Romans 1.18-25
Richard Taylor was an American philosopher and an internationally renown beekeeper. In his celebrated 1963 book Metaphysics, Taylor invites readers to imagine a man who is hiking in the woods and comes upon, out of the blue, a translucent sphere.
Obviously, Taylor points out, the man would be shocked by the strangeness of the object, and he’d wonder just how it should happen to be there, floating in the middle of the forest. More to the point, the hiker would never be able to swallow the notion that it just happened to be there, without cause or any possibility of further explanation. Such a suggestion would strike him as silly. But, Taylor argues, what the hiker has failed to notice is how he might ask that same question just as well about any other object in the woods—say, a rock or a tree or a spider web or a little boy—as about this strange sphere.
He fails to do so only because it rarely occurs to us to interrogate the mysteries of the things around us.
We’d be curious about a sphere suddenly floating in the forest, but as far as existence is concerned, everything is in a sense out of place.
Taylor says you can imagine that sphere stretched out to the size of the universe or shrunken to a grain of sand, as everlasting or fleeting, and it doesn’t change the wonder.
As Taylor writes:
“This illustrates the fact that something that is mysterious ceases to seem so simply by its accustomed presence. It is strange indeed, for example, that a world such as ours should exist; yet few people are very often struck by this strangeness but simply take it for granted.
Suppose, then, that you have found this translucent ball and are mystified by it. Now whatever else you might wonder about it, there is one thing you would hardly question; namely, that it did not appear there all by itself, that it owes its existence to something. You might not have the remotest idea whence and how it came to be there, but you would hardly doubt that there was an explanation. The idea that it might have come from nothing at all, that it might exist without there being any explanation of its existence, is one that few people would consider worthy of entertaining.
The principle involved here has been called the principle of sufficient reason. Actually, it is a very general principle, and it is best expressed by saying that, in the case of any positive truth, there is some sufficient reason for it, something that, in this sense, makes it true—in short, that there is some sort of explanation, known or unknown, for everything.”
What does that all that mean?
It means every little detail and moment of our lives is a marvel no less than that sphere in the forest. It means every part of our lives together is a wonder of which we could ask, “Why this instead of nothing?” It means everything around us is not necessary at all, not “natural” unto itself, and as such, it’s charged, all of it, with the immediacy of God. It’s all gift. Everything, all of it, betrays the finger and foot prints of Almighty God, Maker of Heaven and Earth.
Everywhere God is up in our face.
And yet from a great many of us, God gets our back.
The word of the Lord fell upon the prophet Jeremiah, saying, “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you.” The Lord appointed the prophet to preach to the people of Jerusalem about their impending doom, warning them that if they did not repent, their city would be destroyed and they would be carried away captive.
Unlike the reckoning preached by prophets like Jeremiah, Paul does not announce a pending possibility.
According to the apostle, God’s wrath is already.
Though the ancient heretic Marcion eliminated the word God from the genitival phrase, Paul’s epistle nevertheless reads, “For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who hold the truth imprisoned in the chains of their unrighteousness.” The apostle, unlike the prophets, proclaims God’s wrath after the fact. The Lord’s wrath is a present reality rather than a future judgment exactly because its revelation is the underside of the gospel.
Quite simply, the promise presupposes our plight.
If the redemption of the cosmos required the death of God’s Son, if the law itself led God’s people to push him out of the world on a cross, if God will brook no good works of our own, then humanity’s bondage to sin is total and we are without hope.
In other words, in this passage, Paul essentially reasons that if the word of the cross is the good news, then the bad news must be bad indeed.
This is why it’s a non sequitur to argue that the Old Testament lacks a doctrine of original sin. It does so necessarily, for humanity’s disordered depravity only becomes visible in light of the “now time” of the gospel; the gospel reveals human captivity even as it overthrows it. The world which crucifies God is precisely a world that God, in his wrath, has already handed over to its own desires, saying to the world, “Not my will but thy will be done.”
Having announced God’s powerful saving action in the gospel, here in the latter half of chapter one Paul takes up the gospel’s double meaning— namely, the unveiling of God’s wrath in the face of universal human rebellion against him. Starting in verse eighteen and extending all the way to the end of chapter three, Paul mounts an all-encompassing indictment of humanity that can account for the peculiar means by which the Lord makes us righteous, nude faith.
Paul begins his charging document by identifying a single sin under which all other sins are subsidiary.
We imprison the truth, as Karl Barth translates verse eighteen.
And then Paul repeats the point three times in two verses. What is not visible is clearly visible. But we shut our eyes to the obvious. We suppress acknowledgment of God as Maker of Heaven and Earth. We break the first commandment which makes the keeping of all other commandments incidental.
In sum, the problem with the human condition is a failure to recognize the human condition; specifically, there is a God and you are not him.
You are the Creator’s handiwork and, as a creature, you are headed straight back to the dust from whence you came. So who in the hell are you to live as though you are in charge of your life? Or as Paul puts our problem, “They did not glorify or give thanks to God as God.”
