bibliolatry

plural bibliolatries

1. uncountableusuallyExcessive admiration for a book.
2. uncountableusuallySpecifically, excessive reverence for, or worship of, the Bible or Qur'an, especially as taken literally.

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

   1991, Moisés Silva, God, language, and Scripture: reading the Bible in the light of general linguistics, page 38

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   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.

   1909, James Allanson Picton, Man and the Bible: A Review of the Place of the Bible in Human History, page 270

   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.

   1972, Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down, Folio Society, published 2016, page 164

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

   1972, John Hoyles, The edges of Augustanism: the aesthetics of spirituality in Thomas Ken, John Byrom and William Law, page 97

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

   [1992, Frederick Burwick, Poetic Madness and the Romantic Imagination, page 68

   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.

   2008, Michael J. Cook, Modern Jews Engage the New Testament: Enhancing Jewish Well-being in a Christian Environment, page 267

1. uncountableAlternative letter-case form of bibliolatry (“the worship of the Bible”).

   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.

   1867, Augustus Clissold, The Literal and Spiritual Senses of Scripture in Their Relations to Each Other and to the Reformation of the Church. […], London: Longmans, Green, & Co., […], page 63

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   [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.

   1846 April, “Art. VIII.—The Annals of the English Bible, by Christopher Anderson. London: William Pickering. 1845. 2 vols. octavo. [book review]”, in Southern Quarterly Review, volume IX, number XVIII, Charleston, S.C.: Published for the proprietor, →OCLC, page 481

   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.

   1948, James Parkes, “Man’s Disorder and God’s Design. The Amsterdam Assembly series, in four volumes: […]”, in The Hibbert Journal, volume 47, number 3, page 302

   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.

   1996 May, Betty McCollister, “Creation ‘science’ vs. religious attitudes”, in USA Today, volume 124, number 2612, page 74