If there is one character in the New Testament who polarises Christians more than any other, it is probably the Apostle Paul.

From his bold statements and sweeping judgements to harsh proclamations, there have been plenty of times when I have heard an intake of breath as a reading from one of his letters comes up. Paul can write some of the most beautiful words in the Bible about love, grace, hope and the astonishing equality of people in Christ. Then, sometimes only a few pages later, he says something that leaves modern readers wondering what on earth they are supposed to do with it.

There are passages about women remaining silent, wives submitting to their husbands and slaves obeying their masters. There are statements about sexuality that remain at the centre of some of Christianity’s most painful disagreements. At one point, Paul tells a church to hand someone over to Satan. Elsewhere, he appears to suggest that God deliberately hardens some people while showing mercy to others.

It would probably be madness to write an article focusing entirely on some of those passages.

Which is why I decided to do just that.

My purpose is not to explain Paul away. Sometimes, historical context changes a passage considerably. Sometimes the Greek opens possibilities that our English translations hide.

And sometimes, if we are being honest, the passage remains difficult.

So here are seven things Paul said that Christians are still trying to understand.

1. “Women should remain silent in the churches”

Few verses have generated more argument than Paul’s instruction in 1 Corinthians that women should remain silent in church.

Taken by itself, the meaning appears brutally straightforward. Women should not speak during Christian worship. The problem is that Paul himself appears to contradict that interpretation only three chapters earlier.

In 1 Corinthians 11, Paul discusses women praying and prophesying during worship. He does not tell them to stop. In fact, his argument assumes that they are speaking publicly. Whatever else prophecy involved in the early church, silence was not one of its obvious characteristics.

So what has happened by chapter 14?

There are several possibilities. Some scholars believe Paul is prohibiting a particular kind of speech rather than all speech. The surrounding discussion is about disorder in worship, leading some to suggest Paul is addressing a specific problem rather than creating a universal rule.

Then there is an even more fascinating possibility. Some scholars have argued that these verses were not originally written by Paul at all but began life as a marginal comment that was eventually copied into the text. There are reasons to take that theory seriously, although there is an obvious difficulty: every surviving manuscript of 1 Corinthians contains those verses.

None of those explanations is universally accepted.

But one thing seems difficult to maintain: that Paul simply believed women must never speak in worship. His own letter shows women doing exactly that.

2. “I do not permit a woman to teach”

If 1 Corinthians is complicated, 1 Timothy 2 ramps up the discomfort we might feel.

Paul, or the writer using Paul’s name, if you accept the widely debated view that the Pastoral Epistles were written after Paul’s death, says:

“I do not permit a woman to teach or to assume authority over a man.”

For some Christians, the meaning is clear. Teaching and positions of authority within the church are reserved for men. For others, the verse addresses a particular crisis in Ephesus and should never have been turned into a universal rule.

The difficulty begins with one unusual Greek word: authentein. It appears nowhere else in the New Testament, and scholars continue to disagree over precisely what it means here. It can be translated as exercising authority, but some argue that it carries a more negative sense of domineering, seizing or misusing authority.

Then there is the context. 1 Timothy repeatedly warns about false teaching, myths and unhelpful speculation within the Ephesian church. Some scholars, therefore, believe Paul was responding to a particular problem involving false teaching in Ephesus.

Priscilla helps teach Apollos in Acts, and Paul elsewhere speaks positively about women who prophesy and participate significantly in Christian ministry.

Again, the answer is not as simple as either side sometimes makes it out to be.

3. “Slaves, obey your earthly masters”

This may be the passage I find personally hardest to soften.

Paul tells enslaved Christians to obey their earthly masters.

It is important to understand ancient slavery accurately. Greco-Roman slavery was not organised around race in the way Atlantic chattel slavery later became. Enslaved people occupied an enormous range of roles; some earned money, became highly educated, and could eventually be freed.

But none of that makes slavery acceptable.

Enslaved people were still owned. They could be exploited, beaten and sexually abused. Their lives ultimately belonged to somebody else. And Paul never says the sentence most of us wish he had said:

No human being should own another human being.

There are certainly signs that his theology pushes in another direction. In Galatians, Paul declares that in Christ there is neither slave nor free. In Ephesians, masters are reminded that they and their slaves share the same Master in heaven and that God shows no favouritism. In the tiny letter to Philemon, Paul asks that Onesimus be welcomed back “no longer as a slave” but as a beloved brother.

Those ideas contain explosive implications. Yet Paul never turns those implications into an explicit abolitionist command.

Perhaps he was accommodating a social institution so embedded in the Roman world that he did not directly challenge it. Maybe he was planting theological ideas that would eventually undermine it. Both could be true.

Whatever answer we prefer, I think we should resist making the passage less uncomfortable than it actually is.

4. Paul’s words about same-sex relationships

Romans 1 remains one of the most contested passages in modern Christianity, to such an extent that I write this with some trepidation.

Paul describes men abandoning relations with women and becoming “inflamed with lust” for one another. He also speaks about women exchanging what he calls natural relations for unnatural ones.

For traditional Christian interpreters, the passage seems clear. Paul understands same-sex sexual relationships as contrary to God’s created intention for humanity.

The sexual world Paul inhabited looked very different from ours. Pederasty, prostitution, relationships shaped by social status and power, and various forms of exploitation were widespread.

