But when presented a spiritual menu modeled on the best in the sources, the ordinary believer often senses that a rather arid form has replaced the abundance of the recent baroque tradition. Likewise, the scholar is troubled by the distance between the gospel and early tradition on the one hand, and current church teaching and practice, however simplified, on the other. For the most part, the Bible became their norm. In recent Catholic renewal the gap between the revelatory experience witnessed in the Bible and the composition and canonization of the texts themselves has been given due weight. The Southern Baptist Convention's Restatement on Marriage and the Family and the Doctrinal Congregation's Commentary on the Profession of Faith 's concluding paragraphs represent the flip sides of the same coin.
Reception is the process by which a text is disseminated and interpreted.
Europe-based biblical studies generally looking backwards chart the history of the composition and editing of the text. Were we to focus on reception we would look forwards from the text to the vast effect the Bible has had, and continues to have, on our lives. The same might be said of church teaching in general. In the spirit of Newman reception-focused reflection is a matter of consulting the faithful. These circumstances significantly include the fact that our religious tradition is sectarian in its roots and relied from the beginning so heavily on the individual's reading of the then so recently available printed Bible.