bibliolatry

I must issue one important caveat, however: we have no evidence for "bibliolatry" among the Hittites, that is, reverence for the sanctity of received religious texts.

This is the sort of flat-earth bibliolatry that gives Christianity a bad name.

An aside: The fact that the devil also knows the scriptures should give us some cause for concern over the popular bibliolatry of our age.

Frank Turner observed that "Just as the piety and bibliolatry of Evangelicalism had bred the honest doubter in matters of religion, so also ...

This is hardly the fruit of Western "enlightenment." In the end, evangelism seems to offer little more than an exchange of idolatry for bibliolatry, gods for devils, and magic for dogma.

While advocating a Bible-centred church the bishop warns against the dangers of bibliolatry and biblicism.

To pick an obvious example, there is no more sacred book to evangelicals than the Bible--more tradition-minded Christians sometimes accuse them of "bibliolatry," the worship of the text--and there is no product of the Christian culture industry that is more effectively exploited and marketed than the Good Book.

Champion "Bible-smasher" and a literary man, Foote crusaded against bibliolatry (a project that allies him with Butler and Meredith, among others); his Freethinker, Marsh argues, can be seen as a "`militant' opposite to literature's `reverent' support of Holy Scripture" (181).

Methodist Bishop Hicks condemned the presumptuousness of Bibliolatry: that puny man limits God's power to the dimensions of the human mind.

Although D.'s idiosyncratic use of words and concepts (such as stable/labile, necessity/possibility, fetish, etc.) can be distracting at times, some strong insights are scattered through the volume, as when fundamentalism is viewed as an adolescent addiction to the "now" without history (95) and as "bibliolatry" (165).

To what extent marginal accretions of this kind qualify as literature is open to question; and in assessing a volume packed with observations on such subjects as Mesmerism, the Council of Trent, ancient Jewish history, the bugbear of Bibliolatry, and aspects of English versification, representative quotation is hardly feasible.

But we can still have reservations about the repercussions of so much high-level bibliolatry. I'm haunted by the argument that right wingers once raised about communism during the McCarthy years.

In fact, the New Testament scholar William Farmer has estimated that "almost every subsequent development in the history of the Synoptic Problem is indebted in one way or another to the work of Lessing." (13) Informed by the conviction that mere historical facts are insufficient grounds for robust religious faith, his interest in the historicity of the New Testament was designed to upset what he took to be the short-sighted "bibliolatry" of orthodox Christianity.