That's a pretty narrow view of the relationship between Christianity and the Bible.
I think some other Christians would say instead that there would be no Christianity without Jesus Christ and the "Bible" is but one witness of his revelation; the Holy Spirit is another. The "Bible" should not take the place of the revelation of Christ through the Spirit. Since it is through the Spirit that Christians are supposedly led to faith and understanding, another view is that the Spirit can guide the Christian to understand things that were not as well understood when the "Bible" was originally written. Why must the "Bible" be regarded as an infallible witness in order for it to serve as a witness of Christ? John the Baptist was a witness for him, and he was imperfect. A claim of inspiration does not imply inerrancy; man is also "inspired of God", having the breath of God, but that does not make him infallible and inerrant. Rather, just as man is animated and brought to life by God, so the "Bible" claims that scripture is made alive through God's Spirit.
The fact is that no Christian religion today interprets the Bible the same way as it was when it was originally written. It is impossible to do so because we do not share the same conceptual background, a common understanding of (unwritten) ideas that the authors themselves shared. No matter how orthodox or conservative, a "Bible" reader will still understand the text in his/her own way and reconcile difficult things in the text in his/her own way. For two thousand years, there has already been a kind of "pick 'n' mix" Christianity through biblical interpretation. Interpretation gives a reader a wide margin to make difficult passages or ideas fit together or explain away things that are undesirable (e.g. the theological debates of the third to fifth centuries that developed and refined both Arianism and Trinitarianism, all utilizing the same texts but different interpretive traditions). That was even the case in the earliest Christianity, which adopted multiple interpretations of scripture as it was in its own day, i.e. the OT, along with "other scriptures" that no longer are accepted as authoritative today.
Indeed, there was already a Christianity in different forms before "the Bible" came together as a single volume or canon. The earliest Christianity drew more on oral traditions and practices, e.g. the spoken kerygma of Christ, sayings attributed to him, the hymns and songs about Christ, the speeches and proclamations, and it took a while before the apostolic correspondence became thought of as scripture analogous to the OT. Different books circulated in different places, and there were a great many other books thought to have been scripture as well which are not in our "Bible", but which shaped early Christianity. Books like 2 Peter and Revelation were disputed for a long time and were not considered scripture in various communities. So it is a bit anachronistic to treat the "Bible" as anterior to Christianity as its foundation. And this does not even go into the pluriform nature of the text itself, which even varied occasionally according to different theological views.
My opinion is that the "Bible" reflects the views, political ideologies, and moral climate of its day, containing very real beliefs and viewpoints of its authors. Different writers may have expressed different theological and practical views (such as the different views on the Law between Paul and the author of Matthew), but if you believe in inspiration, then they all were still influenced by the same Spirit in spite of their differences. When Paul gave pastoral advice to the churches of Corinth, Rome, etc., was he merely a puppet voicing the words of God himself? Or was he speaking from his own experience, biases, and knowledge base -- incorporating even his own suggestions and opinions (cf. 1 Corinthians 7:6, 11:17, 13:10), as well as his own emotional attitudes and outbursts (2 Corinthians 11:5-13, 12:11, 16, Galatians 5:12, etc.)? Are those suggestions now inflexible commandments because they are now set in stone in what has become "the Bible"? There is an interesting parallel with the Torah of the OT, which was originally written in a very different social situation than the one that existed in first-century AD Judea. In order to keep obeying the commandments of the Law, there had to be halakha (oral Law) that interprets the written Torah to apply it to present circumstances. Thus, something like Deuteronomy 21:22-23, which originally pertained to the display of corpses on trees, was applied in the first century AD to pertain to burial of crucifixion victims -- even tho crucifixion did not exist at the time Deuteronomy was originally written. The NT is sometimes very critical of halakha, and sometimes indulges in it itself. The question is whether something similar occurs today with how the NT is used to prooftext contemporary practices in our Western society that is very, very different from the Greco-Roman world that the NT was originally a part of. I think we have seen much of this done by the Society with respect to blood transfusions, voting, disfellowshipping,and all the many other rules they make which are said to be "Bible-based". To what extent does "picking 'n' choosing" represent different approaches towards taking a first-century AD collection of texts into the 21st century? And if the Spirit is believed to be actively influencing hearts and minds, what role does he have now in helping our own present generation attain faith and understanding?
