Pistis Christou

The most famous theological controversy of the 20th century I affectionately called the episode of ontological rage. Emil Brunner makes a well-known attempt to try to incorporate a sense of natural theology for Christian theology through making a differentiation of the material and formal aspects of God’s image in human persons. Karl Barth’s even louder “Nein!” was the theological shot heard around theological world, having nothing to do with this sort of business. While the writings of the two delve into other focuses such as the right way to understand John Calvin, the discussion hinged on a matter of ontology: is the image of God entirely defaced and thus incapable of understanding God or is there still something within the person that can give them a point of contact?

It is my contention the Apostle Paul had a similar split with his Jewish contemporaries from a reading of Romans, where he shifts the focus from natural theology as mentioned in Romans 1-2 to Jesus Christ and the Spirit in the rest of the letter.

Now, at first blush, this doesn’t seem like a novel proposition. Douglas Campbell in his tome The Deliverance of God: An Apocalyptic Rereading of Justification in Paul makes a case for a reading of Romans where Paul presents the views of his opposition that he responds to with a different position; Romans 1.20 falls under the views of the oppositional teacher that Paul encodes into Romans. In this case, Paul isn’t portrayed as accepting any natural theology but, by implication, is decisively rejecting it.

The strength of Campbell’s reading is that his close reading of Romans has allowed him to pick up the subtle differences in the argumentation that Paul has in different parts of Romans. However, I would contend the greatest weakness in Campbell’s argument is how he relates these two different theological patterns as pertain to two different people with conflicting views. Campbell has set up Romans as essentially a polemical text where the views of antithetical. In other words, Campbell has set up his reading of Romans as if there are two, mutually exclusive views that are expressed. Such way of framing a contention can be apropos when one is dealing with paradigmatic, systematic, and propositional thinking of a more formal logic: mutual exclusivity is profligate in such a discursive and argumentative context. ¹ However, I would suggest the way Paul opens and closes the first major section of Romans, 1.18-32 and 8.31-39, suggests that Paul is not engaging in such systematic thinking but that he is engaging in more narratival thinking.

Jerome Bruner succinctly describes the difference between narratival and paradigmatic thinking as “arguments convince one of their truth, stories of their lifelikeness.”² Whereas paradigmatic discourse “is regulated by requirements of consistency and noncontradiction,” the narrative imagination expresses itself in believable accounts but is not concerned about analytic conceptions of ‘truth.’³ This is not to declare that narrative cannot or do not express truth; it only to suggest that because it does not take the expression of truth as its central task, narrative thinking is more amenable to ambiguity, fuzziness, etc. such that one narrative will be considered mutually exclusive with another narrative. However, one narrative may still end up being much more reliable than another narrative, or to put colloquially, one narrative may be truer than the other.

So, rather than portraying the two different argumentative patterns in Romans in the form of two conflicting teachers and as such being mutually exclusive, I would suggest that Romans 1-8 is an attempt for Paul to direct his audience away from one narrative about human sin and God’s judgment to a more significant narrative about God’s redemption in Jesus Christ. It isn’t that Paul rejects the narrative on Romans 1.18-32 as false; rather, it is not the most important narrative. Instead, Paul takes the beliefs that that narrative represents and then argues in such a way that directs the audience to the alternative narrative of God’s faithfulness.

AS many scholars have observed including even Campbell, there are multiple similarities between Paul’s discourse in Romans 1.18-32 and the Wisdom of Solomon. For the sake of brevity, I won’t rehash this here, but only to suggest that Paul seems to show knowledge of either the WoS or a stream of thought that share many similarities with WoS. What is pertinent to highlight a particular constellation of the themes of Gentiles, νομός, and judgement shared between WoS 6 and Romans 2.

Wisdom of Solomon 6.1-5

Romans 2.14-16

Listen therefore, O kings, and understand; learn, O judges of the ends of the earth. Give ear, you that rule over multitudes, and boast of many nations. For your dominion was given you from the Lord, and your sovereignty from the Most High; he will search out your works and inquire into your plans. Because as servants of his kingdom you did not rule rightly, or keep the law, or walk according to the purpose of God, he will come upon you terribly and swiftly, because severe judgment falls on those in high places.4

When Gentiles, who do not possess the law, do instinctively what the law requires, these, though not having the law, are a law to themselves. They show that what the law requires is written on their hearts, to which their own conscience also bears witness; and their conflicting thoughts will accuse or perhaps excuse them on the day when, according to my gospel, God, through Jesus Christ, will judge the secret thoughts of all.5

Before analyzing these two passages in light of each other, it is important to note the role the Roman Empire played in both passages. Wisdom of Solomon provides a rebuke against what ultimately amounts to the Roman Empire, who “rule over multitudes” and “boast of many nations.” Meanwhile, Paul does not explicitly mention rulers in this passage. However, he does later in Romans 13 where he suggests the Roman authorities have authority because it has been given to them by God just as the WoS does. Furthermore, Paul even then goes on to use the metaphor of empire and warfare to describe the controlling power of sin and death, as in Romans 5 and 7.

