I just love questions like these. Not long ago, a regular reader and writer, "J. C.", wrote me with this from an e-mail he received from a skeptical associate. I've edited the content slightly to protect the privacy of the original writer.

[Paul] seems to be confused about his sin...In Romans 7:14-8:1 Paul very complexly says, "I do not understand what I do(sin). For what I want to do(good) I do not do, but what I hate(sin) I do." He is still doing what he does not want to do(he is still sinning) He continues with such lunacy as to say that "it is no longer I myself who do it, but it is sin living in me. I know that nothing good lives in me, that is, in my sinful nature." This moron says here that sin is still living in him...his sinful nature is still inside him after his conversion! Look at Paul now in 2 Corinthians 5:16-21...specifically vs 17: "...if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone (sinful nature), the new has come (christlike nature)! Now if Paul is not in Christ then there is no paradox. But that also means a child of the devil wrote most of the New Testament...If Paul is in Christ you Christians have a huge problem...Paul has just told you that you have a new nature...no, wait, didn't he say that it was the sin living in him that made him do what he doesn't want to do? Oh yeah, I'm sorry, that is why I don't believe crap about Jesus...

Well, what we have here, frankly, is yet another example of someone who is ignorantly following the sort of dictum laid down by McKinsey to "read the Bible like a newspaper." What is far better is to read it within the context of the society it was written, and that's what solves the alleged problem here.

The problem is that our critical pal is reading Romans 7:14ff as though Paul were describing his own present experience...sound the buzzer! What Paul is actually doing here is engaging in a typical Greco-Roman rhetorical practice (also found in Jewish literature, including the Qumran Psalms) in which the personal "I" and the present tense is used as a literary convention.

Where the personal "I" is combined with the present tense, the author is utilizing a practice called "speech in character" to represent a universal experience. Here, Paul is bringing out the universal experience of those who do not know Christ (and that did include him, at one time) and their struggle with moral law and sin. He is not giving a biographical account of his present experience as our critic supposes.

So then -- it seems that one reason people like this have problems believing "crap about Jesus" is because they don't know how to read the text in context. Beyond this, our reader doesn't have a firm grasp on what it means to have a "new nature" -- it never means that someone no longer sins. But that's a topic for another question....