Romans 1: Apostasy of the Gospel “General Revelation”
Romans 1 and “General Revelation.”
We searched for God, but we never found him until he came to us.
Let’s take that idea into our relationship with the Gospel. Has it come to us, or are we still looking for the good news? Do we have a general revelation of the Gospel as well?
Natural or general revelation is that knowledge of God taken by reason directly from the visible creation and is accessible to all men. That distinguished from “special revelation,” which is God entering space/time to deliver a message in action and/or language to man. A special act of God in reaching man to bring him up to illumination of his existence and nature. The glory of the moon, stars, and life forms on the earth should also suggest a creator, but the Word of God does not suggest but explicitly reveals, designed to give transformative and life-giving insight into mysteries of His will that are otherwise impossible.
Special revelation is that standard set for the judgment souls. It won’t matter if you never heard it, and this should be, ironically, the scary thing about it. It represents a benchmark of spiritual morality. If you never heard it, your judgment is favorable if you regard and morally handle the spiritual truth claims known in the same manner that you would have handled special revelation. In the absence of special revelation, you are judged by your willingness to assent to purely self-manufactured truth and that which is outside of you. But if you put the products of self-absorption as a priority equal to or superior to what should be that which transcends the physical world and mind, your done. If you resist it, and become “strangers and pilgrims on the earth” (Heb 11:13) you are displaying a seeking after truth that is not from it, displaying an attitude that is receptive to special revelation should it come.
This special revelation of the Gospel, we must remind ourselves, judges now, and this revelation is both a special person and a special truth. Its very exacting, every demonstrative of its origins, very telling that its something that the spatio-temporal universe cant produce. It not only offers people an escape from judgment, it acts as a judge, something capable of standing beside a spirits and showing their integrity on by simple comparison of what one says and does by what the other says and does. It is therefore not suggesting righteousness is by mouthing “Jesus saves” or “Jesus is the Messiah,” that Jesus died and rose the third day, and he is the Savior of the World.” It’s not suggesting your righteousness is you just going around saying, “believe in God, and there is salvation.” The Gospel, bot Person and Word, is a command to obey, by faith, word and action, only after you allow yourself to stand before it and realize “this, unlike what came before, is now proof of the otherwise impossible. I’m guilty, but now I know, because now, finally, I know and am known by what I’m not, and only through this belief in this Truth am I forgiven.”
The special Truth is Jesus of Nazareth, the Messiah, but, again, not only his person. His special person is the incarnate, temporary representation of this special Truth. The Special Truth is the whole biblical phenomena of a God condescending to care for man by giving to the world the positive Truth of Himself: miraculous, embodied, manifested, and brought to the heart by this the appearance and works of this special Person.
The takeaway from this is that what aligns with general revelation naturally aligns with our bias for persons, bodies, objects, and ideas over anything they may ultimately mean. This is the carnal attitude toward all truth claims, that all truth claims are humanly manufactured or reified. Things, appearances, of the outside physical world and inside mental world, what the eye can see, and the brain naturally understands without any special assistance outside of itself. They are heady. Truths that make us feel powerful and important. The carnal world is, after all, what we are born with and what we start with for knowing existence. But alone, everything we see in this world is at best only tokens of ultimate truth, mere assertions, symbols, opinions and claims of what they are not, which alone can only pretend to something greater.
Since that which is greater, the Divine knowledge, is now, after the Cross, is open to the world and available to be known and handled, we’re are not supposed to act as we did before the Cross. Were not supposed to be hamstrung in our contact with Transcendence through our willful or practical dealing only with desire, imagination, preference, conclusions, statements, creeds, theory and speculation, brainpower, and emotional energy in an attempt to transmit ultimate Truth. These are, like the trees and the planets, possibly suggestive but not positively, conclusively demonstrative of contact with God, and if we take the truth from there, especially now, as I said, we’re done.
Why is the Gospel even necessary? Jesus never had to come, you say. Why can’t God simply judge people on general revelation? No. If Jesus never came, there would never have been laid down a proven, confirmed, unassailable means to the apprehension of God that can withstand without breaking an attraction to a vision through our naturally dim lenses. An carnal attraction to a foggy vision that is nonetheless preferable because it makes us look clear and real by comparison. All people who love the truth flock to this revelation of the Cross of Messiah. The old, anti-revelational, and selfish means of truth would never have been repudiated and put away, never again to offer any justified hope of access to any conception or presence of God.
