4. Depraved Gentile society
It is important that we grasp the connection between this section (‘The wrath of God’) and the last (‘The gospel of God’). In verses 16–20 the apostle develops an argument of sustained logic. He refers successively to the power of God (16), the righteousness of God (17), the wrath of God (18) and the glory of God in creation (19–20). In addition, each statement he makes is linked to the preceding one by the Greek conjunction gar or dioti, meaning ‘for’ or ‘because’. Let me try to clarify the stages of the argument by engaging Paul in dialogue.
paul I am not ashamed of the gospel (16a).
q Why not, Paul?
paul Because it is the power of God that brings salvation to everyone who believes (16b).
q How so, Paul?
paul Because in the gospel the righteousness of God is revealed, that is, God’s way of justifying sinners (17).
q But why is this necessary, Paul?
paul Because the wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of people, who suppress the truth by their wickedness (18).
q But how have people suppressed the truth, Paul?
paul Because what may be known about God is plain to them . . . For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities . . . have been clearly seen (19–20).
We can speak, then, of a fourfold self-revelation of God, although the language of revelation is not used consistently throughout. For the sake of theological clarity I will state these divine disclosures in the opposite order:
First, God reveals his glory (his eternal power and divine nature) in his creation (19–20).
Second, he reveals his wrath against the sin of those who suppress their knowledge of the Creator (18).
Third, he reveals his righteousness (his righteous way of putting sinners right with himself) in the gospel (17).
Fourth, he reveals his power in believers by saving them (16).
A careful study of the devastating exposure of Gentile decadence which follows has suggested to some scholars that Paul was influenced both by the story of Adam’s fall in Genesis and by the Jewish critique of pagan idolatry in the book of Wisdom.
Professor Morna Hooker has written that Paul was portraying human sin ‘in relation to its true biblical setting – the Genesis narrative of the Creation and the Fall’. Others have taken this up, and it is not difficult to find parallels which echo this. For example, like Genesis 1 – 3, Paul refers to the creation of the world (20) and to the classification of its creatures into birds and animals and reptiles (23); he uses the vocabulary of glory and ‘image’ (23); he refers to the human being’s knowledge of God (19, 21), the resolve to become wise (22), the refusal to remain a dependent creature (18, 21), the exchange of God’s truth for Satan’s lie (25), and the understanding that rebellion deserves death (32; cf. 5:12ff.). From this it seems clear that Paul was writing against the general biblical background of creation and fall, although the case has not been proved that he was intentionally retelling Adam’s story.
The case is stronger that Paul was alluding to the apocryphal book of Wisdom, especially to its chapters 13–14, which is a Hellenistic Jewish polemic against pagan idolatry. Sanday and Headlam provide a table, whose columns draw attention to possible parallels between Wisdom and Romans. Certainly the Wisdom chapters contain references to the human failure to know God from his works (‘they were unable from the good things that are seen to know the one who exists’); to the sin and folly of idolatry (‘[they] give the name “gods” to the works of human hands’); to the fact that ‘the worship of idols not to be named is the beginning and cause and end of every evil’, including ‘sexual perversion’, ‘disorder in marriages’ and various social ills; and to the conclusion that those who fail to find God in his works ‘[are] not . . . to be excused’. But these similarities are picked out from a mass of inferior material, and are not close enough to suggest conscious borrowing. It seems likely that Paul was drawing more on the Old Testament prophets’ criticism of idolatry than on the book of Wisdom. I agree with Godet that there is a huge difference between Wisdom’s ‘tame and superficial explanation of idolatry’ and Paul’s ‘profound psychological analysis’.
In returning now to Paul’s text, we are confronted by his statement that the wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of people (18).
The very mention of God’s wrath nowadays causes people embarrassment and even incredulity. How can anger, they ask, which Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount equated with murder, and which Paul identified as a manifestation of our sinful human nature and as incompatible with our new life in Christ, possibly be attributed to the all-holy God? Indeed, reflection on the wrath of God raises three questions, about its nature, objects and outworking.
