important to you. (If, for purposes of this exercise, which involves communicating with self-described Christians, you can find a verse to represent that theme, then you may call it a “Biblical theme.”) Then name the hermeneutic that prioritizes these themes. (For extra fun, name some BIBILICAL themes that you reject, and why: “Paul having a bad patriarchy day” or “who knew we could overpopulate the planet?” or “Oops, there’s that ethnocentric nationalism again!”)

My Biblical themes:
- There is a Great Spirit interacting with the creation and creatures. (Gen. 1)
- The earth is the Lord’s (Ps. 24:1)
- God finds ways to reveal a value system to humans. (Ex. 20)
- “People behaving justly” matters to God. (Ex. 3:7; Deut. 16:20; Micah 6:8)
- God wants people to behave in loving ways toward other people (requires some definition). (Micah 6:8; Jn 13:34)
- These “other people” whom we are to love include enemies. (Mt. 5:44)
- God intends for these values to even guide rulers and people in positions of power in their official decisions, not just personal relations in private. (Is. 10:1-3)
- Within limits that we will always be needing to clarify, let various viewpoints coexist, do not enforce uniformity (Acts 6:38-9)

These are key for me. I’ll name this hermeneutic “B’Tselem,” in honor of the Israeli human rights organization that keeps reminding the Israeli government of its obligations. “B’Tselem” means “in the image (of God).” They allow for defensive killing, however, so how about “Enemies are b’tselem, too.”

Now for pulling the weeds.
A question: how openly can we say that there is garbage in the Bible? I am no longer content with the slippery language used by most Mennonite profs and pastors to avoid saying that there are sentences in the Bible that attribute words to God where we think the writers got it wrong AND WE ARE NOT GOING TO HOLD THOSE PASSAGES AS AUTHORITATIVE. In other words, they are not clear about the asterisk they put with any statement about “the authority of scripture*.” It is not enough to say, “we interpret the OT through the NT,” or “we interpret all scripture through Jesus,” if you aren’t going to go ahead and admit, “therefore we do not give authority to those scriptures which ring false.” I have new respect for J. Denny Weaver ever since he said (in the Q&A following the 2006 C. Henry Smith lecture), “my wife told me not to say this, but I’m going to say it anyway: Sin entered into the writing of scripture.” I have decided that I am not going to pay attention to any Bible teacher who won’t say those words on the record.
(As a tangent, this leads to questions about why there is a back cover on your Bible . . .)

“Pulling weeds” is a good analogy, because weeds are not so labeled. It takes a particular gardening hermeneutic to decide what plants to value and which to pull.

So, Biblical themes of no account:
- Any passage claiming that God values one tribe over another (all “chosenness”). This necessarily includes all passages giving land to any people in perpetuity.
- All passages where anyone claims God told a person to kill another person (punishments or battles).

Other Biblical themes that are situational and not of abiding relevance:
- All rules of orderly and inoffensive worship (notably gender-specific limitations). It may be that there are times for being orderly in worship or inoffensive in a surrounding culture; today, in fact, it is offensive in our culture to forbid women to speak in church, therefore the specific rule would have to be reversed: “I forbid men to try to silence women in church,” Paul could write today, in pursuit of the very same value he was advancing in Corinth in the year 55.
- Any implication that God wants us all to have lots of children.
- Dietary laws (discarded by Acts 10).

Oh, one more theme I value: Good discernment is done in community (Acts 11:1-18; 15:6-29), so, anyone care to join me in this exercise in discernment?