Bibliolatry

the danger of bibliolatry is only too apparent in the contemptuous references often made by Christian authorities to the uselessness of pagan literature since access to the Bible had been secured by the Church.

Bibliolatry led to a phobia about swearing; rejection of the Bible made it possible again, and with it a release of the repressions which gave the Puritan middle class their moral energy.

The exponents of bibliolatry rely on the letter and make the spirit dependent on the letter

they are also committing "bibliolatry" by putting the Bible where God alone belongs

"bibliolatry" (the fundamentalist insistence on the literal truth of "the Bible as the Word of God")

Some sectors of the religious world have been accused […] of "bibliolatry," that is, valuing their Bible itself so highly that they are almost guilty of idolatry.

[I]f this is the rational reverence of Protestantism,—it cannot be long before the ingenuity of our enemies compiles the annals of Bibliolatry, abounding, if not with sad impieties, yet with absurdities as numberless and as noxious as the thousand and one Mariolatries, with which our controversialists are armed.

To account the Scripture holy, and yet to deny its spiritual sense, is mere Bibliolatry; and this is the real origin of the charge of Bibliolatry so frequently made in the present day; in which point of view the charge is a just one.

We are apparently to go back, not to fundamentalism, but to a still earlier phase of man’s religious development, and regard the Bible as some mysterious and supernatural fetish, redolent rather of primitive magic and tabus than of a conference of Christians in 1948. When this new and disquieting Bibliolatry approaches the problems of life, it is inevitably gnostical rather than mystical in its emphases, escapist not realist in its impulses.

Other clerical plaintiffs were the Methodist, Roman Catholic, Episcopal, and African Methodist Episcopal bishops of Arkansas, joined by representatives from Presbyterians, Southern Baptists, and Reform Jews. Methodist Bishop Hicks condemned the presumptuousness of Bibliolatry: that puny man limits God's power to the dimensions of the human mind.