"The Bible is not an end in itself, but a means to bring men to an intimate and satisfying knowledge of God, that they may enter into Him, that they may delight in His Presence, may taste and know the inner sweetness of the very God Himself in the core and center of their hearts." (A. W. Tozer, The Pursuit of God. Christian Publications. 1948. pg. 10).

"The Bible is the written word of God, and because it is written it is confined and limited by the necessities of ink and paper and leather. The Voice of God, however, is alive and free as the sovereign God is free. 'The words that I speak unto you, they are spirit, and they are life.' The life is in the speaking words. God's word in the Bible can have power only because it corresponds to God's Word in the universe. It is the present Voice which makes the written word powerful. Otherwise it would lie locked in slumber within the covers of a book." (A. W. Tozer, The Pursuit of God. Christian Publications. 1948. pg. 74).

"The Bible will never be a living Book to us until we are convinced that God is articulate in His universe. To jump from a dead, impersonal world to a dogmatic Bible is too much for most people. ...I believe that much of our religious unbelief is due to a wrong conception of and a wrong feeling for the Scriptures. A silent God suddently began to speak in a book and when the book was finished lapsed back into silence again forever. Now we read the book as the record of what God said when He was for a brief time in a speaking mood. With notions like that in our heads how can we believe? The facts are that God is not silent, has never been silent. It is the nature of God to speak. The second Person of the Holy Trinity is called the Word. The Bible is the inevitable outcome of God's continuous speech. It is the infallible declaration of His mind for us put into our familiar human words. I think a new world will arise out of the religious mists when we approach our Bible with the idea that it is not only a book which was once spoken, but a book which is now speaking." (A. W. Tozer, The Pursuit of God. Christian Publications. 1948. pgs 81,82).

"One of the dangers from which the Church should pray to be delivered is idolatry of the letter of Scripture. The letter exists for the spirit, not the spirit for the letter. Literalism is the grave in which spiritual religion is buried. The New Testament is a book which is to be spiritually interpreted. It has no greater enemy than the thorough-going literalist who would fetter its free thought by confining it within obsolete forms. It has no greater friend than the teacher who can give to its time-worn metaphors freshness and power by translating them into the language of the present." (James M. Campbell - The Heart of the Gospel: A Popular Exposition of the Doctrine of the Atonement. Fleming H. Revell Co. 1907. pg. 19)

"We are not to make the Torah into God Himself, nor the Bible into a "paper pope." The Bible is only the result of the Word of God. We can experience the return of the Word of God in the here and now, the perpetual return of the actual, living, indisputable Word of God that makes possible the act of witnessing, but we should never think of the Bible as any sort of talisman or oracle constantly at our disposal that we need only open and read to be in relation to the Word of God and God Himself." (Jacques Ellul - Living Faith: Belief and Doubt in a Perilous World. Harper and Row San Francisco, 1983. pg. 191)

"The purpose of all Scripture is to bear witness to Christ (John 5:39; 20:31). The Bible in itself is not the Word of God. The Word of God is a person (John 1:1). Neither does the Bible have life, power or light in itself any more than did the Jewish Torach. These attributes may be ascribed to the Bible only by virtue of its relationship to Him who is Word, Life, Power and Light. Life is not in the book, as the Pharisees supposed, but only in the Man of the book (John 5:39) (Brinsmead, Robert D., "A Freedom from Biblicism" in The Christian Verdict, Essay 14, 1984. Fallbrook: Verdict Publications. Pg. 12).

"We must stop using the Bible as though it were a potpourri of inerrant proof-texts by which we can bring people into bondage to our religious traditions. (For in practice the only inerrancy we ever defend is the inerrancy of our religious traditions and our way of reading the Bible.) We must no longer use the Bible as the Pharisees used the Torah when they gave it absolute and final status. Christian biblicism is no different from Jewish legalism. It is the old way of the letter, not the new way of the Spirit (Rom. 7:6)." (Brinsmead, Robert D. "A Freedom from Biblicism" in The Christian Verdict, Essay 14, 1984. Fallbrook: Verdict Publications. Pg. 14).

"Granting absolute status to the written witness was then and now a system of religious absolutism or religious fascism. It was then and now idolatry in its most insidious form because it makes a visible icon out of the witness to the Word of God. Taking that which belongs to the living Word (the eternal and inerrant attributes of God) and bestowing it on written Scripture compromises the uniqueness of the incarnation. As there is only one incarnation, so there is only one union of perfect divinity and perfect humanity. The one ideal, sinless humanity is the Word made flesh in Jesus' humanity." (Robert D. Brinsmead, "The Gospel and the Spirit of Biblicism, Part I", The Christian Verdict, Essay 15, 1984. Fallbrook: Verdict Publications. Pg 7).

"It is significant that Jesus made no attempt to convey His message in writing. The only written record He left was what He wrote in sand ­ and that was soon swept away. If we think that the Word of God is essentially information, propositions or ideas, then we will also think that it can be adequately expressed in writing. But once we begin to see that God's Word is the presence of infinite life and Spirit, we begin to appreciate why none of Christ's eyewitnesses thought they could contain the Word in writing. The community of the beloved disciple passed on his testimony that "the world itself could not contain the books that would be written" if the living Word had to be reduced to writing (John 21:25)." (Robert D. Brinsmead, "The Gospel and the Spirit of Biblicism, Part I", The Christian Verdict, Essay 15, 1984. Fallbrook: Verdict Publications. Pg 8).