1. What is the wrath of God?
If we are to preserve the balance of Scripture, our definition of God’s anger must avoid opposite extremes. On the one hand, there are those who see it as no different from sinful human anger. On the other, there are those who declare that the very notion of anger as a personal attribute or attitude of God must be abandoned.
Human anger can be righteous but is mostly very unrighteous. It is an irrational and uncontrollable emotion, containing much vanity, animosity, malice and the desire for revenge. It should go without saying that God’s anger is absolutely free of all such poisonous ingredients.
The desire to eliminate any notion of God’s personal anger, as being altogether unworthy of him, is associated with the name of C. H. Dodd, whose commentary on Romans was published in 1932. He argued that ‘Paul never uses the verb “to be angry” with God as subject’, although he is often said to love, and that the noun orgē (anger) is used only three times in the expression ‘the anger of God’, whereas it occurs constantly as ‘wrath’ or ‘the wrath’, without reference to God, ‘in a curiously impersonal way’. Dodd’s conclusion is that Paul retains the concept ‘not to describe the attitude of God to man, but to describe an inevitable process of cause and effect in a moral universe’. A. T. Hanson elaborated this view in The Wrath of the Lamb (1959), maintaining that God’s wrath is ‘wholly impersonal’ and is ‘the inevitable process of sin working itself out in history’.
But the argument based on the comparative absence of the expression ‘the wrath of God’ in favour of ‘wrath’ or ‘the wrath’ is weak. For Paul does the same thing with grace. At the end of Romans 5 he writes both of ‘the grace of God’ (15), and about ‘the grace’ which he nevertheless personifies as both ‘increasing’ (20) and ‘reigning’ (21), and which is the most personal of all God’s attributes. If then ‘grace’ is God acting graciously, ‘wrath’ must be God reacting in revulsion against sin. It is his ‘deeply personal abhorrence’ of evil.
The wrath of God, then, is almost totally different from human anger. It does not mean that God loses his temper, flies into a rage, or is ever malicious, spiteful or vindictive. The alternative to ‘wrath’ is not ‘love’ but ‘neutrality’ in the moral conflict. And God is not neutral. On the contrary, his wrath is his holy hostility to evil, his refusal to condone it or come to terms with it, his just judgment upon it.
2. Against what is God’s wrath revealed?
In general, the wrath of God is directed against evil alone. We get angry when our pride has been wounded; but there is no personal pique in the anger of God. Nothing arouses it except evil, and evil always does.
More particularly, Paul writes that God’s wrath is being revealed against all the godlessness [asebeia] and wickedness [adikia] of people, who suppress the truth by their wickedness (18). According to J. B. Lightfoot, asebeia is ‘against God’ and adikia ‘against men’. Further, ‘the first precedes and entails the second: witness the teaching of this chapter’. Scripture is quite clear that the essence of sin is godlessness. It is the attempt to get rid of God and, since that is impossible, the determination to live as though one had succeeded in doing so. ‘There is no fear of God before their eyes’ (3:18). The opposite is also true. The essence of goodness is godliness, to love him with all our being and to obey him with joy.
God’s wrath is directed, however, not against ‘godlessness and wickedness’ in a vacuum, but against the godlessness and wickedness of those people who suppress the truth by their wickedness (adikia again). It is not just that they do wrong, though they know better. It is that they have made a deliberate decision to live for themselves, rather than for God and others, and therefore deliberately stifle any truth which challenges their self-centredness.
What ‘truth’ has Paul in mind? He tells us in verses 19–20. It is that knowledge of God which is available to us through the natural order. For what may be known about God (and what is knowable to finite, fallen creatures like us is inevitably limited) is nevertheless plain or open. And the reason it is plain is that God has taken the initiative and has made it plain. How? Verse 20 explains. It is that ever since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities – his eternal power and divine nature [which together constitute something of his ‘glory’, 23] – have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made. In other words, the God who in himself is invisible and unknowable has made himself both visible and knowable through what he has made. The creation is a visible disclosure of the invisible God, an understandable disclosure of the otherwise unknown God. Just as artists reveal themselves in what they draw, paint and sculpt, so the Divine Artist has revealed himself in his creation.
