Absolutely spot-on, Derlin; the same holds true. We must remember that while all the Bible was written for us, it was not written to us, per se. And our first task is to evaluate what it meant to those who heard it, understanding as best we can what the writers were trying to communicate in the times in which they lived and wrote. Only then can we do the task of applying it to our current times/situations. II Chronicles 7:14, for instance, isn’t a text of Scripture that we can just pluck right out of its context and apply to 21st-century Americans without first doing the above tasks.

Beyond this, there must be the confidence that Scripture is without error in the original manuscripts. There is a parallel to Constitutional interpretation there, not “inerrancy”, per se, but the idea that the authority of each piece inheres to the text itself: Scripture, because it came from God (Who cannot inspire error), and the Constitution, because it was written by men in positions of authority whose full intent was that their words be taken seriously, understood as they meant them, and applied consistently. And it is liberals, theological and political, who tend to abuse each of these (that’s a tad broad-brush, particularly politically, I understand). A significant portion of that stems from a general disdain for authority, which tends to be discouraged by conservatives (who understand that authority, though not necessarily infallible, is infallibly necessary), and which tends to be encouraged by liberals (“Question Authority”).