It is by now fairly commonly acknowledged that beneath nearly every controversy within Christianity there lies a single issue, that being the role of biblical scripture and its interpretation. From ancient creedal arguments over the procession of the Holy Spirit (from Father only, or from the Father and the Son?) to contemporary debates over modalistic casting of the Trinity as "Creator, Redeemer, Sanctifier"; from early ecclesiastical conflicts over the papal primacy to modern wrangling over women in the presbyterate and episcopate, and gays and lesbians at the altar for whatever reason or purpose; from antique liturgical tussles over candles on the altar (or table) to contemporary skirmishes over where the furniture, priest and people shall stand, sit or kneel, we revert to biblical texts to fortify the argument.

Yet, while we acknowledge that our fundamental difference comes down to the role of biblical scripture and its interpretation, we overlook (conveniently) that all Christians who argue from scripture are thus united in a common fundamentalism. For by appealing to scripture as the basis for whatever we perceive to be fundamentally true of our position, we are appealing to scripture as fundament, or foundation. That we may differ in our interpretation, from the liberality of relativistic readings to the strictures of literalistic readings, is little distinction. An unyielding adherence to the most liberal reading is as strident and strangulating as an adamant literalism. And a selectively applied literalism is as relativistic as the most fanciful liberalism.

While we're struggling to see our way clear of this muddle, it may or may not be helpful, but it might well be chastening, to consider that in our shared scriptural fundamentalism we have been preoccupied with syllable and syntax and too little mindful of Sinai. We've been so busy contending and contesting that we've neglected confessing; like generations of believers before us, we've become idolaters.

Even our Hebrew ancestors, among the first to deploy written language in service to faith, sensed its dangerous potential for idolatry. The name of Israel's God was an unpronounceable quartet of consonants. It was not to be uttered or written without keen awareness of its power. Intentionally rendered more as a glyph or sign embedded in the text than as a word itself, the name of God was a textual and linguistic stumbling block, a speed bump, demanding a pause and reminder--a stopping for reflecting and bearing to mind and heart--that the Being behind and beyond that four-letter signifier is far greater than any word can encompass or contain.

Writing was not for all our Hebrew ancestors the currency it is for us today. Thus, when the common believers of Israel sought to render their God immediate and palpable, they resorted to the molten image, a golden calf. But the graven image forbidden by the decalogue was not and is not limited to three-dimensional statuary. Language is also rendered in graven text; in their time upon stone, in our time upon metal plates and in electrostatic fields that mound the lines of raised letters in fine carbon powder and incise them in microscopic bursts of ink saturating paper fiber.

But the propensity toward the idolatrous properties of text was realized early. The decalogue itself, said to have been inscribed upon tablets of stone, was enshrined in the tabernacle and carried in the midst of the people in token of God's presence. In time, this text gave rise to other text, as successive generations recorded interpretations, one upon another, much of which was codified. Thus did the word become idol--a substantial, material representation--that was eventually perceived by some, including Jesus, to be just that and judged a hindrance in the way to God.

Believers in Jesus, in the course of recording their response to his life and ministry, defended their departure from the Hebrew religion using text to rebut text. They appealed to selected Hebrew texts to justify their departure from other Hebrew texts, and in the process, created yet more texts of their own. In a bold leap of theological bravado and breathtaking insight, the text of the gospel attributed to John actually posits Jesus as the Word made flesh. Among the many possible meanings of this claim is that the God signified by the unpronounceable Hebrew word and obscured by generations of interpretive words, has transcended text and all artificial (and potentially idolatrous) signifiers by incarnation, full embodiment in the realm of human experience.

The human propensity toward idolatry is challenged in the Christian experience by the bodily resurrection and ascension of the incarnate Jesus. Whether by human design or divine action, the result of this tangible loss of the body is the same: Those who might render the mortal remains of Jesus into idolatrous relics are denied the physical material, even as their Hebrew ancestors had been denied, at least at first, the vowel points that might have rendered a fuller dimensionality to the tetragrammaton, making those four nonsense consonants a functional word.