It is also relevant to mention 1.18-32 may be expressing something that could be construed as very veiled swiped at Nero and the imperial court. As Paul’s address of homosexuality in Romans 1.26-27 may have knowledge of Emperor Nero’s homosexual activity in the background, and thus 1.18-32 may be a very veiled swipe of Nero and the imperial court. Furthermore, as Nero was trained under the tutelage of the Stoic Seneca who thought God was known through the observation of the created world, it would be plausible for Nero to have spoken about God through this form of natural theology. If these resemblance warrant this connection, we might also understand the very ambiguous statement of “God gave the up to the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the degrading of their bodies among themselves” as a very veiled reference to rumors of incest between Nero and his mother Agrippina.

However, even if Romans 1.18-32 is not in reference to the Roman emperor, clearly, Paul has the notion of empire in the back of his mind throughout the letter. Thus, this makes the contrast between WoS and his statement very significant. Whereas WoS speaks only of judgment, Paul does not specifically express what outcome there will be, but that people could be accused or excused by their thoughts in the day of judgment. Thus, whereas the WoS expresses a very stark, judgmental, Paul ends us expressing a more open-ended view of judgment. If Paul is consciously alluding to the WoS or a similar stream of thought in Romans, then he is now turning the sails from the certain judgment that concludes at the end of chapter 1 to a more open-ended possibility in chapter 2. If this analysis is correct, Paul is neither embracing a wholesale rejection nor acceptance of the Romans 1.18-32 narrative, but is providing a more complete story that allows the possibility of condemnation and exoneration at the end.⁶

What is held in common by both of these narratives beyond judgment, however, is the criteria of judgment: law/νόμος. While WoS 6 does not use νόμος to refer to the Torah, this “law” and Torah would have a common source. Whereas the rulers are directed to learn this “law” through attentiveness and to wisdom (WoS 6.9-11), Torah was considered by many Jews to be an expression of God’s Wisdom. Therefore, to learn wisdom about the world is to be educated about the things that the Torah also instructs Jews about. Since this wisdom is in part acquired through observations in nature (WoS 7.15-22), the WoS expresses a natural theology that would be a source of similarity between God’s wisdom as disclosed in Torah and human observation of wisdom from creation.

There is a similar view in Paul. The Gentile can be judged by νόμος, which clearly is in reference to Torah here, even though they do not have the Torah. Notice that Paul refers to the Gentiles doing the law with/by φύσις (Rom. 2.14), which is the same word used when referring to heterosexual activity in Rom. 1.26. While the NRSV and other translations render this as an adverbial dative and translate it as “instinctively” or “by nature” and treat this as a term describing a person’s character or behavior, the role of φύσις is wisdom, both Stoic wisdom and the wisdom prescribed by the Wisdom of Solomon⁷ suggests Paul may be describing the instrument by which one does the law: observations from nature as was mentioned in 1.19-20. Thus, it may be better to render this into English as “does the Torah by natural knowledge.” In this case, Paul is similarly expressing a view of a Gentile νόμος based upon natural wisdom and theology.

But here is where things get interesting: whereas this law/wisdom is how God will judge people in Wisdom of Solomon, Paul does not take this route. Instead, Paul suggests this law will be a source of a person’s own self-judgment: they will evaluate their own actions in accordance to this law. This is significant. God is not judging people based upon law and wisdom. Rather, Jesus Christ is going to bring out the secret thoughts of people’s hearts, as if to state that Jesus is more a facilitator of this judgment by bringing to light the knowledge of what is right that everybody had.

Therefore, what we are seeing here is that Paul is created a gap between Jesus and Torah. Because the judgment by Torah, and also wisdom, expressed the thoughts of the people that they had internalized, it is not a direct expression of God’s righteous character. Rather, it is Jesus in His death who demonstrates God’s righteousness (Rom. 3.21-26), not wisdom and Torah. This judgment scene in light of Paul’s larger discourse paints a picture of a gap between God’s righteousness revealed in Christ and knowledge of wisdom and Torah

However, this gap is more than simply an epistemic gap as my usage of the language of revelation and knowledge might. While this gap would also be epistemic of nature, it is also motivational gap: neither natural knowledge of God nor the Torah ensured obedience to God. In fact Paul portrays both as having a role in the increasing of sin.⁹

At stake for Paul is this: this gap is filled God’s justifying act. God’s justification is God’s proleptic word in crucified and risen Christ to form people into the pattern of Jesus Christ through access to the Holy Spirit; it speaks forth the future reality of the people to have a righteous character before it has come to pass temporally. Hence God can justify the ungodly, putting the person on a different trajectory.