Indeed shutting our eyes to the givenness of God— what Barth calls the Passion of the Truth, the suffering of the Truth— constitutes Paul’s only attribution of agency to human beings.
Just this week, a seminary student in the Midwest emailed me, asking, “I know that faith is a gift from God and salvation rests on faith alone. But I'm curious to know what you would say our role in salvation is— if any.”
And Paul answers her question here, “We suppress the truth of him who holds us in existence.”
In his book the Experience of God, my former teacher David Bentley Hart ridicules those who turn their backs to the God who shows up in our face everywhere, everyday.
Hart writes:
“An absolutely convinced atheist, it often seems to me, is simply someone who has failed to notice something very obvious—or, rather, failed to notice a great many very obvious things…It may be that the atheist lacks not any conceptual means but rather the very experience of existence itself.
Just to make clear what my peculiar prejudices are, I acknowledge up front that I do not regard atheism as an intellectually valid or even cogent position; in fact, I see it as a fundamentally irrational view of reality, which can be sustained only by a tragic absence of curiosity or a fervently resolute will to believe the absurd. More simply, I am convinced that the case for belief in God is inductively so much stronger than the case for unbelief that true atheism must be regarded as a superstition, often nurtured by an infantile wish to live in a world proportionate to one’s own hopes or conceptual limitations.
Atheism misses the whole point of talk of creation: God would be just as necessary even if all that existed were a collection of physical laws and quantum states, from which no ordered universe had ever arisen; for neither those laws nor those states could exist of themselves.”
That is to say—
Even if God had never spoken the stars into the sky nor brought you to be, the simple math to compute the tip on your restaurant tab logically necessitates the existence of God.
That 1 + 1 = 2 is by itself sufficient reason to believe, an argument from design.
Everywhere the fact of God is up in your face.
And, more often than not, God gets our back.
But, to make this a matter of philosophical diversion only exacerbates the indictment with which Paul accuses all of us.
To believe or not to believe—
It is not the stuff of speculation.
It is a question whose answer, so to speak, has the ability to alter our DNA.
For Paul, the correlative to sin is not the law but creation.
Much like the Book of Proverbs, which rarely speaks of sin in reference to a moral code, Paul can begin by indicting all of humanity, most of whom have not the law, because sin is more fundamentally a disordered response to reality.
All sins are secondary to our overarching failure to acknowledge God as Creator.
Paul takes it as obvious that the beautiful world and the goodness of life comes from a Giver— life is as incontrovertibly miraculous as a blue sphere suspended before you in the forest. Just so, to express one’s gratitude to that Giver is not only right and beautiful in itself but an indication that one is properly ordered to— in tune with— the goodness of creation. Hence, sin is far more egregious than the violation of rules and deeply more problematic than “missing the mark.” It is, in Paul’s terms, a suppression of and willful blindness toward the obvious truth of human dependence on God. We did not make our world. You did not create your child. And when we defy its order and goodness with our greed, malice, slander, lust, etc., when we make ourselves the arbiters of life, we assume the right of creators to define the terms of their own existence.
Such is the lie— the passion of the truth— implicit in every sin.
Moreover, to fail to practice gratitude to the Giver is to show oneself insensitive to, and at odds with, creation’s goodness, an aberration from which inevitably other perversions of goodness follow, infecting and corrupting every aspect of life.
This is the straightforward claim in the passage.
As the American Standard Version renders it:
“For revealed is a wrath of God from heaven against all impiety and unrighteousness of men who hinder the truth in unrighteousness, because that which is known of God is manifest in them, for God manifested it to them. For the invisible things of him since the creation of the world are clearly seen, being perceived through the things that are made, even his everlasting power and divinity, that they may be without excuse. Because, knowing God, they did not glorify him as God, nor give thanks, but became vain in their reasonings, and their senseless hearts were darkened.”
We speak of the worship of God as though its a simple matter of Sunday morning attendance and that the decision to stay home, play golf, or heed the demands of travel sports is a morally neutral choice. Meanwhile, according to scripture, when God is not worshipped and glorified the primary faculties of our thinking and perceiving become distorted, “their senseless hearts were darkened.”
When God is not worshipped and glorified the primary faculties of our thinking and perceiving become distorted
If Paul were writing to the church today, he might say that the failure to worship God as God permanently altered our DNA because his precise point here is that the corrupting effects of the fall are as irreversible as they are universal. We were all born into a world downstream of Paul’s diagnosis. You can post the Ten Commandments in every room in the world and it will not matter. It will not make us righteous. It cannot lighten and enliven our hearts— that darkness cannot be undone. Just as there are no excuses, there is no hope. Knowledge of the true God, exclusive worship of him alone, obedience unto him and no other, those possibilities are gone. They disappeared for you before you entered the world. Human nature cannot now recover because, somewhere east of Eden, God gave us over to what we want.
THERE IS NO HOPE.
Writing on the first commandment, Robert Jenson restates the underside of Paul’s gospel:
“In Genesis’ account of creation, the great theme is: “God said, ‘Let there be . . . .’ and there was . . . and it was good.” God speaks Torah even where there is nothing, and even so is obeyed; the existence of creatures is exactly this obedience. To hear God’s command is, therefore, to be refreshed in my very being.
