We are interested in receiving the most rationally discerning, socially responsible, and prudentially intelligent guidance with credibly ultimate points of reference for our life orientation. In the ideal scripturalist culture, scripture sets supreme benchmarks for cognitive discrimination, especially in otherwise elusive moral and metaphysical matters, without interfering with cognition in other modes; it is an indispensable platform for the religiously required maximum of responsiveness to divine and other beings, guarding against heteronomous conformism and self-centered passion; and it offers, with its extraordinarily deepened view of ends and means and its ongoing communal examination, one of the most pragmatically intelligent approaches to achieving the best life. Nevertheless there are numerous reasons to think that scripturalism in practice is too strongly at odds with normal standards of wholesome guidance and too seriously conflicted internally to guide us successfully. That there are effective scripturalist responses to these worries does not constitute a general vindication of the scripture premise but does show how the risks of scripturalism may be reduced. Philosophers' views of scripture have been of four types: deferential, patronizing, hermeneutical, or, as in the present study, neutrally normativist.