this morning I read the beginning of corinthians again: That astonishing first chapter where paul needed only to add 'Yahweh says this' to sound like Isaiah or Ezekiel at their zenith. All-encompassing, depth of depth stuff. and then you get to his first tirade against . . . the guy who married his stepmother.
when I was a young teenager at school I joined the crusaders having been involved with the christian union at weekly meetings. I used to go to bible studies at people's houses which I really enjoyed, in a slightly uneasy kind of way. we always studied paul: combing through each line for meaning and praying and talking about it as though they were the words of God Himself.
I lost my faith a little while after this (all sorts of reasons) but when I went to college I met a monk who was also the temporary chaplain and had a conversion experience when I visited his monastery. Again there were all sorts of reasons for this but I am convinced now that it was mainly the mindblowing discovery of the psalms which, despite the fact that I knew they were somehow important, had scarcely ever looked at and, when I had, could not really understand.
as a music student, I was having a great deal of trouble with my music as a result of my spiritual dilemmas, but here they were: singing these psalms day after day month after month just as David had done umpteen thousands of years before! a perfect fusion of word and music . . . .I was bowled over not only by the sense of continuity and the gentle rolling rhythms of the singing, but also by the confusing, enigmatic depth of the texts themselves.
I listened a little while ago to a talk on youtube given by a very well-read and brilliant moslem speaker Sheikh Ahmed Deedat who travelled a great deal in the USA in the 90's trying to help the moslem community there to rediscover their spiritual heritage. He was constantly comparing the bible with the koran and one of the most interesting things he said was that, whereas the bible was a patchwork of different books rewritten a thousand times by scribes, the koran was the purest word of God Himself.
Here is a passage from the koran (from the chapter called the cow)

40. O Children of Israel! call to mind the (special) favour which I bestowed upon you, and fulfil your covenant with Me as I fulfil My Covenant with you, and fear none but Me.
47. Children of Israel! call to mind the (special) favour which I bestowed upon you, and that I preferred you to all other (for My Message).
62. Those who believe (in the Qur'an), and those who follow the Jewish (scriptures), and the Christians and the Sabians,- any who believe in Allah and the Last Day, and work righteousness, shall have their reward with their Lord; on them shall be no fear, nor shall they grieve.

the longing that each of us have for words that are TRUE, I mean really true is enormous. Our desire for truth above all is sometimes overwhelming. We scour the earth for such words: the words of God Himself. Words to believe in and to live by.
but the truest word is like the diamond or gold: rare, and hard to find, needing hours, weeks, months of hard slog to discover and then to mine . . . . I have come to the conclusion that there are many reasons why God seems to make Himself so elusive. . . .

I've got a bit carried off my point perhaps, so bear with me as I claw my way back.
There are clearly words of deepest truth in Paul and that is why they are included in the New Testament but, just as in Kings or in Isaiah or any of the prophets there are passages which speak and passages which don't and each of us must judge for ourselves as we read. "The word on the page is dead until it is read". But we shouldnt be judging too quickly. We can't expect God to speak to us line by line I think . . .
I happen to think that Deedat was wrong in his comparison of the koran and the bible because the fact that the bible is a community effort, even a tribal one, written over a period of almost a thousand years does not make it any less 'inspired'. Quite the opposite in fact. Any text which is composed by one man, however inspired passages in it may be, will be scarred by untruth, prejudice and blind spots and that is as it should be. The scarring and prejudice doesn't just happen at the writing end of course, it happens at the reading end as well - like a very bad telephone line or a dead sea scroll . . . .
My firm belief is that many of the catastrophic and divisive problems and heresies encountered in our personal lives and in the life of our church (and here I am including every single Christian who ever called himself a Christian whether Catar, catholic, presbyterian, wesleyan, aryan, shaker etc etc) is when we read a passage from scripture, take it out of context and inflate it with meanings to suit our own ends. To my mind Paul himself is saying exactly this at the beginning of Corinthians when he is talking about the Paul/ Apollos problem. Have we listened and understood or taken what he is saying on board down the bloody centuries? It scarcely seems so.
We mustn't allow ourselves to be afraid to criticise texts that we read in the Bible and that must include Paul if we are to avoid these enormous pitfalls on our communal spiritual path. Paul is not a deity whose every word was the word of God Himself. It just isn't the way in which God communicates with men and it seems to me that Paul himself is telling us exactly this in the first chapter of Corinthians. If our criticism is misjudged or off the mark (which it will be) we are, at least, exercising that judgement and will hopefully learn, over the decades, how to judge better in the hope of arriving somewhere closer to the Real Truth which is surely the only point of reading or learning anything. Time will refine our judgement until the great day comes when we can scarcely open our mouths because we know we will get it mostly wrong . . . . [I am suddenly aware that I am condemning myself here! so be it!]
I suppose my main war is against fundamentalism Blackstone. I know there is a really strong tradition in the church of 'passage-combing'. When I was a novice monk we had to spend an hour a day doing what we called 'lectio divina' which I never quite got the hang of because it tended to make me want to squeeze Meaning out of a passage which may not have been speaking to me at all and, moreover, to feel inadequate and guilty when I still couldn't make sense of it . . . . I know that passage-combing has its place, but it is just as important to read the whole lot and, above all, to read the whole bible as well, in a critical way; by which I mean, when we just don't get it, or don't like it, to say so and not be silenced by convention or blind, unquestioning reverence. We are an essential part of this story as well after all. However great the prophets of old, it is, at this particular moment in time, our very own interpretations that count: a stepping stone along the Way . . . .