CS Lewis on the Word of God contained in "an untidy and leaky vehicle".

You hear it all the time.  Reading the Bible makes you an atheist.  Many atheists have claimed that running into verses like the one below caused the sparks of their unbelief.  

Now go and strike Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and don't spare them; but kill both man and woman, infant and nursing baby, ox and sheep, camel and donkey.

1 Samuel 15:3 World English Bible 

As an atheist that converted to Christianity, C.S. Lewis presents an interesting work around.  The Bible contains wickedness, but this is not of God. It is the fault of the human writers.  

…When a series of such re-tellings turns a creation story which at first had almost no religious or metaphysical significance into a story which achieves the idea of true Creation and of a transcendent Creator (as Genesis does), then nothing will make me believe that some of the re-tellers, or some one of them, has not been guided by God.

Thus something originally merely natural – the kind of myth that is found among most nations – will have been raised by God above itself, qualified by Him and compelled by Him to serve purposes which of itself it would not have served.  Generalizing this, I take it that the whole Old Testament consists of the same sort of material as any other literature – chronicle (some of it obviously pretty accurate), poems, moral and political diatribes, romances, and what not; but all taken into the service of God’s word.  Not all, I suppose, in the same way.  There are prophets who write with the clearest awareness that Divine compulsion is upon them.  There are chroniclers whose intention may have been merely to record.  There are poets like those in the Song of Songs who probably never dreamed of any but a secular and natural purpose in what they composed.  There is (and it is no less important) the work first of the Jewish and then of the Christian Church in preserving and canonizing just these books.  There is the work of redactors and editors in modifying them.  On all of these I suppose a Divine pressure; of which not by any means all need have been conscious.

The Human qualities of the raw materials show through.  Naivety, error, contradiction, even (as in the cursing Psalms) wickedness are not removed.  The total result is not “the Word of God” in the sense that every passage, in itself, gives impeccable science or history.  It carries the Word of God; and we (under grace, with attention to tradition and to interpreters wiser than ourselves, and with the use of such intelligence and learning as we may have) receive that word from it not by using it as an encyclopedia or an encyclical but by steeping ourselves in its tone or temper and so learning its overall message.

To a human mind this working-up (in a sense imperfectly), this sublimation (incomplete) of human material, seems, no doubt, an untidy and leaky vehicle.  We might have expected, we may think we should have preferred, an unrefracted light giving us ultimate truth in systematic form – something we could have tabulated and memorized and relied on like the multiplication table.  One can respect, and at moments envy, both the Fundamentalist’s view of the Bible and the Roman Catholic’s view of the Church.  But there is one argument which we should beware of using for either position: God must have done what is best, this best, therefore God has done this.  For we are mortals and do not know what is best for us, and it is dangerous to prescribe what God must have done – especially when we cannot, for the life of us, see that He has after all done it.

Reflections on the Psalms by CS Lewis