God’s existence and nature have been revealed and vindicated as true. There is no going back in history, and neither is there anything else for a moral man to choose.
The Gospel is the herald to all those that would be saved. Its a test, not to prove anything to God but so that those that throw their opportunities away cant say they have an excuse, because they had no choice, that they had nothing proven transcendent and phenomenal. The blessing of that is that we have now this transcendent Truth. We have assurance, not fear, not confusion, struggle, and strife looking for God, doomed to look all holy and pious only if we engage our own “truth.”
I am not questioning if natural revelation has value informing us about God, but only asserting the value and place given by the New Testament writers of the special of Christ, and asking if its the same as ours. I want to know if their understanding of the creation of God is informative of the same kinds of things for which we assume it in the Church. The Church certainly demotes natural revelation below special revelation, but when conceive of special revelation they dissimulate by giving it the “general” category, not the “special” one.
I wonder whether Paul, in Romans 1, intended natural revelation to serve not so much as a general invitation to faith, but rather as an evidential standard of judgment—particularly for a kind of recalcitrant Christian faith that, though exposed to the gospel, prefers to remain vague or evasive. Perhaps Paul meant it not to commend belief in God based on nature, but to expose the kind of soul that, even having heard the gospel, gravitates toward lesser revelations. It would be almost amusing—if it weren’t so spiritually disastrous—that our normative reading of Romans 1 treats natural revelation as if it were a self-standing apologetic, commending humanity for its theistic intuitions. In truth, we may be forcing a square apostolic warning into the round hole of modern evidentialism. What if the beauty of mountains or the irreducible complexity of life was not meant to validate our belief in God, but to indict us for preferring those things to Him?
If we concede that the natural world serves a purpose beyond a minimal epistemic threshold, then what would the higher standard be, if not special revelation? And if special revelation is that higher standard, would it not include, as part of its essential content, a means of discerning not only the true object of affection—the one worthy of faith—but also, to the same degree, the false object that draws our affections away? In that light, natural revelation does not justify belief, nor merely condemn unbelief; it exposes the idolatrous affections of those who, even knowing the gospel, prefer the aesthetic, the scientific, or the mystical over the prophetic Word. It was not given to inspire vague religiosity, but to accuse those who, having received the higher light, settle for the lower glow.
The Gospel of the General Revelation with Special Revelation?
It first is imperative to bring out that an extended argument for natural revelation as a necessary companion to special revelation is not present within the entire canon of the New Testament. Nowhere do we find it suggested that natural revelation is an excellent argument for the existence of God (there is not so much as even an attempt at a systematic theology in the New Testament). In every instance, we see general revelation used as a means of contrast between what we know easily and without effort and what we should know through the teaching of and our informed meditation over a revealed document.
What we should know is how we know anything positively about God, which commends Him and us to a moral nature and a love of Truth, without special revelation. What is clear is that the existence and nature of God comes to those honest about knowing it through the gospel and Christ. That is consistent with Christ as the only mediator between man and the otherwise ineffable God, and is the sustained NT argument.
Is general revelation used in the New Testament, as it is continually in our apologetics, as a means to find God and commend or condemn Man for his moral duties? Or, used for failure to recognize the need for another kind of revelation of God in the gospel? The difference between the two is like night and day, for the former is cripple in its ability to tell us anything about what we might be missing in our faith, which might work in us toward our missing of Christ. A relegation of special revelation is what atheists push, to throttle its full power and put it at arm’s length so it will not be a threat.
I think that natural revelation is one of the most frightening and challenging doctrines we have, however, but only because it informs us of what, exactly, faith is by contrast, which is almost always what we don’t what it to be. About precisely how near we are to God as to how far we are from Him, and that may not be a welcome measurement.
There are only two New Testament passages for possible use in asserting that general or natural revelation acts sufficiently apologetic for God and that its something of vital importance in evangelism. The apologetic idea is that you need to see God in nature before you can see him in scripture. Is there any validity to this?
Mar’s Hill
In Acts, we have the famous passage of Paul on Mars Hill in Athens.
A lot of hay has been made out of this, especially by presuppositional apologists in the attempt to demonstrate how a properly basic “God sense” is foundational of faith, and the right way to approach atheists. But in Acts, we see that Paul is only using it to dissuade the Athenians from one thing and toward another, not to predicate an acceptance of Christ on their pagan, naturally influenced motivation of belief in god(s).