This truth of revelation through creation is a regular theme of Scripture. ‘The heavens declare the glory of God’, and ‘the whole earth is full of his glory’. The Job who confessed that previously he had only ‘heard’ of Yahweh, finally affirmed that through the ingenuity of the natural order his eyes had ‘seen’ him. For the living God who made all things, as Paul proclaimed to his pagan audience in Lystra, ‘has not left himself without testimony’, but has shown his kindness to the human race by his gifts of rain and crops, abundant food and overflowing joy.
Because Romans 1:19–20 is one of the principal New Testament passages on the topic of ‘general revelation’, it may be helpful to summarize how ‘general’ differs from ‘special’ revelation. God’s self-revelation through ‘what has been made’ has four main characteristics. First, it is ‘general’ because made to everybody everywhere, as opposed to ‘special’ because made to particular people in particular places, through Christ and the biblical authors. Second, it is ‘natural’ because made through the natural order, as opposed to ‘supernatural’, involving the incarnation of the Son and the inspiration of the Scriptures. Third, it is ‘continuous’ because since the creation of the world it has gone on ‘day after day . . . night after night’, as opposed to ‘final’ and finished in Christ and in Scripture. And fourth, it reveals God’s glory through creation, as opposed to revealing God’s salvation through grace in Christ.
The conviction that God reveals himself through the created universe is still meaningful to us. Christians still believe that God’s power, skill and goodness are displayed in the beauty and balance, intricacy and intelligibility of the universe, as scientists keep on probing it.
For example, a consultant surgeon wrote to me a few years ago:
I am filled with the same awe and humility when I contemplate something of what goes on in a single cell as when I contemplate the sky on a clear night. The coordination of the complex activities of the cell in a common purpose hits the scientific part of me as the best evidence for an Ultimate Purpose.
Anthropologists have also found a worldwide moral sense in human beings so that, although conscience is of course to some extent conditioned by culture, it still testifies to everybody everywhere both that there is a difference between right and wrong, and that evil deserves to be punished (32).
Paul ends his statement with the words so that people are without excuse (20). This shows that what he has been talking about is ‘natural revelation’ and not ‘natural theology (or religion)’. The latter expresses the belief that it is possible for human beings to come to know God through nature, and that therefore, as the way to God, creation is an alternative to Christ. Some people base this belief on Romans 1, especially on the expressions that they knew God (21) and that they possessed the knowledge of God (28). But there are degrees to the knowledge of God, and these phrases cannot possibly refer to the full knowledge of him enjoyed by those who have been reconciled to him through Christ. For what Paul says here is that through general revelation people can know God’s power, deity and glory (not his saving grace through Christ), and that this knowledge is enough not to save them but rather to condemn them, because they do not live up to it. Instead, they suppress the truth by their wickedness (18), so that they are without excuse (20). It is against this deliberate human rebellion that God’s wrath is revealed.
3. How is God’s wrath revealed?
The first answer to this question is that God’s wrath will be revealed in the future, at the end, in the judgment of the last day. There is such a thing as ‘the coming wrath’, and Paul calls Judgment Day ‘the day of God’s wrath’. Second, there is a present disclosure of God’s wrath through the public administration of justice, to which Paul will come later in his letter (13:4). But this is not in his mind here.
Third, there is another kind of present disclosure of the anger of God, to which the apostle will devote the rest of Romans 1. It is being revealed from heaven now, he says (18), and he goes on to explain it by his terrible threefold refrain God gave them over (24, 26, 28). When we hear of God’s wrath, we usually think of ‘thunderbolts from heaven, and earthly cataclysms and flaming majesty’, instead of which his anger goes ‘quietly and invisibly’ to work in handing sinners over to themselves. As John Ziesler writes, it ‘operates not by God’s intervention but precisely by his not intervening, by letting men and women go their own way’. God abandons stubborn sinners to their wilful self-centredness, and the resulting process of moral and spiritual degeneration is to be understood as a judicial act of God. This is the revelation of God’s wrath from heaven (18).
