I’ve finished reading The Last Word by N.T. Wright. Very good, and while Wright tends toward the more traditional, his comments put both liberals and conservatives in their place, as any good Anglican might do.

“Biblical scholarship needs to be free to explore different meanings. This is not just the imperative of the modern scholar, always to be coming up with new theories in order to gain promotion or tenure in the university. It is also a vital necessity for the church. Any church, not least those that pride themselves on being ‘biblical,’ needs to be open to new understandings of the Bible itself. This is the only way to avoid being blown this way or that by winds of fashion, or trapped in one’s own partial readings and distorted traditions while imagining that they are full and accurate account of ‘what the Bible says.’ At the same time, however, biblical scholarship, if it is to serve the church and not merely thumb its nose at cherished points of view, needs to be constrained by loyalty to the Christian community through time and space. When a biblical scholar, or any theologian, wishes to propose a new way of looking at a well-known topic, he or she ought to sense an obligation to explain to the wider community the ways in which the fresh insight builds up, rather than threatens, the mission and life of the church.
“Such a statement will provide protests – some of which will simply indicate that the protesters are still living within the modernist paradigm, and pretending to an illusory detached ‘neutrality.’ Of course, the church has sometimes gotten it wrong, and tried to demand of its scholars an adherence to various forms of words, to ways of putting things, which ought themselves to be challenged on the basis of scripture itself. The Christian ‘rule of faith’ does not, in fact, stifle scholarship; even if it provokes the scholar to try to articulate that rule with greater accuracy and elegance, that itself will be a worthy task. Those who try to cut loose, however, discover sooner or later that when you abandon one framework of ideas you do not live thereafter in a wilderness, without any framework at all. You quickly substitute another, perhaps some philosophical scheme of thought. Likewise, those who ignore one community of discourse (say, the church) are inevitably loyal to another (perhaps some scholarly guild, or some drift on currently fashionable theology).”
(N.T. Wright, The Last Word, p.135-136)