Let's say you believe in God and you believe that God can speak to us, that we have access

to His words.

This is the line of thought behind the conviction that a book could be God's word.

More specifically that the Bible, really a collection of books, is in some way divine.

These are texts that both within themselves and in the tradition claim to give us a word

from God.

While at the same time these texts do not hide or deny in any way that they are written

by people and that they are also a human word.

Those two things are true at the same time and that's what these texts claim.

But in what way can a book both be human and divine?

Aren't these two things mutually exclusive?

But underneath that's an assumption.

Something is divine only if it can't be explained through normal processes of cause and effect

and human involvement.

If its humans are involved and there's cause and effect processes behind it, then it can't

be divine.

You know it's easier to think that if the Bible really is God's word, it came to be in spite

of humans.

That God kind of just took control over someone's mind and hand, maybe put them in a trance,

and then that person woke up and looked at what they had written and were like, wow,

the book of Romans, this is good stuff.

So to me this is all rooted in a deficient concept of God's involvement in creation through

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