Let me sum up our reflection thus far on the wrath of God. It is God’s settled and perfectly righteous opposition to evil. It is directed against people who have some knowledge of God’s truth through the created order, but deliberately suppress it in order to pursue their own self-centred path. And it is already being revealed, in a preliminary way, in the moral and social corruption which Paul saw in much of the Graeco-Roman world of his time, and which we can see in our own day too.
In Paul’s exposition of the outworking of the wrath of God, he develops the same logical process of deterioration, according to the principle he has established in verses 18–20. That is, the general pattern of his argument recurs in verses 21–24, 25–27 and 28–31.
First, he asserts the people’s knowledge of God: they knew God (21), the truth about God (25) and the knowledge of God (28).
Second, he draws attention to their rejection of their knowledge in favour of idolatry: they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him (21); they exchanged the truth about God for a lie, and worshipped and served created things rather than the Creator (25); they did not think it worthwhile to retain the knowledge of God (28).
Third, he describes the reaction of God’s wrath: he gave them over . . . to sexual impurity (24), to shameful lusts (26) and to a depraved mind (28), leading to antisocial behaviour.
These are the three stages of the downward spiral of pagan depravity.
a. Verses 21–24
The opening statement that they knew God cannot be taken literally, since Paul writes elsewhere that people outside Christ do not know God. It refers rather to the limited knowledge of God’s power and glory which is available to everybody through general revelation (19–20).
Instead of their knowledge of God leading to the worship of God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him. Rather their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened (21), and (despite their claim to wisdom) they became fools (22). Their futility, darkness and folly were seen in their idolatry, and in the absurd ‘exchange’ which their idolatry involved: they exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like a mortal human being and birds and animals and reptiles (23).
What Paul saw plainly, wrote C. H. Dodd, was that Greek philosophy ‘easily came to terms with the grossest forms of superstition and immorality’. And the cultural idolatry of the West is no better. To exchange the worship of the living God for the modern obsession with wealth, fame and power is equally foolish and equally blameworthy.
God’s judgment on the people’s idolatry was to give them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity. The history of the world confirms that idolatry tends to immorality. A false image of God leads to a false understanding of sex. Paul does not tell us what kind of immorality he has in mind, except that it involved the degrading of their bodies with one another (24). He is right. Illicit sex degrades people’s humanity; sex in marriage, as God intended, enriches it.
b. Verses 25–27
Here another ‘exchange’ is mentioned, not the exchanging of the glory of God for images (23), but the exchanging of the truth about God for a lie, indeed ‘the’ lie, the ultimate lie. For this is what the falsehood of idolatry is, since it involves transferring our worship to created things from the Creator, whom Paul in a spontaneous outpouring of praise declares worthy of eternal adoration: who is for ever praised (25).
This time God gave them over to shameful lusts, which Paul specifies as lesbian practices (26) and male homosexual relationships (27). In both cases he describes the people concerned as guilty of a third ‘exchange’: the women exchanged natural sexual relations for unnatural ones (26), while the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another (27a). Twice he uses the adjective physikos (‘natural’) and once the expression para physin (‘against nature’ or ‘unnatural’). Men committed shameful acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their error (27b). Paul does not specify what this penalty is; only that it is received ‘in themselves’.
Verses 26–27 are a crucial text in the contemporary debate about homosexuality. The traditional interpretation, that they describe and condemn all homosexual behaviour, is being challenged by the gay lobby. Three arguments are advanced. First, it is claimed that the passage is irrelevant, on the ground that its purpose is neither to teach sexual ethics, nor to expose vice, but rather to portray the outworking of God’s wrath. This is true. But if a certain sexual conduct is to be seen as the consequence of God’s wrath, it must be displeasing to him. Second, ‘the likelihood is that Paul is thinking only about pederasty’ since ‘there was no other form of male homosexuality in the Greco-Roman world’, and that he is opposing it because of the humiliation and exploitation experienced by the youths involved. All one can say in response to this suggestion is that the text itself contains no hint of it.
