Back to Theology Paper where you left The growth of "bibliolatry" has been rampant in the 20th century. Many scholars studying the effects of print upon theology point to the scientific growth in thinking as the major contributor to the idea that truths could be "encoded" in print. Prior to the establishment of print, science was not so "technical". It was much more mysterious, and ideas were communicated via word of mouth.
Since the Reformation, and increasingly so as printed books have become established and widely available, there is the societal requirement to produce documents to describe and outline ideas, whether they be scientific, philosophical, or technical. The writings of the Old and New Testament canons had long since represented the set of documents accepted in large part as the ones to represent the most crucial elements of the faith.
Even at the time of the Reformation, however, the idea of the canon was not necessarily universally accepted. Martin Luther himself was a critic of the inclusion of James in the canon, calling it "an epistle of straw". This would be considered heretical in today's attitudes toward the canon. Clearly, the acceptance of the canon as we have it today was not an operating assumption in the early 1500's, even for the man many consider to be the architect of the Reformation. What might this tell us about our assumptions about scripture today?
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