I completely agree that a middle ground between these two ideals is important for both the church as a whole, and as individuals. The idea of the Bible being inaccessible to the people trying to follow it is something that seems terribly unfair. This is something that people look for for history, for guidance, and to understand the religion they follow. How is someone supposed to do that without following along by reading and studying the text? 

I think that similarly to it being “untethered” as Breed calls it, the Bible only being able to be read by a few opens up the door to it being either misunderstood, and their taught in the wrong way, or worse, read purposefully in a wrong way as a way to guide Christians down the way that only the church leaders wanted them to go. Either way, it’s unfair to people who simply cannot read the book for themselves. 

However, I also understand that on the contrary, such an important text being untethered and almost untracked also presents dangers and opens up the opportunity for either accidental misprints or purposefully the words being abused and used in the way that they were not intended to be read. 

I find these things to be two sides of the same coin, and I understand the arguments on both sides, but I do think that people should have the opportunity to read the book as it is, even though that opened up the opportunity to it being a little bit diluted, and some things being lost in translation. 

With the internet today, it’s brilliant that there is now the ability to go back and see the oldest documents of the Bible, and see all of the different translations that have come of them. I feel like nowadays, things are no longer “untethered” because we can see the way that it changes over time, and can go back to versions that are most similar to the truth of the oldest documents.