People have used Paul to justify Paul to me. Paul says that “all scripture is God-breathed”. (From Timothy 3:16-17) They use this as proof that whatever Paul says is from God.
The problem is that Paul wasn’t talking about his own words. Paul was writing letters to other people. His words weren’t considered Scripture at the time he wrote them. That was many years later.
Scripture is indeed God-breathed. It is inspired, in-spired. To “respire” is to breathe. We get the word Spirit from that root – spirit and breath are the same. It means the same thing. So the Holy Spirit is the breath of God.
It is what makes humans different. When God created Adam and Eve, God breathed into Adam to give him life. God didn’t do this for animals.
Some of what Paul says is helpful, but some of it is divisive. Some of his words go against the basic command of Jesus to love our neighbors as ourselves. There is nothing uplifting or loving about telling women to shut up. (1 Corinthians 14:34-35) There is nothing loving about telling gay people (or anybody) that they are going to hell. (1 Timothy 9-10, among others)
Judging people isn’t our job. Our job is to look after ourselves. Paul says that we are to nicely tell off other people in order to correct them (1 Timothy 5:20, among others).
Jesus tells us otherwise. Jesus says that we should look out for the plank in our own eyes and not the speck in our neighbor’s eye (Matthew 7:3-5, among others). Jesus tells us that whatever we use to measure others will be used to measure ourselves (Matthew 7:2). Thus – don’t judge at all.
It is important to always compare the words of anyone who says they act on the behalf of God with the words of Jesus. If what they say isn’t showing love to God and to all of God’s children (everybody), then what they say isn’t in fact “God breathed.”
betsybeadhead 
Please let me preface this by saying that I completely agree with you that we should not judge each other. Jesus does tell us to love each other and to examine the plank in our own eye.
However, I believe that if you start to say one part of the Bible is valid while another is not, that you are standing on dangerous ground. Jesus did not write the Gospels. They were Spirit inspired and God breathed, but written by men, just like Paul’s letters. And around the same time, too. Paul met the disciples, and talked with them about God. They were all alive at the same time. So to say that Paul’s letters do not count as God breathed Scripture because they were not a part of the Bible at the time they were written is to allow the probability that the writings about Jesus are not valid either.
The Bible is either the unerring Word of God and complete and perfect, or it is not and we can’t trust any part of it.
Jesus Himself had a great deal to say about sin and hell (Matt. 25:41, Mark 9:43-48, Matt. 5:22, Matt. 7:13-14, Matt. 8:12, Matt. 10:28, Matt. 25:46, Mark 3:29, Luke 16:19-31). He made it abundantly clear that there is a hell and people will go there. He came to die for our sins to save us from hell, but we have to accept that sacrifice in order to benefit from it.
The difference between Jesus and the stereotypical modern day Christian is that Jesus loved first, and when people got a hold of that message of love, they left their sin behind in favor of it. Many Christians now preach sin first, and in our easily offended generation, people are turned off by the notion that what they are doing is wrong.
Again, I completely agree with you that it is wrong for us to judge others. Only the Holy Spirit can convict someone of their sin. However, completely ignoring someone’s sin and not warning them of hell isn’t love either. That’s like telling a cancer patient that they don’t need treatment and won’t die without it, even though we know otherwise.
There is a fine line between love and judgment and many people today are failing to show compassion. But the bottom line is, either we accept everything Jesus said, including sin and hell, or we accept none of it. Either the Bible is true in its entirety, or it is not. And if it is, we cannot truly love someone without warning them of the consequences of sin.
Thank you for this post and the last one (“But I’m not Judgmental”) , they definitely gave me a lot to think about, and the message of not judging is certainly a very important one that I wish more Christians today would pick up on.
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