Essentially, the best kind of revelation that was available before Christ was potentially corroborating of God but insufficient. We should stop relying on natural revelation to any degree, much the way we must leave the Law as a way to please God, giving way to the New Covenant.
This incident with Paul is for us to use for finally distinguishing between one kind of superseded faith, a “general” one if you will, and a new one that saves on belief, which is very “special.”
Acts 17:22-23 (KJV) Then Paul stood in the midst of Mars’ hill, and said, [Ye] men of Athens, I perceive that in all things ye are too superstitious. 23 For as I passed by, and beheld your devotions, I found an altar with this inscription, TO THE UNKNOWN GOD. Whom therefore ye ignorantly worship, him declare I unto you.
Strong’s says that the word translated “superstitious,” Δεισιδαιμονεστερους, literally means “fearful of demons,” or religious in the bad sense. The Unknown God, the god whom they don’t know but is still deserving of worship for these people, is the god that rules over the religious affections yet gives no sure knowledge of that divine unknown realm and divine person. A dark faith. Paul says the real God, the one who made the heavens and the earth, does not live in temples made of men’s hands. This God is not, therefore, worshipped in religion by being carried on the exclusive domain of the imagination and made up of any corporeal thing. Therefore, the broad sweep of the natural world that God created as revelatory is ultimately opaque and not a basis for real spiritual ideas. The natural is only important as you would call a child’s toy truck important for training in the use of a real one. The toy truck is a toy like training wheels on a bike compared to tires on a car. Its essential for a child, but for the real world and a spiritual adult. Its an object of familiarity with the real world, but meant to be set aside after maturity as a piece of nostalgia representing a necessary path to adulthood that is now not played with. An adult does not have the toy on the dashboard of his car and must play with it before he drives it.
In v.26, Paul mentions prophetic revelation as this valid basis.
Acts 17:26 (KJV) And hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth, and hath determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation; .
Paul says that everyone is basically the same, and as such, are subject to the same spiritual standards by God. The word “appointed” is προτασσω, meaning “prescribe” or “pre-arrange,” here is the only time used in the NT. It might suggest that the “times appointed” refers to the seasons an indistinct historical ethos, but “so appointed” is a figure for prophecy, as we will see.
Acts 17:27 (KJV) That they should seek the Lord, if haply they might feel after him, and find him, though he be not far from every one of us:
Paul sets up his argument then by using the pre-appointment of Christ as a fulfillment of the pre-appointment of nature. Before Christ, God expected everyone to use this suggestion of future perfect disclosure of him through the natural order to undertake a search for him through what was available. Everyone is appointed by God to search for God and find Him. Paul says that in this state their only means is to “feel” for him. This word psēlapháō is kind of like someone in a dark room feeling for something to touch, which he can identify. Man was appointed to do this, that they might find God, but, of course, they never found God. The end in this opaque state was always that man would not find God, because it is impossible through only general revelation to find God, or impossible only through speculation, philosophy and naïve, self-absorbed religion to find God, but only something that feels like Him. Something that is in accord with the spiritual wisdom that what we feel is in this world but not of this world. Paul means that man would find God through a higher revelation, a miraculous one present in the world now, though never a revelation that is perfect.
This sensible miraculousness, this transcendence of God is clearly indicated here:
Acts 17:28-29 (KJV) For in him we live, and move, and have our being; as certain also of your own poets have said, For we are also his offspring. 29 Forasmuch then as we are the offspring of God, we ought not to think that the Godhead is like unto gold, or silver, or stone, graven by art and man’s device.
Possibly Cleanthes is quoted by Paul to establish a friendly link between the old revelation and the new. God is not like anything natural. And when we find him, we are not just in the dark and feeling for him, but He has become revealed. Paul now brings it all home.
Acts 17:30-31 (KJV) And the times of this ignorance God winked at; but now commandeth all men every where to repent: 31 Because he hath appointed a day, in the which he will judge the world in righteousness by [that] man whom he hath ordained; [whereof] he hath given assurance unto all [men], in that he hath raised him from the dead.
Prophetic language. “The times of his ignorance,” hath appointed a day,” “he will judge the world,” “man whom he hath ordained.”
The pre-appointment of Christ came to replace the old, impossible revelation, and this new standard subjects everyone to it. These are prophetic statements. The assurance that the Father raised Christ from the dead is the assurance from the prophetic revelation which defines the “good news” of the gospel. Christ rose from the dead as a fulfillment of prophecy. You don’t have to “feel” for God, you can see him work in a way that no one else can by just looking at the Scriptures with a fair and unbiased reading of history.
