Amen to all of that, Alan. I wish I could say what you said as clearly as you said it.
My personal theory is that the "passes all understanding" part of God and His Word is why so many people (e.g. Troy) are susceptible to the "it contradicts itself" and "it's fiction" and "it's just another set of stories and moral teachings" and "it's just a historical artifact of the power structures at the time of the Council of Nicea" arguments.
It's easier to put our faith in our own powers of reason than it is to put faith in someone far, far beyond us. It's easier to see how things violate the logic generated by our puny little minds, the "scientific method," "modern scholarship," and the like, than it is to admit that, well, we ain't ever going to be able to explain it all.
In one way, it may be the hardest thing for a professing Christian (or someone not ready to profess) to do. To say, "I can't figure out why this isn't a contradiction, but because I know that my mind is puny, I'm ready to say He knows, and I'll take Him on faith."
I think this is why it took some weird combination of deep exploration of Benedictine/monkish writings and repeated exposure to Baptists and other fundie types to make me personally really believe. The monks were far better than I was with higher logical abilities, garden variety Baptists turned out to be extremely well-read (way beyond me), and the fundies kept pointing out the difference between a "religion" and the faith that comes from a personal relationship with the Divine.
These incredibly bright and educated people spent more time pointing out what they didn't know (unlike my fellow academics, who profess their superior knowledge and reason at the drop of a hat, even when I knew there was insufficient empirical evidence for thieir claims).
And the fundies? Well, relationships aren't built of "knowledge", scientific, religious, or otherwise. Relationships are built of trust. And trust, as Brendan Manning and a lot of other of those highly educated and well-read types point out, is what faith is all about. I don't trust Jesus because I "know" he is correct according to the theology of Lutheranism. I can't know Him in the way I know demand curves always slope down and that market power is a function of the elasticity of demand. But because He has let me have a personal relationship with Him, I can trust him to know what I cannot. I can trust Him to have done what I could not. I can have faith in Him, even with regard to those things that my human education and my limited mind tells me are contradictory, inconsistent, and, more than anything else, impossible to explain and reason my way to.
Back to Paul in particular:
I used to be among those who was most bothered by Paul's uncompromising approach, for as everyone knows I'm an anarchist ultra-freedom advocate and hate the state. (Try making Romans 13 into something consistent with an anarchic philosophy; while I think it can be, it's not easy or simple. Some would say my explanation is the ultimate of rationalization and avoidance.) I definitely see why many fitting the "liberal" label would want to minimize his teachings for what "people" should do.
But over the years I have less and less that bothers me. Why? Because I've come to understanding that most of Paul's trademark bluntness and unwillingness to compromise is not pointed toward what I should do or think about other people. It's pointed toward me as an individual decision-maker.
It's that "personal relationship" idea again. Paul's letters are not aimed at groups or nations or societies at all. They are aimed at each of us one at a time. One of the things that makes God superior to us, one of things that He can do but we cannot. Even as many of us are reading the same words in the Word at the same time, even as He gave a sermon to hundreds at a time, He is speaking to each of us, using the same words, in a way unique and different for each.
And that is what He is doing, not just through the red letter words of the Sermon on the Mount or the Last Supper, but through the inspired letters of Paul. So when *I* read Paul (or anything else in the Bible, Old Testament or New), I need to remember that it is God instructing and guiding me. I need to approach it that way, not in ways that allow me to speak to what others are doing, shouldn't do, or must do.
Paul, and the other amanueses of God's inspiration, is not trying to tell "Christians" collectively how to behave. He's trying to tell each of us, individually, to work harder at keeping our own houses in order. Because after the encounter on the road to Damascus, everything Paul did was his own attempt to follow Christ's, and because that is what Christ did. It's not about how good Paul was at speaking or writing to groups, it's not about how correct he was in instructing believers in general how to behave. It is about how good he was at following His savior's example of instructing individual believers how to behave while talking to several of them at a time.
And funny thing is, once I started to admit that the only thing I should be reading the Bible for is for instruction in my individual personal relationship with Him, once I started seeing all the logs in my own eyes, it became easier and easier to deal with Paul's bluntness and refusal to compromise. Because *I* as an individual never have an excuse for my individual failures to follow the Great Commandment.
Some times, of course, my failures include sins of self-righteousness and judgment. I truly believe that any time I fail in that way, any time I might use the Bible as a way of telling others how *they* must behave for salvation, any time I might use the Bible as a way of labelling another's behavior sinful, I am using the Bible in a way that He doesn't intend. Because the Bible is there -- for me -- as a mirror showing *my* sins. And my sins are far too many for it to matter whether someone else is sinning in another way.
For each of us, the Bible is intended as a way to put our individual, personal, house in order. And I the individual cannot put my house in order by anything I do, negative or positive, with respect to the sinful houses of other. In fact, every time I attempt to put another's house in order, I take my attention away from my own and my own gets to be a bigger mess than ever. All I can do, as Paul says somewhere, is utterly submit myself, as if I were, because I must be, His slave in all things.
And trust that He will take care of the rest. All that truly important stuff that only He can take care of.
So, Ray, forgive me if this offends, but I shall continue to pray that you will see that important as politics and protection of the American way and American exceptionalism are in this world, they pale in comparison to the concerns that God has for you and me as individuals and that he is writing to you and me about in the books of both Old and New Testament. And, Troy, forgive me if this offends, but I shall continue to pray that you will see that, as important as it is for you to point out the failings of Tex or Gunny or me or conservatives or Republicans or tea partiers, it is far more important for you to realize the dangers of righteous anger, for none of us is righteous enough to have standing to take a position of superiority sufficient to God. None of us.
And, both of you and everyone else here, forgive me if I this offends, but I shall continue to pray that each of you will see that all of the concerns you have about this world (and how the Bible does or not apply to them) pale in comparison to the personal messages about your individual choices and your individual salvation that He is trying to send you as an individual in the Bible.
By orders of magnitude more than any of us can count.
If we are using the Bible for any reason other than getting our individual house in order, if we are using it for any reason other than figuring out how He wants each of us as individuals to follow Him, we are using it incorrectly.
This I believe.
And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God.
Romans 12:2 (NKJV)