In the Christian tradition, there are two primary ways of reading the Bible. The more conservative, fundamentalist tradition, tends to see the Bible itself as the very Word of God, and believe it to be inspired. In the liberal tradition, it is the person who is inspired as they read the Bible, but this is not unlike any other devotional reading in the Koran or Bhagavad-Gita.[1] Mulholland points to the narrowness of both traditions and writes,
In the Christian tradition, however, there is a unique conjoining of both halves of the inspirational dynamic. God’s inspiration of the writer and God’s inspiration of the reader are two halves of a whole, and to loose either half is to erect in our hearing of the scripture a filter that will block out a tremendous amount of the living, penetrating, transforming Word of God. We might end up doing one of two things: slavishly worshiping the Bible or standing back and critically assessing and picking from among the biblical tidbits those which seem to “inspire” us. Either extreme is deadly and deadening to spiritual wholeness. There needs to be the vital conjoining of both halves of the inspirational equation.[2]
This balance of reading, as suggested here by Mulholland, is with both perspectives in mind. This allows the Bible to both come alive for the contemporary reader, and to have authority for shaping the lives of Christians, without crushing personal liberty.
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