Biblical Interpretation

The bible is a really long book. There's lots of information in there; almost too much to comprehend. I think nearly every Christian looks at the bible differently though, even though they're all reading (pretty much) the same words. Basically, though, the readers can be broken down into these three categories.

The Literalists:

These are the people who believe every word of the bible verbatim. There are no mistakes and there is no necessity for interpretation. The bible is what it is. One of the benefits of this method is that it requires pretty much zero thinking. There's no need to interpret anything. The folly for this believer is that the literal reading of the bible leaves no room to reconcile contradictions in the bible; and there are a LOT of them. How can literalists believe in something that contradicts itself over and over?

The Intepreters:

These are the people who read the bible and believe that some of the bible is a historical account of events and that other parts require interpretation to be understood. On the surface, this seems like sound reasoning. This somewhat resolves the issue that the literalists have with contradictions as they can be explained away as either meaning something else or inserting a personal understanding of the bible that resolves the contradiction (well, God said don't kill but God is always right so if he commands you to kill it's OK). There are a couple problems with interpretation, however. 1.) How do you know what parts are supposed to be interpretted? 2.) How do you know what the correct interpretation is? If I'm going to be following rules to assure my ascendancy to heaven when I die, I want a firm list of rules. If I have to go about interpretting what is right and wrong than I run the risk of doing wrong even when I believe I am doing right.

The Buffet Lovers:

The buffet lover is very similar to the interpretter, but with one key difference. I would consider the interpretter to be someone who interprets the entire bible. The buffer lover on the other hand is someone that believes what they want to believe, literally or interpretted, and simply ignores the rest. This method allows the believer to get around contradictions, because they simply ignore them. It still suffers from the same issues of interpretation, and probably moreso, because now they are discarding parts of the bible they don't like rather than trying to explain them away.

I find it impossible to be able to reconcile the teachings of the bible in my mind seeing it through one of these three archetypes. How do believers do so? Am I missing an archetype?