I'm doing some preparation for a sermon-lecture on 'Christian liberalism' for the Uni Fellowship of Christians.
I dug out this quote from Don Carson's review of John Webster's 'Holy Scripture'. It's a goodun:
I am not sure what Webster means when he speaks of the danger of “divinising the Bible.” Perhaps he is thinking of well-meaning but not very well informed believers who understand correctly that, however mediated, this book has been given by God, but who understand so little of the humanness of the Bible that they have no categories for the idiolects of the individual corpora, the complex array of literary genres and their diverse rhetorical appeals, and so forth. But this is not so much the “divinising” of the Bible as the dehumanizing of the Bible. As far as I can see, the greatest contemporary danger of divinizing the Bible does not lie with the fundamentalists who, however conservative their views, invariably understand that the Bible is talking about something outside itself, about God, Christ, people, the world, atonement, the gospel, and that it is this God of the gospel who saves us, not the Bible itself. In other words, they understand that the Bible is a graciously provided means to refer to extra-biblical reality, to God himself. In that sense, they do not so “divinise the Bible” that they are tempted to worship it. No, the greatest danger of bibliolatry today lies with some in the Yale school who are loath to say clearly that the Bible actually does refer to extra-biblical realities, or, if they concede it does, they give the impression that we cannot know them. They speak of the importance of reading the Bible, memorizing the Bible, firing our imaginations by much meditation on the Bible, but can scarcely bring themselves to say that what saves us is something extra-biblical: the gospel of God, which has both historical and super-historical content, both natural and supernatural content. Clearly, Webster is not addressing that problem, at least not here. So is the warning against “divinising the Bible” merely a rhetorical condemnation of those who buy into what is in fact the more traditional view of what Scripture actually is throughout the centuries of the church? (from here)
