Investing Money Bible Code (aka How to use the Bible to support your idolatry)

And Jesus said, "He who hears these words of mine and puts them into practice is like a wise man who invested heavily in gold and avoided European stocks like a plague. Also, Merica."

Homophily and interpretation

We know sociologically that the principle of "homophily" (love for and attraction to what is similar to oneself) is one of the strongest forces operating in social life. As a result, biblicists (and most other Christians) who interpret the Bible in the same way have a very strong tendency to cluster together into homogeneous social networks of similarly believing people. One name for that when it is institutionalized is "Protestant denominations." Most people--including most biblicists--tend to live in relatively "small" worlds, in the subcultures and social circles with which they are most at home and comfortable. Homophily is powerful this way--even the most seemingly "cosmopolitan" people tend actually to live in parochial worlds. In fact, empirical research shows that evangelicals tend to live in more religiously homogeneous worlds than most (though not all) other religious Americans. For biblicists these relatively small worlds can function as effective "polausibility structures" to sustain the "reality" and believability of their particular assumptions and convictions--as the same small worlds that most everyone else, including atheists and adherents of every other belief system, so for them.

Christian Smith, The Bible Made Impossible (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2011), 60-61.

A contemporary discussion on inerrancy and authority...

What role should the Bible have in society? A panel discussion with Tim Keller, Alister McGrath, and Brian McLaren. It's well worth a watch.

Bibliolatry

Telford Work, a gifted scholar, makes just this point:

While the Bible is basic to Christianity, it is also marginal--in that God alone occupies the center of the faith, and that both belief in God and the believing community predate and will succeed Scripture's present form and roles.

At the center of the Christian faith is the Trinity, and the gospel and atonement are about restoring cracked Eikons to this Trinitarian God. Beginning our understanding of Scripture with the Trinity is to claim the personal nature of everything Christian.  Whenever the Bible replaces the Trinity, we have bibliolatry. The first Christians believed that God's story entered a new chapter with Jesus, and they were living in that story before they sat down to write it.  So we need to get this straight: our faith finds expression in Scripture but that faith is in the Trinitarian God and not in the Bible.  Our faith is in the Bible in the sense that in it we hear the Trinitarian God whom we have come to know.  I do not think that we can know the Trinitarian God apart from what we learn of him through the church's Bible, but even conceding this allows us to keep God front and center in terms of what Scripture is.

Scot McKnight, A Community Called Atonement (Nashville: Abingdon, 2007), 143