The Letters of Paul and Issues of Canon

My New Testament class has been studying the letters of Paul--week after week, on and on.  I haven't changed my mind about Paul; I still find his prose dense and inelegant and in need of specificity.  Paul was writing for specific churches dealing with specific problems, and frankly, most of his advice is not really applicable universally.  His letters are interesting to me historically, but I am still baffled at how much the Church has been shaped by these letters, especially in terms of how we police behavior--baffled and irritated.

It's especially irritating when I consider that Paul thought that Christ would be returning during his lifetime and during the lifetime of the readers of the letters.  He wasn't writing for people centuries later.  He wasn't trying to shape the future church.

In class on Tuesday night, we talked about issues of canonization--how did the New Testament come to exist?  I was cautious about my comments.  I know that some of my classmates are likely to have a very different view than mine.  I do not see the Bible as the inerrant word of God.  I believe that God can be revealed in the Bible, but I also believe that God can be revealed in nature.  I know that books were chosen, and I don't believe those choices were always pure.  Those people had other agendas.  I know that work got lost, and some of that work might have been a better choice.  I know that books that survived several centuries might have been rejected for a variety of reasons.

I am also aware of how hard it was to preserve words and ideas in the ancient world.  It is hard in our current time too, but hard in different ways.

On Tuesday night, our professor asked us what letters of Paul's seem worthy of preservation, and I had to say none of them, outside of historical interest.  I raised my hand and said that if I never had a chance to read Paul's letters ever again, I wouldn't be sad, the way I would if I couldn't access the Gospels, if I had to rely on memory.  The Jesus revealed in the Gospels is much more compelling than the Jesus revealed in any of the epistles.

And it's through Paul's letters that I see how the Church came to be a church that talks about personal sin, not societal sin.  I could make a case that it's through/because of Paul's letters that we have the substitutionary atonement theology, that Jesus was crucified because that was the only way to appease an angry God.  Those developments make me sad.

There's just not much in these letters that helps in my spiritual development.  I try to imagine the early church who found these letters so relevant that they went to the significant expense and time to copy them out for each other.  It's not something I would do.