Bibliolatry en · NOUN
Etymology
From Biblio- + -latry.
Meanings
-
(alt-of, uncountable) Alternative letter-case form of bibliolatry (“the worship of the Bible”).
alt of bibliolatry
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:[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: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: