The other problem with the Bible is it undeniably a product of human ingenuity, culture, and experience. It is certainly a book with divine power (2 Tim 3:16-17), but if you leaf through its pages it clear that this divine power is dripping in human perspiration.
The book is so human at times, that we almost can't stand it. Like when Jesus uses eating and defecating as a metaphor for true moral living, or when prophets run around naked and shave their pubic hair, or when Paul growls at those who were trying to reincorporate Jewish religious practices (circumcision) into the new community of faith (the church) by telling them to castrate themselves.
The Bible is riddled with starkly human elements that are at odds with our contemporary/evangelical/North American sensibilities. Elements that contradict the tidiness that we strive to impose on the text, defy our post-reformation hermeneutic, and belches rudely in the face of our theological systems.
We like to treat the Bible as a holy soothsayer, ethereal and refined, a genteel dispenser of starched and pressed theological pleasantries. But it seems to me the Bible acts much more like a eccentric uncle who laughs too loud, dresses too sloppily, and makes embarrassing bodily noises at totally inappropriate times.
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