If this gap between God and Torah and nature is filled by Christ, what then of Torah and natural theology? Paul takes pains to make clear throughout that he is not rejecting the Torah.¹⁰ If the previous similarities between Torah and natural wisdom hold up here, then Paul would think equivalently about natural theology. Paul isn’t proclaiming an outright rejection of natural theology like Barth does. Whereas the instructions about righteousness is made effective in Christ through the Holy Spirit (Romans 8.3-4), so too will God redeems the whole creation. (Romans 8.19-23) It is warranted to suggest then that in Christ, God redeems natural theology rather than discards it. However, one must have a hope set on the unseen (Romans 8.24-25) so that what the Christian understanding is not reducible to observations of nature. Instead, Christian thinking can embraced a redeemed natural theology, where nature is imagined in relationship to the redemptive activity of God in Jesus Christ.

This view doesn’t treat revelation and natural theology as two mutually exclusive sources ala Barth. Rather, as the narrative of 8.31-39 gives epistemic priority of God’s action in Jesus Christ over the painful human experience in creation, Paul implies that there is a priority in God’s disclosure of Himself in Jesus. The problem is that the κόσμος has been corrupted by sin and death¹¹ so that not everything that is experienced and observed in creation is representative of God’s will and purposes. This does not abandon natural theology, but rather provides into question how reliable natural theology is on its own terms: if it both expresses God’s power and divinity while also ‘expressing’ the powers of sin and death, how can one reliably differentiate from nature what is of God and what is not?

The answer: the life, death, and resurrection Christ provides the hermenutical key by which an understanding can be made sense of; people come to understand this through living by the Spirit and putting the deaths the deeds of the flesh so that their lives increasingly become an expression God’s righteousness. Because in Christ and through the Spirit, one’s life and heart reflect God, one has the capacity to then reliably differentiate what of nature is of God and what is not.

Thus, if my presentation is correct, one partial strand of Paul’s argumentive progression from Romans 1-8 is to provide a different perspective of the relationship of the believer’s knowledge in relation to creation. It is tertiary to his primary point of establishing God’s redemption in Jesus Christ and the Spirit and the second premise that the Torah is good but does not ensure faithfulness, but I would suggest it his natural theology lurks in the background.

This contrasts with the Barth-Brunner debate. On the one hand, it sides with Brunner to the extent that one can allow for natural theology. However, natural theology on its own sake does not deliver anything that is necessary for God’s redemption in Jesus Christ. However, Brunner attempts to ground theology in a metaphysics of God’s image and an artificial distinction between the formal and material aspects goes in the wrong direction. Not only is such a definition artificial, it overlooks the role that Paul assigns to cosmology as it pertains to sin and death in Romans. For Paul, the gap between God and nature isn’t found in how the image of God was defaced, but the way creation itself was negatively transformed by human sin.

Being inextricably a part of creation that both reflects God’s wisdom and the enslaving powers of death and sin, even if our minds may glimpse some true knowledge about God through nature our hearts are being tugged away by nature. Only redemption in Christ can allow natural theology to a) reliably proceed in the epistemic task while also b) effectively directing people towards God’s purposes in the new creation. This I would suggest is more faithful to Paul’s view of natural theology, that doesn’t demand a mutual exclusivity of the epistemic sources of revelation and nature, but rather grounds the epistemic effectiveness and reliability of using natural knowledge to understand God only insofar as the redemption of Jesus Christ has been actualized in people through walking by the Spirit.

1. That Campbell is thinking in such a way is evidenced in the systematic way Campbell addresses the traditional Protestant view of justification which he refers to as Justification Theory.
2. Jerome Bruner, Actual Minds, Possible Worlds.
3. Ibid.
4. NRSV
5. NRSV
6. This strategy makes argumentative space to then allow for God to justify the ungodly (Romans 4.5)
7. See the usage φύσις in WoS 7.20.
9. Romans 1.18-32 portrays how people knew God through creation but ended up substituting creation for God the Creator, thereby leading to a deformation into greater sin; Paul implies responsibility for idolatry leading to sin is due to the way they came to know God through nature. Meanwhile, Romans 5.20 and Romans 7.14-25 explain how knowledge of Torah leads to a proliferation of sin. Both knowledge of natural wisdom and of Torah can lead to faithlessness.⁸ While does Paul not suggest that nature or Torah fail to provide any true beliefs about God, he explicitly recognizes the incapacity for them to be powers that make people righteous.
10. Romans 3.31 and 7.13
11. Romans 5.12-14