Some, therefore, argue that Paul’s concern is with exploitative relationships or uncontrolled sexual desire rather than every imaginable form of same-sex relationship. Others respond that Paul’s language is broad enough to include same-sex behaviour generally.

That debate will not be solved in a paragraph, and I have no intention of pretending otherwise. But the sentence that follows may be the one we most often overlook. Paul turns his attention from the person being judged to the person doing the judging.

“You, therefore, have no excuse, you who pass judgement on someone else.”

The uncomfortable possibility is that Paul’s first concern was not simply to identify what was wrong with other people, but to expose our tendency to use moral failure to feel superior. Suddenly, the reader who has been comfortably identifying everybody else’s sins find themselves under examination.

Whatever Romans 1 ultimately means for Christian sexual ethics, Paul does not appear to have written it simply to provide us with a list of people we are entitled to condemn.

5. “Wives, submit yourselves to your husbands”

Ephesians 5:21 may be one of the most quoted lines Paul ever wrote:

“Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ.”

Then comes the famous instruction to wives.

There is an interesting grammatical detail here. In the earliest Greek text, verse 22 does not actually repeat the verb “submit”. It depends upon the wording of verse 21. The thought flows directly from mutual submission into the discussion of marriage.

That does not mean Paul was secretly writing a twenty-first-century marriage guide two thousand years early. He still uses language about husbands as heads and wives submitting to husbands, and interpreters continue to disagree over what authority those words imply.

But the other half of the instruction is often treated far too casually. Husbands are commanded to love their wives as Christ loved the church. And how did Christ love the church?

By giving himself up for it.

Whatever authority Paul imagined a Christian husband possessing, he immediately redefines it in terms of sacrifice rather than domination. In a society where household codes generally assumed male authority, that was a significant shift.

Paul works within the household structure of his world, but he also places pressure on that structure by redefining authority around self-sacrifice.

6. “Hand this man over to Satan”

Every now and then, Paul says something that sounds completely wild to modern ears.

This is one of those occasions.

A serious sexual scandal has developed within the Corinthian church, and Paul is furious that the community appears proud rather than disturbed by it. His solution is extraordinary:

“Hand this man over to Satan for the destruction of the flesh.”

If your local church announced that at the next annual meeting, I suspect attendance might rise considerably.

Yet the phrase probably means something less supernatural than it sounds. Paul appears to be calling for the man to be expelled from the Christian community. To hand someone over to Satan, therefore, was effectively to remove them from the protection and fellowship of the community.

Even so, Paul’s language remains severe, yet a detail changes the way I hear it. The sentence does not end with destruction.

Paul says this should happen “so that his spirit may be saved on the day of the Lord.”

The goal, strangely enough, is restoration.

What initially sounds like a curse is intended as discipline severe enough to provoke repentance. Whether we are comfortable with Paul’s method is another question entirely, but his purpose is not simply to punish someone he dislikes.

He still hopes to get him back.

7. “God has mercy on whom he wants… and hardens whom he wants”

And then we reach Romans 9.

Paul has been wrestling with one of the greatest theological problems of his life. If Israel is God’s chosen people, why have so many rejected the Messiah Paul believes God has sent? His argument takes him through Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Esau and eventually Pharaoh.

Then he writes:

“God has mercy on whom he wants to have mercy, and he hardens whom he wants to harden.”

The obvious objection comes almost immediately. If God hardens people, how can he then blame them for being hard? Paul knows exactly what the reader is thinking because he asks the question himself:

“Then why does God still blame us? For who is able to resist his will?”

This is where many modern readers expect the neat explanation, but it never really arrives.

Christians have built entire theological traditions around these verses. Some see unconditional election: God freely determines whom he will save. Others argue that Paul is speaking less about individual destinies and more about God’s purposes through history. Others still emphasise that Pharaoh repeatedly hardens his own heart before God is described as hardening it.

The tension remains.

Paul seems determined to affirm God’s freedom without removing human responsibility.

Exactly how those two things fit together has been a subject of debate among Christians ever since.

Perhaps the difficult part is not Paul

After working through these passages, something else begins to become obvious.

Every Christian interprets Paul.

We have to.

Most Christians do not greet one another with a holy kiss, despite Paul’s repeated instruction to do so. Most Christian women in Western churches no longer cover their heads during worship. Very few Christians believe slavery is morally acceptable simply because Paul told enslaved people to obey their masters.

Whether we realise it or not, we make interpretive decisions. We decide which instructions belong particularly to their culture, which principles continue beyond their original setting, and how different passages should be weighed alongside one another.

The awkward question is whether we consistently apply those principles.

I do not think the answer is to abandon Scripture whenever it makes us uncomfortable. Nor do I think we should twist difficult texts until they conveniently agree with everything twenty-first-century society already believes. But perhaps we should become more honest about what reading Scripture actually involves.

There is no interpretation-free version of the Bible sitting somewhere waiting to be discovered.

We read ancient texts written in languages most of us do not speak, addressed to communities we have never visited, living within cultures very different from our own. We inevitably make judgements about language, context, history, theology and application.

That does not make Scripture less valuable. If anything, I think it requires us to approach it with greater humility.

Paul wrote some extraordinary things. Some beautiful, Some difficulty. Some, I suspect, Christians will still be arguing about long after all of us are gone.

Perhaps that is not because Scripture has failed.

Perhaps it is because Scripture is asking more of us than simply finding a verse and declaring the matter decided.

Perhaps the difficult passages are not obstacles to faith, but invitations to approach God’s word with the humility it deserves