Scripture is a human, and a historical
fact. We may say: is a human, and therein an historical fact—intimately
involved with the movement, the unceasingly changing specificity of historical
process, its grandeur and its folly.
Even those who regard one particular
scripture as God-given, or as transcendently absolute, must recognized that
without a human response to it, without a community, reception and preservation
of it, it is otiose. (Wilfred Cantwell Smith, What is Scripture? A
Comparative Approach [Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993], 21)