While these affirmations about Scripture run the risk of opening the door to what some might term
bibliolatry, their purpose in the 2LC is to make clear to the reader that even ascription to this confession, as comprehensive as it is, does not guarantee all of the knowledge necessary for salvation and obedience.
(24) [Without a doubt, there are many very good reasons for venerating writing as an instrument of memory, knowledge, and communication, as well as to acknowledge those addicted to letters and to indulge
bibliolatry. However, another part of literary production and of contemporary thought can be explained by a desire to recuperate something, games, dreams, shadows, loss, of that original state that rational writing would have tried to overcome...
As part of their "March of Freedom" campaign, the National Association of Evangelicals pressed Eisenhower, Vice President Richard Nixon, the Supreme Court justices, and every governor to sign a "Statement of Seven Divine Freedoms." The deal was, as Kruse writes, "to signify that the United States of America had been founded on the principles of the Holy Bible." Most boarded the
bibliolatry bandwagon with glee as it steamrolled across America, supported by Moose Lodges, Legionnaires, Kiwanis, and Boy Scouts, vowing that all parties, as Eisenhower proclaimed, "turn to Him." The spectacle hoorayed on Independence Day on the National Mall.
He asserts that "Biblical aesthetics is really another form of
bibliolatry (i.e., we must study the Bible because of its supposed superior literary beauty)".
That perennial gadfly, Yeshayahu Leibowitz, complained about the "
bibliolatry" of David Ben-Gurion and like-minded secular Zionists:
While opposing
bibliolatry, he saw the Bible as great literature that should be used in schools.
Grimsrud's approach compels the reader to take the Bible seriously and authoritatively without falling into
bibliolatry.
Fundamentalism, rooted in
bibliolatry, is a movement well-known in the West.
Reducing the Word of God to the Scriptures can be a form of
bibliolatry. The revelatory Word of God for creation speaks to its reliability and trustworthiness.
Hence, after opening remarks on the "scriptural crisis" (49) opened by Erasmus's edition and translation of the New Testament in 1516, The Legend of Holiness in the Faerie Queene and Doctor Faustus are analyzed as tom between the
bibliolatry that the "Scripture alone" doctrine seems to imply and iconoclastic leanings of the Reformation.
Coleridge attacks narrow readings of Scripture for which he coined the term "
Bibliolatry." This literalism neglected the inspired spirituality of the Bible as a whole and sought to bring "together into logical dependency detached sentences from books composed at a distance of centuries from each other, under different dispensations, and for different objects" (Coleridge 59).
bibliolatry - the worship of the Bible