free sample
I rarely ever do this, but this little snippit rung my bell. This comes from McLaren's A New Kind of Christian.

"As for his comments about my treatment of the Bible, well, I would just say that there is more than one way to "kill" the Bible. You can dissect it, analyze it, abstract it. You can read its ragged stories and ragamuffin poetry, and from them you can derive neat abstractions, sterile propositions, and sharp-edged principles. (One wonders why God didn't just give the abstract system instead of all the stories and poetry!) You can sanitize the text of all evocative language, paradox, multiple perspectives, and interesting, three-dimensional people to end up with cute little morals, simple two-dimentional systems, and flat, boring prose that reads like a legal code or assembly instructions for a bicycle. As a result, the Bible itself begins to vaporize, to disappear, leaving the desired residue of systematic theology, which is all you ever wanted anyway.

Or if you prefer, you can also kill the Bible by demythologizing it. You can read it like an engineer and dismiss anything that doesn't fit your modern, Western, rationalistic, reductionistic mind-set. You're left with a pickled specimen, a hollow shell, a stuffed tiger this way too, through a kind of expert thological taxidermy."