Still, the Word gave rise to words. And text became canon. Arguing whether the text formed the church or the church formed the text is tantamount to debating the primacy of egg over chicken. Suffice it to say that they are inextricably bound. The primacy of Rome's episcopate rests upon the disputed interpretation of the Matthean text wherein Jesus delivers a set of metaphorical keys to a metaphorical kingdom to a very human disciple whose name, "Peter," translates as "rock" and therefore may in either his person or his faith represent the metaphorical "rock" upon which that kingdom rests.

Those who interpreted the metaphorical rock as Peter himself went one way and those who believe the metaphorical rock is the apostle's erratic but emphatic faith went another. It is perhaps ironic and instructive that the latter took their leave of the former just at the point in human history when the Gutenberg press made the graven word accessible to the masses.

Protestantism made the printed word, the Bible, the center of its life. The pulpit in some instances actually replaced the altar or table at the center of the assembly. While the furnishings in pre-Reformation churches often included an altar and a pulpit and their placement remained unchanged when those buildings were converted for Protestant worship, their meaning was reordered, or at least took on a different emphasis. At best the pulpit and altar stood in proximity to one another, the pulpit, until lately, positioned above and/or before the altar. In other words, the pulpit stood over and often in front of the altar, signifying its superiority as the sheltering interpretive canopy beneath which the altar stands and/or the mediating interpretive tower through which the altar is approached. In either case, even in Protestant Christianity where the eucharistic liturgy remained, the place of the word--the text, its reading and its interpretation--were given place of honor.

The primacy of Scripture in Protestant Christianity, like its predecessors, has itself become an idol. That such a proposition might be greeted with scorn and anger does not diminish its potential truth. That contemporary Christians revert to biblical scripture, a material text--a graven image--as a source superior to the more risky and less tangible faith that emanates from a dynamic relationship with the living God, suggests an idolatry equal to any before it. This is not to deny the fundamental and foundational importance of the text as part of our own story; revelation is not only progressive, it is inherited. But the substitution of the formed and fixed text of my ancestor's relationship with God at the expense of the text of my own life and relationship with the living God is an act of unconscionable cowardice. Yes, what I know of God is due, in part, to what my ancestors knew of God and gave me in the sacred text. But neither my faith, nor God's being, ends there.

To limit my experience of God and my faith to the pages of the text is the equivalent to Peter's insistence that he be allowed to build three tabernacles on the mount of the Transfiguration to enshrine his apprehension of Moses, Elijah and the Messiah. The impulse toward enshrinement was an impulse toward idolatry. It was denied Peter; it is denied me. I may carry the images of such apprehensions within my heart; they may dwell within me, but I cannot erect shrines to them and dwell within them. I, like Peter, must always leave the mountaintop and engage the life God has given me, in relationship with God and all God's creation.

I do not mean this brief reflection to be accusatory or condemnatory, but rather instructive. I need to be reminded constantly that a life of faith is a risky business, otherwise it would be neither a life or a faith. And I am mindful that I write and reflect as a student of words and a wordsmith, on the verge of a new time. Words are no longer limited to graven technology, may one day even disappear or revert to the status of the hieroglyphics of antiquity, yet one stage in the evolution of human communication and record-making. Yet I am confident that our successors will find, as have we, the means to practice idolatry, to fashion substitutes for that elusive and ineffable God whose reality and presence, like love itself, transcends any and all incarnation.

For the time being, being the only time God has yet given us, I find the words of Mark Taylor particularly pertinent:

Might "God" be the name for that "in" language that does not belong to language--the name, in other words (always in other words), for that which language can never name or cannot avoid naming the unnamable? Questions linger, calling us to linger with the question.

...Why do we still search, still probe, still question? What calls us to respond? What disrupts the present? Unless our work is "academic" in the worst sense of the word, something else haunts the search that is our research. What is this "something else" and why will it give us no rest?

[About Religion: Economies of Faith in Virtual Culture, University of Chicago Press, 1999, pp. 30-31].

Sam Portaro is the Episcopal chaplain at the University of Chicago. He wrote this reflection during the recent National Student Gathering in Estes Park, Colo.