Didn't Constantine Write The Bible?

If you think the Bible descended out of heaven in a red letter edition complete with concordance, leather binding, and dedicated to your grandmother, you're going to be disappointed. The Bible is through and through the product of human cultures. It was written at particular times in history with the particular idiosyncrasies of particular cultures. So when I hear people say things like "the Bible is the product of the political forces -- you know, Constantine's rise to power, and all of that" my response is "So what? What did you expect?" To say that the fact that the Bible is the product of human society (with its personal, political, and social factors) somehow makes it less divine is to make the same mistake as saying that the fact that Jesus was a Jewish carpenter precludes his divinity. The central mystery of the Christian faith (in which lies the hope of humanity) is that God condescended himself and came to this earth as one of us. Not the condescending of the rich kid who decides to play homeless for a few days but always keeps his daddy's credit card in his back pocket in case things get bad, but the kind of condescending that leads to the cross. The kind where he realizes there's no way out because he really has become one of us. In the same sense that God became fully human in the person of Jesus, so the word of God became fully human in Scripture. Conservative Christians are often guilty of scriptural docetism. In the same way that gnostic Christians of the early church thought that Jesus only "seemed" to be human, some of us try to ignore the obvious human elements in scripture. It's understandable, it stems from the desire to protect the divinity of scripture against a secular culture that makes the opposite error of seeing only its humanness. In the same way that we can look at Jesus and see him as 100 percent human we can also look at the development of the canon of scripture from a 100 percent sociological perspective. But no matter how many political or social agendas one may find as she traces the history of the canonization of scripture over its several hundred year course I believe she will still find such a purely sociological explanation wanting. Scripture has always had an incredible power over the lives of those who faithfully follow it, and time and time again has called them to action in ways that secularists will never quite be able to understand--in just the same way that for all his humanness, Jesus' life on earth has all the marks of divinity.