Weight of the text, tempered by reason.

If you're familiar with the idea of the Constitution as a Living Document -- not a musty, crumbling bit of finality to be pulled out in checking ye olde answers -- then you might like this post from Ross Douthat who thinks some bright modern minds just might be missing the rich complexities of a living, vs. a literal, Bible interpretation:

So is it reasonable to believe that the Gospel passages quoted above “speak more clearly” than, say, the story of Sodom and Gomorrah to the question of whether Christians should interpret the events in Haiti as God’s punishment for some (spurious) 18th-century sin? I think it is. So do many theologians, ancient as well as modern, Protestant as well as Catholic, And the fact that Richard Dawkins and Pat Robertson both disagree tells us something, important, I think, about the symbiosis between the new atheism and fundamentalism — how deeply the new atheists are invested in the idea that a mad literalism is the truest form of any faith, and how completely they depend on outbursts from fools and fanatics to confirm their view that religion must, of necessity, be cruel, literal-minded, and above all, stupid.
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It’s true that there are plenty of stories in the Bible — including Sodom and the Flood — that line up more closely with what Dawkins wants to call the “true Christianity” of Pat Robertson’s remarks. But — and this is important — the Christian religion is not identical to the Bible. It’s a faith based on the Bible, as read in the light of reason and (or so Christians believe) under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. Catholics emphasize the Church’s authority to interpret scripture, while Protestants emphasize the individual believer’s authority — but both reject the fundamentalist conceit that no interpretation is necessary, and that every passage is equally transparent and every story carries equal weight.