The temptations to misread the Bible on our own behalf and to domesticate it for our own purposes are many and dangerous, and in America, devoted as we are to the Bible, we have tried them all.

Bibliolatry, the worship of the Bible and the making of it an object of veneration, of ascribing to it the glory due to God, is one of those temptations that we ought to avoid.

Literalism, which worships the text and gives it an inappropriate superiority over the spirit that animates it, is another temptation to be eschewed.

And the worst of these, what I call culturism, is the worship of a culture in which the Bible is forced to conform to the spirit of the age.

from The Good Book: Reading the Bible with Mind and Heart