It follows that not to obey God’s commandments is not to be. It would seem further to follow that if I once am disobedient, I cannot again obey, there now being no one there to do so. And these are indeed the drastic truths: sin is death, and renewal of obedience demands nothing less than new creation.”
This should not be a surprising claim.
Of course! Rejection of the One in whose image we are made corrupts human nature to its vanishing point.
Of course! Rejection of our creature-hood makes us less than human.
Of course! Our nature being so corrupted we engage in acts whose wrongness should be as obvious as the philosopher’s sphere.
This past week the Wall Street Journal published an article by Katherine Blunt entitled, “The Influencer Is a Young Teenage Girl. The Audience Is 92% Adult Men.”
If you blanche or hesitate at Paul’s totalizing indictment, I encourage you to read it.
In it, Blunt reports on a Midwestern mother who, three years ago as a pandemic-era diversion, started an Instagram account for her preteen daughter. A former marketing director, the mother thought that she and her daughter could bond by sharing photos of the girl dancing, modeling, and living life in small town America.
Quickly, the mother’s daughter amassed followers. Soon, photographers offered to take professional shots for the girl. Not long after, brands began sending free apparel for the girl to model.
“We didn’t even have the page for a month, and brands were like, “Can we send her dance-wear?’” the mom said. “She became popular really fast.”
Unsurprisingly, the mom eventually noticed a disturbing trend in the data that showed up on the Instagram's account dashboard.
Most of the preteen girl’s followers were older adult men.
Men left public comments on photos of the girl with fire and heart emojis, telling her how she was gorgeous.
Other comments, direct messages, photos, and links left by adult men I cannot utter here.
The girl’s mother told the Wall Street Journal reporter that soon after starting the Instagram account, she had to devote two to four hours a day to blocking followers or deleting inappropriate comments.
At the same time, the mother excitedly counted the sponsorships and brand deals and money that came their way.
With her mother’s encouragement, the girl announced that her “dream job” in the future when she became an adult was to become an influencer.
The girl’s mom explained to the reporter, “It wasn’t like I was trying to push her to be a star, but part of me thought it was inevitable, that it could happen someday. She just has that personality.”
And the mom divulged to the reporter that her daughter’s aspiration's left her in a bind:
“To reach the influencer stratosphere, the account would need a lot more followers—and she would have to be less discriminating about who they were. Instagram promotes content based on engagement, and the male accounts she had been blocking tend to engage aggressively, lingering on photos and videos and boosting them with likes or comments. Running them off, or broadly disabling comments, would likely doom her daughter’s influencer aspirations. That was a reason to say no. There were also reasons to say yes. The mom felt the account had brought her closer with her daughter, and even second- and third-tier influencers can make tens of thousands of dollars a year or more. The money could help pay for college, the mom thought.”
The mom said yes.
And with that, she grew to accept a grim reality: Being a young influencer on Instagram means building an audience including large numbers of predators. . . .
Katherine Blunt’s reporting then goes on to document how the girl’s Instagram account became so entangled with profanity and predation that it’s parent company Meta— not the girl’s mother— shut down the account. The article ends with mother and daughter expressing regret and relief.
Regret that Instagram removed the girl’s account.
And relief— relief that they had created a backup account.
“…they became vain in their reckonings, and their senseless hearts were darkened.”
You do not need a commandment that explicitly states, “Thou shalt not pimp out your daughter before pedophiles,” to know that it’s wrong.
That girl’s mother has no excuse.
Nevertheless, even as we judge the girl’s mother in our hearts, Paul’s charging document does not stop until every last one of us is caught in its indictment.
Raise your hands (in your hearts) if this accusation fingers you:
“Since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a debased mind and to things that should not be done. They were filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, covetousness, malice. Full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, craftiness, they are gossips, slanderers, God-haters, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, rebellious towards parents, foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless. They know God’s decree, that those who practice such things deserve to die—yet they not only do them but even applaud others who practice them.”
When Paul finally wraps up this indictment with the words, “There is no distinction…all have fallen short of the glory of God…” he’s breaking the news that there is NO HOPE FOR ANY OF US.
There is no hope. Forget about being saved by God. We cannot even know the true God with our darkened hearts and debased minds.
THERE IS NO HOPE.
From our side.
That’s the underside of the gospel.
Turn it over though…
Our only hope is that it’s true.
Our only hope is that this little word, not nearly as obvious and obtrusive as the philosopher’s blue sphere, is true, “Jesus lives for you.”
With our darkened hearts and debased minds, this little word— this little word, not the golf course and not purple mountains’s majesty— is the only place the true God can be found. And your faith in it is your only escape from the wrath of God we are already in.
So come to the table.
You have sufficient reason.
The bread that is his body and the wine that is his blood— the creatures of his promise to you for you— are not only your righteousness, they are your rehabilitation.
Eating, in faith, alters your DNA.
The Passion of the Truth