Sorry if I cut too much with that quote. I don’t want to be disingenuous.
I actually don’t think that acknowledgement of “the Bible is the word of God” is a show stopper at all.
By example: Einstein wrote about relativity. If I read his papers, I know that this isn’t “the word of relativity” (bad phrasing) or a direct experience of relativity itself (well, technically…). There’s a layer of indirection and abstraction upon relativity; ambiguity imposed from putting it into language as opposed to direct experience, along with room for Einstein’s own misunderstanding and misinterpretation.
If I then read what someone else wrote about what Einstein said, there’s another layer of abstraction and indirection, even further from the “truth”. More room for intentional and accidental distortion, incompleteness, etc.
However, these layers of indirection don’t make relativity any less real.
Likewise, I don’t see why proving whether the Bible is the direct word of God has any bearing on the realness of God or of his word.
If you approach it as “I’m reading the word of a scribe who copied down what Abraham said” and accept that there are textual distortions from copying things for generations, never mind the original indirection, it doesn’t seem [to me] to really change anything.
In the absence of direct experience, it seems to hinge on other questions like, “is God real” and “did Abraham actually communicate with God” and “did the scribe accurately record that experience”.
But I don’t actually think that treating the Bible as the direct or indirect word of God has any real bearing. But I do see how that distinction would change how one discusses contradictions.
Just as with the story about the blind men and the elephant, there can be apparent contradictions in describing the same underlying non-contradictory thing. It doesn’t make the elephant any more or less real, nor the distinct experiences any more or less wrong.