Sunday, December 12, 2004

Bibliolatry

Bibliolatry is the worship of a particular book. In the case of Christianity, the term bibliolatry is used in a derogatory sense toward those who either have an extreme devotion to the Bible, or hold to a high view of biblical inerrancy However Historic Christianity has never endorsed worship of the Bible itself, as worship is explicitly reserved only for God Himself. Also Biblical authority is derived from God the author of the text, not the text itself. So the term is not a reference to an actual belief, but is often used as a pejorative term to negatively label perceived practices of theological opponents. The groups to whom the term is most often applied are Protestants of a fundamentalist and evangelical background who hold to Biblical inerrancy and Scripture as the only divine authority. So most of those who level the charge either reject Biblical inerrancy (such as much of mainline Protestantism does) or uphold divine authority that includes Apostolic Tradition in concert with Scripture rather than Scripture alone (Catholicism, Orthodoxy, many within Anglicanism, & the vast majority of Christianity worldwide).

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