There is no "theology of the Bible"

Unfortunately, both conservative AND liberal Christians think there is.

This is a follow-up of my post two weeks ago about Elizabeth Warren being ignorant about both philosophy and theology with an out-of-context quote of "whatever you have done to the least of these" from Matthew 25.

The fundies and conservative evangelicals are way wrong on this, of course, trying to mine the Tanakh for proof texts about Jesus. Of course, that's only 1, 925 years old, as the guy who wrote Matthew, most likely in the early 90s CE, was doing it.

But, liberal Christians haven't always abandoned that. And, in claiming that, say, "god is love" is the theology of the bible? They ignore the Yahweh who ordered holocausts, the Yahweh whose love for his own allegedly chosen people was conditional, and more.

Beyond that, "love" or "peace"?

Yes, both Isaiah and Micah say "Beat your swords into plowshares." (Micah probably wrote first.)

But Joel 3:10 says "Beat your plowshares into swords." And also reverses the second half of the Isaiah-Micah line, to "Beat your pruning hooks into spears."

Joel 3 in general talks about Yahweh restoring the fortunes of Israel, and that his people need to gird for war for their part in that. Micah 4, seemingly referenced by Isaiah 2, is a "latter days" passage. (I don't use "end times," let alone "apocalyptic," as those have Xn overtones.)

Now, at this point, both conservative and liberal Christians, despite my holocaust comments above, will probably still try to claim there is a theology of the bible.

There isn't. Back to Matthew 25. Doing good works appears to be the key to being a sheep or a goat. But Paul, in Romans 3:23, says "all have sinned and fall short of the glory of god," backgrounding his fudged through Greek quote of Habakkuk two chapters earlier and in Galatians that "the righteous will live by faith." (The better translation is of Habakkuk 2:4 that "the righteous shall live by his faithfulness," that is, to use Christian doctrine terminology while still rejecting an overarching theology of the bible, that Habakkuk is talking about sanctification, not justification.)