Thirty years after leaving the Christian church, I am reading the Bible again, very differently than I did in my youth. I like your distinction between idol and icon–I didn’t actually get around to saying that in my first comment.

But thirty years ago, when I started trying to articulate the problems I was having with Christianity, I talked about the Bible as a graven image that fundamentalists bowed down before, and people looked at me like I was babbling nonsense. Decades later, when I first heard the word “Bibliolatry,” I learned for the first time that there were other Christians out there who shared my experience of the Bible. They had probably been out there all along, but I’d never found them and in the mean time I had to completely reinvent my spiritual life, first alone, then as a Wiccan for twenty years, and now as a Quaker (but still not Christian).

Perhaps it was meant to be. I certainly don’t begrudge my experience of the Goddess and the Horned God, and I’m certainly not the first mystic to have been given a kick in the pants by the Gods and told to “go wander” with no further instructions.

But if Christians–passionate, mystical Christians with a full and vivid experience of God–had been more vocal about calling Bibliolatry by its name, I might still be Christian today. As is, every time a Christian talks about “tolerance” towards our fundamentalist brothers and sisters, it makes Christianity a little bit less safe and less welcoming for me.

You say that words like “Bibliolator” are name calling. That is only true if fundamentalists are regarded as strangers and foreigners, alien to one’s own experience. But for those of us who have _been_ fundamentalist, whose experience of fundamentalism has been up-close and personal and deeply damaging, Bibliolatry is a label that we _need_ if we are going to be able to name our own experience.

It can be uncharitable to call somebody an alcoholic, too. But owning the label is absolutely essential to the recovery process. You don’t call AA uncharitable because they call heavy drinkers alcoholics. They’re not doing it to feel smug and superior; they’re truth-telling about their own human condition.

I’m not saying Biblical scholars don’t have their own idolatry. But the world is not neatly divided into cynical scholars in one camp and “relatively unsophisticated fundamentalists” in the other. The world is, in fact, awash with refugees from fundamentalism–refugees who still have their passionate hunger for God but who have great difficulty treating as an icon something that was previously thrust upon them as an idol.

Joanna