> I think you leave out another option, something I have heard more than once. That is the viewpoint that the Bible is partially the revealed word of God and partially the non-divine viewpoints of those who wrote it down.

My honest opinion is that this is what people come up with as a seemingly sensible excuse to do just what I'm saying is wrong -- compile a customized religion in which desired elements of Christianity are kept and the others thrown out. The vast majority of the time (in my experience) this position is taken, the decisions made on what gets to be divinely-inspired and what gets to be thrown out as human error are dubiously founded. If something sounds good, it's the word of God; if it's harder to stomach, it's human error. I'm probably over-simplifying, but that's the gist of it.

The problem with the idea that the Bible is part God, part man, is that this idea doesn't hold with what the Bible has to say about itself. This is dangerously close to a circular argument, I know, because what if what the Bible says about itself being the infallible word of God is one of those "human" parts?

The thing is, what the Bible has to say about itself ("all scripture is given by inspiration of God") is so pervasive and foundational that to doubt its own claims that it is the pure, infallible, preserved word of God, you wind up throwing out so much of it -- and not just particular passages but entire themes -- that what you wind up with is the big question of why you'd trust what the Bible has to say about anything else, either. In particular, the very teachings of Christ become suspect; he quoted the Old Testament so many times, treating it as the inerrant word of God each time, that "it is written" has become something of a cliche even outside Christianity.

So, sure, you *can* use the line of reasoning that the Bible is part divine, part human, and piecemeal your brand of Christianity the way you want to, but this introduces so many paradoxes at a fundamental level that it just doesn't make any sense to me.

Personally, I think this is all by design. As was already mentioned here earlier, God encourages us not to make wishy-washy decisions. Be hot or cold, not lukewarm. Don't sit on the fence. Accept all the Bible as God's word or none of it.