The Sermon on the Mount

"What if Jesus isn't being cute and romantic in the Sermon on the Mount?  What if he is completely serious and means to be taken seriously?  What if he is proposing the ultimate deconstruction - the deconstruction of all human structures, whether scientific preanalytic visions, governments, economies, ideologies, civilizations, and the framing stories that drive them- so that we can be recomposed in our true identity, resituated in God's primal framing story of creation?  What if he is trying to excavate through layer upon layer of carpeting, plywood, ceramic tile, blacktop, gravel, trash, broken glass, and cement, so our bare feet can once again feel the cool, moist, soft soil from which we were, and are, all created?"
                                                               -Brian McLaren, Everything must change-

The word of God

What if a large number of Christians throughout history didn't have the ability to read the bible, nor have any deep biblical/theological knowledge?  What if these brothers and sisters didn't miss out on hearing and living by the word of God?  What if owning your own copy (or several) of the bible and calling it "the Word of God" is a relatively new thing, only a couple of hundred years old?  What if we search the scriptures, learn them, teach them, and all the while miss the one thing that, Jesus taught, really counts?  What if all these Christians, without the ability to read, or without the means of purchasing a copy of the Bible, or simply living before the age of the printing press, got this one thing right?  What if the word of God simply is LOVE?

OT Hell

What if there is no mention of eternal punishment in the whole of the Old Testament?  What if the word Hades (the only word sometimes translated hell in the OT) was never meant to convey the meaning of eternal punishment?  Wouldn't God, when He talked to Moses on the mountain, have told him of such a place, if such a place existed? (Something like:  Oh, by the way, if you don't keep my commandments you'll end up in a place of eternal punishment.  And the people you'll be killing on the way to the promised land, they'll end up there, too.)

Law vs. Love

What if we're doing the same thing to the New Testament (NT), as the Jews did to the Tanakh by writing the Talmud, trying to keep the law plus thousands of other extra rules. What I mean is that we take the NT (but also the OT) and read it as the law, something to live our lives by as good Christians.  And because it's not that easy to understand what the different authors really want us to do, we come up with commentaries that we need to study and adhere to as closely as possible.  What is the difference between a good study bible with footnotes and commentary (not to mention Christian book stores filled with advice and rules to live the Christian life succesfully, based on scripture), and the hundreds of intricate laws that the God fearing Jews put on themselves?  Have we really come away from living under the burden of the law?
What if Jesus is really right, and it all can be broken down to... LOVE?

The Word

What if the Bible only talks about Jesus as the Word (of God) and not of itself?  What if the verse in 2.Timothy "All Scripture is God-breathed..." does not talk about the NT?  How would that change my view of the Bible? 
What if Jesus, the Word of God, was (as John writes) with the Father in the beginning, just like a word is inside of me before I speak it out, or an idea before I bring it into being?
In the beginning, it says, God created by speaking things into existence.  What if Jesus is this life giving word, present with God in the beginning?  That would make him one with God.  But would he be God?