What May Be Known About God
“For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse.”
Romans 1:19-20
I am calling the Apostle Paul’s words in Romans 1:19-20 the “principal text” when it comes to natural theology. It is a great shame that when works on natural theology turn to exegesis, that verse 20 is treated on its own. Verse 19 is seldom given a voice. That is very odd given what is usually being debated between Classicalists and Presuppositionalists. Granted that it will not settle the matter by itself. Both sides will claim any connections between verses 19 and 20 as their own. However, it will at least keep before our minds the category that divine revelation always precedes human reason. While it is true that grace perfects nature, it is also the case that the grace of general revelation is what sets before reason the whole field of objects with natures.
The differences between general revelation and special revelation are usually put in terms of four features: audience, content, medium, and end. This is at the surface of things, but it will be a useful launching point.
General revelation is called “general” because its audience is all mankind; its content speaks of God as Supreme Being or Creator, yet gives no hint of what happens at death or whether He cares for us; its media is everything in the created order; and its end is the condemnation of the whole race in sin. By contrast, special revelation is called “special” because its audience is the people of God; its content is redemption, or God in Christ; its media is the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments; and its end is the development of the gospel and sanctification of those who are saved by hearing and believing.
That seems straightforward enough. However, each of these points are more controversial than they may appear at first glance.
We will have to craft some diagnostic questions that can get us nearer to the heart of the controversy over natural theology. It would be illuminating to ask such questions about all relevant texts. But since that would be a monumental work of biblical theology, this study will be restricted to treating Romans 1:19-20 as that “principal text,” Romans 2:14-15 chief among the supporting texts along with Psalm 19:1-6 and Acts 17:22-29 and others that may be less obvious to the reader. Finally it will be necessary to deal with alleged problem passages. But what sort of questions will help us gain the clarity we need? I will retain something of the audience, content, medium, end paradigm, although only the audience question will resemble its usual simple form. Let me reframe things in this way:
1. Who all is included in the audience of this knowledge?
2. What is the exact object of this knowledge?
3. What are the modes, or media, of this knowledge?
4. Does this imply an objective natural theology?
There may be several legitimate matters of exegesis that a critic of my thesis may want to discuss, for example, about the pervasiveness of sin and idolatry in the remainder of Romans 1. My purpose is not to silence such discussion. However, that subject will be treated sufficiently to show that those realities will not change the basic discoveries. Lastly, some may suspect that the link between the Wisdom of Solomon and Romans 1:18-32 is relevant to this discussion. I do not believe so. It is given extensive treatment in Dodd, Dunn, and Longenecker, among others.1
The fact is that the usual critics of natural theology have nothing to gain by making Paul sound more like a Hellenistic Jew, so whatever Paul may have had in the back of his mind about that text is all the more irrelevant to this study. Some elementary logic might also give pause to anyone who might seek to utilize that ancient source against natural theology. Either it was canonical or else not. If so, then the canon bears even more witness to natural theology; if not, then Paul in the canon is resting an argument on the extra-biblical. It would not be enough to root the Apostle in that work. One would still have to show how natural theology is excluded from both.
Context and Construction
As always there is a wider context to our proof texts. Here the Apostle is introducing the grand subject of the righteousness of God to the Roman church. In doing so, the most systematic treatment of the gospel anywhere else in the New Testament is born. It is commonly accepted that 1:18-32 is a textual unit where Paul places the Gentiles in the dock, so that the overwhelming emphasis is on the guilt of mankind for having both suppressed God’s truth and translated its glory into the basest forms of idolatry and immorality. Our famous “general revelation” text (vv. 19-20) is set in that wider frame.
In order to be thorough in exegesis, we must always ask whether there is debate about the translation of these words. There are no text-critical issues. However, even the casual observer will note that the main English translations will have varying order to the clauses. In and of itself, that may be nothing to the point, as the word order in Greek does not function the same way as it does in English. On the other hand, the order of words can often signify emphasis by the author. While the real debate will over what is implied by the content, sometimes even a subtle shift in emphasis hints at additional content.
To my mind, the King James Version is most illuminating here. It is closest to the order of the Greek, varying only within the clause τοῖς ποιήμασιν νοούμενα καθορᾶται, where intelligible English actually has to render it, “being understood by the things that are made.” Otherwise, what I have in mind is the core of verse 20 concerning the content. Paul specifies this as, “his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature.” For the syntactical relation of these three terms, we can agree with Moo: “The subject of this complex clause, ‘his invisible attributes,’ is further defined in the appositional addition, ‘his eternal power and his deity.’”2
What we will want to pay careful attention to is whether or not what that which may be known about God (v. 19) is in fact known by all mankind. And if so, what exactly would be required in terms of the human reasoning process in order for such to constitute real knowledge? Must it not at least be true knowledge? Must it not at least have been reasoned to some extent. Augustine put things in this way:
“Notice that Paul does not call them ignorant of the truth but says that they held the truth in iniquity, and he does not fail to answer the obvious question: How could those to whom God had not given the law have a knowledge of the truth? For he says that through the visible things of the creation, they reached an understanding of the invisible things of the Creator.”3
________________________
1. cf. C. H. Dodd, The Epistle of Paul to the Romans (London: Collins, 1959); James D. G. Dunn, Romans 1-8 (Dallas: Word Publishing, 1988); Richard Longenecker, The Epistle to the Romans (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2016), 193-95.
2. Douglas J. Moo, The Epistle to the Romans (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans Publishing, 1996), 104.
3. Augustine, On the Spirit and the Letter, in ACCS, VI:39-40.
