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It’s not ‘pick and choose.’ It’s pick a side.

It’s not ‘pick and choose.’ It’s pick a side.

Last updated on: July 24, 2026 at 2:08 pm by Fred Clark

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It’s not ‘pick and choose.’ It’s pick a side. 2026-07-24T14:08:07-04:00 Fred Clark

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Richard Beck has a new book out called The Book of Love: A Better Way to Read the Bible. (So if you’ve ever wondered, wondered, wondered, wondered who, who wrote the book of love, it was him.)

A book with a title and subtitle like that is bound to get pushback from White Christians here in America in just exactly the form you’d expect. “Oh, so you think the Bible’s all about LOVE do you? Well what about God’s wrath and God’s fury and God’s searing ‘holiness’?” You can imagine what his inbox looks like these days.

Like most of Beck’s critics, I have not read his book (yet). And because of those critics, I am reluctant to push back against the way he pushes back against this pushback.

So I’ll keep this relatively short.

It’s not about “picking and choosing” prooftexts. It’s about picking a side.

Here’s Beck’s charitable summary of the argument from his critics:

One of the questions I’ve been asked to address since the publication of The Book of Love is how progressive readers of Scripture tend to “pick and choose” their way around the more difficult passages in the Bible. This criticism comes from both conservative readers of Scripture and outside critics of Christianity.

Conservative critics of progressive readings like to point out how progressives ignore, or pick around, references to God’s wrath and Jesus’ death saving us from that wrath. Along with a progressive reluctance to talk about how much Jesus speaks of hell and that place of “outer darkness” where there will be “weeping and gnashing of teeth.”

Skeptics of Christianity like to point out how progressives pick around what they deem to be the more regressive parts of the Bible, from gender roles to slavery to the genocidal texts of the Old Testament.

OK. Now, here is where Beck comes tantalizingly close to a proper response to this criticism, but then fails to stick the landing and falls — or perhaps leaps — into accepting the bogus framework of those critics:

The approach I take in The Book of Love is to point to how the Bible criticizes and deconstructs itself. The questions and concerns we have about the Bible? The Bible is aware. The Bible always beats us to the punch.

The trouble here is how progressive readers of Scripture really do “pick and choose” their way around the Bible. This is a legitimate criticism.

All the “progressive readers of Scripture” nodding in agreement with the first paragraph there will feel betrayed by the second paragraph, in which Beck suggests that he alone understands “how the Bible criticizes and deconstructs itself” and that this is knowledge that eludes all of those hippie freaks far off to his left whose imagined existence must counter-balance his critics to the right, thereby positioning him neatly in what can only be described as the reasonable center. Or something. But ugh. Knock it off with that nonsense.

Look, I enjoyed Prop 8: The Musical and especially enjoyed Jack Black’s extremely Jack Black portrayal of Jesus. He brought that full Dio-meets-Robin Williams energy to his big song-and-dance number, “You pick and choose.”

That song was fun and funny, but it ultimately falls into the same trap Beck falls into here: The false idea that anyone reading the Bible will be forced to “pick and choose” between the prooftexts they want to elevate and those they want to dismiss.

This is what Peter’s vision in Acts 10 looked like.

This whole idea that everybody, “conservative” and “progressive” alike, must and therefore does “pick and choose their way around the Bible” is based on the false notion that the Bible is a collection of prooftexts and clobber verses.

That’s not at all what it is. The Bible is a library of disparate voices. Those different voices are sometimes synoptic and sometimes utterly at odds and at war with one another.

In other words, the Bible is (among other things) a collection of arguments.

This is often dimly noted as a criticism rather than a description: The Bible is full of contradictions! Yes. And also, No Duh, Einstein. That’s kind of necessary if you’re going to understand both sides of an argument.

Beck references this in his post, discussing how the canonical biblical book of Jonah can be read as a criticism of the canonical biblical book of Joshua.

Or, really, as a viciously funny, polemic, sarcastic, broadside against the exclusivist views of Joshua, Ezra, etc., intended to mock and demolish that side of the argument, burn it down, stomp on the ashes, and salt the earth.

The author of Jonah is not some imaginary hippie “progressive reader” who “picks and chooses,” ignoring the biblical passages on the other side. The author of Jonah confronts those passages, taking a stand for one side of an argument and against the other side of that argument.

Does Beck’s imaginary pick-and-choose hippie exist in nature? Probably. The world is vast and I’m sure you can find some barefoot, kumbaya-singing “progressive” who “picks and chooses” to blissfully ignore the texts of terror and the texts of wrath and all of the texts that advocate for the Fred Phelps-ian side of the intra-biblical argument.

But the real distinction here is that so-called “progressive” readers of the Bible acknowledge the existence of those intra-biblical arguments while the pick-and-choose “conservatives” (and pick-and-choose hippies) do not. You cannot take sides in an argument you refuse to acknowledge exists.

Well, you cannot choose sides. And when you do not choose a side, one tends to get chosen for you.

Once you recognize that those arguments pervade the biblical library, you begin to understand that “picking and choosing” clobber texts is a distraction and a dead end.

Reading the Bible is not about choosing texts. It’s about choosing sides.

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