When you go to the Bible, what do you expect or hope to find? Maybe you go to the Bible to meet with God, or to learn truth. Or it might be for comfort and encouragement or to get help and insight. 

Experience has found that there are four Christian minds and each of these Christians minds comes to the Scriptures for a different reason. Each has a different notion of what the Christian life is about. And because they value different things about Christianity, they also fear different things in their Christianity.

The first one would be a doctrinalist mind. The doctrinalist sees the Bible primarily as a source for sound doctrine and true religious teachings. In the Christian life the stress and value is on knowing and believing what it correct. The doctrinalists tend to go to battle on two fronts: against those who think that doctrine is not essential and with other doctrinalists who don’t hold the same view on a doctrinal issue. The greatest fear of the doctrinalist is heresy or ignorance.

The second mind is the pietist. The pietist mind stresses having a personal experience of God in their life and the Bible functions as a stimulus to this. Reading the Bible is crucial to fostering a personal sense of divine presence. And so the Bible is not so much about doctrine as it is devotional and relational. The greatest fear of a pietist is spiritual dryness or intellectual pride.

The moralist views Christianity primarily in terms of morality. And so the Bible helps people to live a righteous life and to engage in right action. Moralist tend to have strong opinions on matters that they think all Christians should adhere to. (If you’re really a follower of Jesus your children will be in public schools… or in Christians schools… or home schooled.) The greatest fear of the moralist is private immorality and hypocrisy.

For the culturalist mind, the Christian life is viewed primarily in terms of involvement in the broad institutions of society. The Bible is a set of marching orders for cultural transformation and the renewal of public life—including the arts, politics, science, and technology. The crucial test for a true Christian is not right belief, or right experience, or even right behavior—it is right relation to our world and our community. The greatest fear of the culturalist is private religion, public irrelevance, and unknowingly being involved in sinful structures.

What is the use of such a taxonomy? First is to gain knowledge of ourselves. Which mind do I most identify with? How does this help me understand those things I most value and fear in my Christianity? All of those things are found in the Scriptures. But each of the minds tends to leave something out when it comes to reading the Bible. So its important to read the whole Bible because it prevents us from not reading those passages that aren’t what we’re looking for.

Second, it’s to gain knowledge of others. It’s not to peg one another and say, “I got you figured out”; but rather when we find ourselves disagreeing with one another it’s helpful to reflect and ask, What is this brother or sister valuing and what is it that they’re afraid of? This helps us empathize with each other and learn from each other in these differences as we seek to be one body who are all living together under the authority of the living Scriptures.