Nobody actually believes all scripture carries equal weight. We just don’t say that out loud.

Every single one of us has a canon within the canon. A set of texts that sit at the center of how we read everything else. And another set we quietly step around. This isn’t a liberal thing or a conservative thing. It’s a human thing. It’s a Christian thing. It has been since the beginning.

Here’s what I mean.

The same person who builds their whole theology around Romans 13, “submit to the governing authorities”, goes real quiet when you get to Revelation 18, where the Roman Empire is called the whore of Babylon and people are told to flee her. Same Bible. Completely different posture toward the state. You have to choose which one is doing the heavier lifting in your theology. Everyone chooses.

The person who says women can’t preach because of two verses in Paul’s letters also eats shrimp, cuts their hair, and wears blended fabrics, all of which the text addresses with the same level of authority. Something is deciding which of those texts still applies and which one doesn’t. That something is a theology. It’s just usually an unexamined one.

The prosperity gospel preacher highlights the blessings in Deuteronomy and builds an empire around them. They don’t spend a lot of time in the Beatitudes, where Jesus says the poor are blessed and the rich have already received their comfort. Again, both are in the book, but only one gets the stage.

The patriot who loves America and loves Jesus has to do some real work around the Sermon on the Mount, where Jesus tells his followers not to resist evil with violence, to love enemies, and to refuse the logic of retaliation. Most of the time that work doesn’t happen.

None of this makes anyone a bad person. It makes us readers. Human readers of an ancient, complicated, multi-voiced text. The writers of scripture didn’t always agree with each other either. The Bible contains arguments within itself about how to understand God, suffering, justice, and what faithfulness looks like.

The problem isn’t that you have a canon within the canon. You do. The problem is when you pretend you don’t, and then use your particular selection of texts to tell everyone else they’re not taking the Bible seriously enough.