Third, there is the question what Paul meant by ‘nature’. Some homosexual people are urging that their relationships cannot be described as ‘unnatural’, since they are perfectly natural to them. John Boswell has written, for example, that ‘the persons Paul condemns are manifestly not homosexual: what he derogates are homosexual acts committed by apparently heterosexual people’. Hence Paul’s statement that they ‘abandoned’ natural relations, and ‘exchanged’ them for unnatural (26–27). Richard Hays has written a thorough exegetical rebuttal of this interpretation of Romans 1, however. He provides ample contemporary evidence that the opposition of ‘natural’ (kata physin) and ‘unnatural’ (para physin) was ‘very frequently used . . . as a way of distinguishing between heterosexual and homosexual behaviour’. Besides, differentiating between sexual orientation and sexual practice is a modern concept; ‘to suggest that Paul intends to condemn homosexual acts only when they are committed by persons who are constitutionally heterosexual is to introduce a distinction entirely foreign to Paul’s thought-world’, in fact a complete anachronism.
So then, we have no liberty to interpret the noun ‘nature’ as meaning ‘my’ nature, or the adjective ‘natural’ as meaning ‘what seems natural to me’. On the contrary, physis (‘natural’) means God’s created order. To act ‘against nature’ means to violate the order which God has established, whereas to act ‘according to nature’ means to behave ‘in accordance with the intention of the Creator’. Moreover, the intention of the Creator means his original intention. What this was Genesis tells us and Jesus confirmed:
at the beginning the Creator ‘made them male and female’, and said, ‘For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh’ . . . So they are no longer two, but one flesh.
Then Jesus added his personal endorsement and conclusion: ‘Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.’ In other words, God created humankind male and female; God instituted marriage as a heterosexual union; and what God has thus united, we have no freedom to separate. This threefold action of God established that the only context which he intends for the ‘one flesh’ experience is heterosexual monogamy, and that a homosexual partnership (however loving and committed it may claim to be) is ‘against nature’ and can never be regarded as a legitimate alternative to marriage.
c. Verses 28–32
Paul’s opening statement in verse 28 this time includes a play on words between ouk edokimasan (they did not think it worth while) and adokimon noun (a depraved mind). It is not easy to reproduce it in English. We might say that ‘since they did not see fit to retain the knowledge of God, he gave them over to an unfit mind’.
And their depraved mind led this time not to immorality but to a whole variety of antisocial practices, which ought not to be done (28), and which together describe the breakdown of human community, as standards disappear and society disintegrates. Paul gives a catalogue of twenty-one vices. Such lists were not uncommon in those days in Stoic, Jewish and early Christian literature. All commentators seem to agree that the list cannot be neatly classified. It begins with four general sins with which these people have become filled, namely every kind of wickedness, evil, greed and depravity. Then come five more sins which they are full of and which all depict broken human relationships: envy, murder, strife, deceit and malice (29). Next come a couple on their own, which seem to refer to libel and slander. These two are followed by four which seem to portray different and extreme forms of pride: God-haters, insolent, arrogant and boastful. Now comes another independent couple of words, denoting people who are ‘inventive’ in relation to evil and rebellious in relation to parents (30). And the list ends with four negatives: no understanding, no fidelity, no love, no mercy (31).
Verse 32 is a concluding summary of what Paul has been describing. First, they know. Yet again he begins with the knowledge possessed by the people he is depicting. It is not now God’s truth that they know, however, but God’s righteous decree, namely that those who do such things deserve death. As he will write later, ‘the wages of sin is death’ (6:23). And they know it. Their conscience condemns them.
Second, they nevertheless disregard their knowledge. They not only continue to do these very things, which they know deserve death, but (what is worse) they actively encourage others to do the same, and so flagrantly approve the evil behaviour of which God has expressed his disapproval.
We have come to the end of Paul’s portrayal of depraved Gentile society. Its essence lies in the contrast between what people know and what they do. God’s wrath is specifically directed against those who deliberately suppress truth for the sake of evil. Paul was not exaggerating.