Icons and Idols

I listened to a friend talk today about icons and idols. He proposed a definition of idol that I have heard him give before, but I found that it can apply to more then just pictures and crucifixes. "An idol is an icon that has stopped referring." An icon is a thing in the physical world which gestures, points, to God. This allows for almost anything to be seen as an icon. A tree, in so far as it points to its creator can act as an icon. Some Christians speak of the sacramental nature of the whole world and I think that in much the same way we can speak about a myriad of things in the world as icons.
But more specifically I was excited to think of the Bible as an icon. The Bible as icon, at this first glance, seems to exclude some of the problems that I have with the fundamentalist Christian approach to the Bible as the "Word of God". (A phrase that I think most properly should not be taken away from referring to Christ.) The Bible as icon can maintain the strong view that in those words we can find God's inspiration of individual men, as it were, a picture of God given by grace to us. But it avoids the problem of the Bible giving us some sort of power over God, a standard that we can hold Him too, something that we can go back to and say to God, "You owe us what you said."
But we must still remain cautious that we not move from icon to idol. In the same way that many fundamentalists have "a paper pope" we have to be careful not to allow the Bible to be an idol. We must always treat it as referring to/pointing to, a God who cannot be summed up on paper and in statements. He is beyond even the worlds of Christ which revealed the Father to a people in the world, in a context, within a view. God is beyond and above even His graceful revelation.