"The New Testament authors did not customarily refer to their written record as the Word of God. That subsequent Christian tradition tends to do this while the writers themselves hesitate to do it should tell us something. Evidently they distinguished the difference between the living, infinite Word and the written record more clearly than we do. If the written record is every called the Word, it is the Word only in a secondary, derivative or relational sense. It is not the Word in the absolute sense. Strictly speaking, the Scripture is the witness to the Word of God, and like a good witness, it does not speak of itself but points away from itself (John 5:39)." (Robert D. Brinsmead, "The Gospel and the Spirit of Biblicism, Part I", The Christian Verdict, Essay 15, 1984. Fallbrook: Verdict Publications. Pg 9).

"Church history has amply demonstrated that... The written record became absolutized. The prophetic spirit was quenched. The Christian Scripture became a rigid Christian Torah, a rule book for everything Christians must believe and teach. The gospel became a new law. Faith was confounded with orthodoxy, which was really theological legalism. The church ceased to be a charismatic community and became an institution. Instead of the Spirit there were rules. Instead of the priesthood of all believers there was wretched clericalism. Instead of the Spirit and presence of the living Christ there was religious canned goods. Instead of the living gospel there was dead ideology. Instead of freedom there was bondage. Yet, like the Pharisees, we have desperately tried to substitute an incredible devotion to the letter of Holy Scripture for the prophetic Spirit. Instead of having the certainty which the Spirit inspires, we have looked for certainty in endless apologetics and theories of textual inerrancy. (Robert D. Brinsmead, "The Gospel and the Spirit of Biblicism, Part I", The Christian Verdict, Essay 15, 1984. Fallbrook: Verdict Publications. Pg 9).

"When will that branch of the church which so proudly labels itself "evangelical" recognize that authority and certainty are not found in the transmission of inerrant information which reduces the gospel to an ideology or a scientific formula? True Christian certainty is a Spirit-induced certainty. The resurrected One is present in the message of His resurrection and seals to the heart the truth of the apostolic testimony. Therefore the attempt to derive a sense of certainty in the possession of an inerrant Scripture is misguided. Might this not indicate a loss of the prophetic (gospel) Spirit?" (Robert D. Brinsmead, "Letter and Spirit." The Christian Verdict, Essay 16, 1984. Fallbrook: Verdict Publications. Pgs 4,5).

"If we move in the direction of biblial absolutism ("the religion of the Book"), how can we escape turning the New Testament into a Christian Torah and the gospel into a new law? Once we do that, religious fascism with all its sectarian ugliness cannot be far away. Far better a mistaken Christian (a heretic) who has somehow caught the Spirit of Christ, than an orthodox Protestant who thinks that the Spirit is mediated to him through the letter of correct theology." (Robert D. Brinsmead, "Letter and Spirit." The Christian Verdict, Essay 16, 1984. Fallbrook: Verdict Publications. Pg 5).

"The letter of Holy Scripture is like having a photograph of a person whom we wish to meet at the airport. The image in our hands is not the living person and cannot adequately portray his living reality. But it enables us to recognize the right person when we see him and prevents us from mistaking him for another person. So Scripture may help us recognize the Spirit of Jesus and keep us from embracing another spirit." (Robert D. Brinsmead, "The Necessity and Limits of Holy Scripture," The Christian Verdict, Essay 16, 1984. Fallbrook: Verdict Publications. Pg 5).

"The letter of Holy Scripture can never adequately or exhaustively contain the Spirit who is the presence of the resurrected One. Surely the incarnation ought to teach us that God cannot be textually defined. Neither can the reality of the Gospel be expressed by mere definition. Of course the gospel has rational content, but it is much more than information. The gospel includes a living Witness and a living Presence. What is conveyed is not the mere words of man but the presence of the Son of God, who gives life to the dead. The gospel conveys not just definitions and theological information but Spirit and life which gives birth to life." (Robert D. Brinsmead, "The Necessity and Limits of Holy Scripture," The Christian Verdict, Essay 16, 1984. Fallbrook: Verdict Publications. Pg 5).

"The one thing the New Testament forbids us to do is to treat it as a static document to be used as a set of proof-texts for instant solutions to complex and controversial contemporary problems. To misuse the New Testament in this way is to deny its dynamic character and to fail to realize that the Word has to be applied in a specific context. ...A static interpretation of the New Testament is dependent on a frozen Christology, one that views Jesus as limited to the first third of the first century; a dynamic interpretation of the New Testament is based on a Christology that views Jesus not only as the human manifestation of God in first-century Palestine, but also as the Risen Lord of the church present yesterday, today, and tomorrow... As the contemporary church remains obedient to the Risen Christ in her midst, the gospel can become a dynamic Word." (Karl Paul Donfried, The Dynamic Word. Harper and Row. 1981. pg. 199).

"The effect of fundamentalism is to give an infallible Bible and a set of rigid evangelical beliefs primacy over God's self-revelation which is mediated through the Bible. This effect is reinforced by the regular fundamentalist identification of biblical statements about the truth with the Truth itself to which they refer. ...The living reality of God's self-revelation through Jesus Christ and in the Spirit is in point of fact made secondary to the Scriptures." (Thomas F. Torrance, Reality and Evangelical Theology. Westminster Press. 1981. pgs 17,18).

"It is Christ Himself, not the Bible, who is the true word of God. The Bible, read in the right spirit, and with the guidance of good teachers, will bring us to Him." (C.S. Lewis, Letters of C.S. Lewis, pg. 247.)