I found myself reading an very interesting and brief essay about the power and peril of biblical philosophy in society. Dr. Jayne Svenungsson's essay in Englesberg Ideas, The Visionary Potential of the Biblical Legacy, discusses how religious ideals can be used both to inspire people and debate as well as to suppress them.

Her three ideas -- that biblical truths are emergent rather than fixed, that fixing any truth as an idol is prohibited, and that biblical insights about justice and other abstractions are to be debated, rather than carved in stone -- show clearly how the bible can be a source of wisdom and insight rather than conflict.

I was reminded of a story. I found myself one recent evening, seated at a Passover Seder next to a former US Supreme Court justice. Our host’s use of an old testament quote -- “there shall be one law for both you and the strangers among you” — sent my seat-mate to his pocket Constitution. “I’m looking,” he told me, “for exactly how this idea is worded in the US Constitution.”

It was the 14th amendment, the one being debated that very day in the sitting court. "No state shall make or enforce any law which shall … deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”

“Not ‘citizen'” the Justice said, “not ‘man' not 'land-holder,’ ... ‘person.’ That launched us on a discussion of how deeply biblical ideas are embedded in our culture, beginning with monotheism and the idea that we might, having been created in the image of God, be able to understand his creation fully. Or if not fully, “more perfectly."

Important: these biblical ideas are abstractions, with no reliable final form in our political discourse. They are to be discussed and debated and approached with humility and curiosity, as Dr. Svenungsson suggests.

Like many ideals: freedom, equality, justice, and others, as well as truth itself; the nature of human knowing means that we can approach, but may never arrive at full understanding and execution of these ideas on earth.