Bibliolatry

“One of the first things we need to see about the faith of Christians is that they had their Christian faith before they had the Bible. Telford Work, a gifted scholar, makes just this point:

While the Bible is basic to Christianity, it is also marginal—in that God alone occupies the center of the faith, and that both belief in God and the believing community predate and will succeed Scripture’s present forms and roles.[Living and Active, page 316]

“At the center of the Christian faith is the Trinity, and the gospel and atonement are about restoring cracked Eikons to this Trinitarian God. Beginning our understanding of Scripture with the Trinity is to claim the personal nature of everything Christian. Whenever the Bible replaces the Trinity, we have bibliolatry. The first Christians believed that God’s story entered a new chapter with Jesus, and they were living in that story before they sat down to write it. So we need to get this straight: our faith finds expression in Scripture but that faith is in the Trinitarian God and not in the Bible. Our faith is in the Bible in the sense that in it we hear the Trinitarian God whom we have come to know.”—A Community Called Atonement, Page 143