The problem is, Danutz, that Jesus’ ideas about ‘peace, justice, and community correct’ are so deeply and consistently grounded in the Old Testament that I really don’t see how you can extract the moral values from the particular belief in YHWH and the story about a particular historical community (as Russ says) without doing serious damage to the text - and to the integrity of the person of Jesus.

I know you don’t like this and I know we’ve just had this conversation, but it still sounds to me as though your ethical and religious position is only incidentally Christian - and incidentally Christian is not really Christian at all. I don’t think in the long run that we will find good answers to Paul’s excellent questions by collapsing the biblical narrative down to a few worthy moral values. I believe that there is a lot that is true in what you assert, but I don’t think it is necessary to reject Jesus’ understanding of God in order to affirm it.