After throwing the crowd into indecision and confusion, the result when Paul finished teaching his brief summary was people believing:
Acts 17:34 (KJV) Howbeit certain men clave unto him, and believed: among the which [was] Dionysius the Areopagite, and a woman named Damaris, and others with them.
Remember, that a Christian who takes this as salvation through believing God through natural revelation is a Christian that makes the gospel superfluous. It is not superfluous, as I explained, when it reflects the highest Holy standard of spiritual faith. If natural revelation was all that was needed, we don’t need Christ, so we cant conclude that we need natural revelation to set up the gospel argument. The Christ argument illuminates the natural world as a product of God, not the other way around.
In the same way, it is not accepted that Paul is relying on a “God sense” of people that must be in place before the Gospel is accepted, as many exegetes assert and certain apologists asset.
Wait! Is there not a God sense? Of course. Everyone has it. Atheists have it, and that’s what they are constantly trying to stuff it back down when it lifts its head with what is called “science” and “reason,” tropes which are long on assurance but short on sublimity. But what has the power to lift its head is the point.
In real apologetics, you assume that God is in His revelation, not necessarily in your sense, since it can be a sense of Satan or a sense for Sarasvati. Only God’s revelation has the ability to lift an honest sense of God, which is indiscernible, to the surface. And this is not for the sense, it for remaking and reorienting it entirely, and so much so that one sense of God is replaced by another. If you prioritize this vague “God sense” in evangelism, you get what we have today: a vague and subjectively influenced Christianity without any necessary Scriptural ground and where just about anything goes, including our awful “general,” unparticularized, un-speciated gospel message except in its insistence that its something about Jesus.
The sense of God is equal to that of the general revelation of nature as a spiritual influence: insufficient but foundational. Whatever noetic state a prior believer assumes in respect to God before he knows and believer the Gospel, a foundation to faith is not built first with necessary philosophical, ideational, and instinctive objects. That foundation is of a pure “special” revelatory object and in a necessary appearance of God in some sure form is as capable of instilling a “God sense” as it does building God up from a God sense.
A “God sense” is absolutely worthless, as is natural revelation, without the ability to see the actual God in some form. We are only “feeling” for God by the power of logic and philosophy, and intuition and emotion. That which is foggy and unsure is not a foundational edifice for what is not if what is not comes suddenly, unexpectedly, and has no origin anywhere around matter and mind. What is not of matter and mind is a suspension of human sense, not product of it. Grounding faith on a “God sense” may sound pious, but this sense is just as capable of accepting Moloch and Apollo as it does Christ. To have canal hunger for physical food makes one gravitate toward physical food, but it does not make the food and it certainly does not determine which food are good for you and which are not, especially if that food is spiritual. “God sense” does no necessarily contain anything about the God that must be accepted to satisfy spiritual hunger without which spiritual death follows. You could say before the Cross righteous people were guided by an honest and wise God sense and natural revelation, but you cant say this after Christ. Now its only because of a genuine love for the revealed Truth of God in Jesus Messiah, not a vague concept or feeling of “God” that grounds faith.
If you want a “God sense” discussed in serious tones, you need more than a general conceptual symbol of “God” or “sense,” with nothing necessarily coming from Transcendence. If Transcendence showed up, it would not matter if anyone felt for a “God’s sense” because the divine, foreign phenomena is making it from nothing. From that which is spiritually and transcendently sure, not speculative and from the gut. God can reveal himself in the context of inferior revelation, but he is not reaching man on the basis of it, but reforming from scratch man’s whole spiritual insides according to a new thing in which the inferior, insular and indistinct one merely approximates. The man then uses “general revelation” and his “God sense,” if they are there, to inform his spirituality of the pervasive power of God that existed long before any relatively artificial basis which could never reached.
It does not matter what your background is, your feelings and senses, your family story, your education, your cultural influences, what’s in your head and heart. It does not matter if you adamantly deny God or not. This New Revelation is designed to break the stranglehold of them, on anyone, and remake them new. There is no need to appeal to the ontological argument until later, when your faith is taking off, and then only for strengthening of what has already been established transcendently by the messianic revelation.
The prophecy that man makes is a false one, and a deal with the devil, by grounding faith in anything other than a particular special revelation (not a particular general revelation of the Bible). If we do, we may start with good intentions, but it dooms theology in the end. We end up relegating Scripture as the equal or inferior to autosuggestion while assuring that this inferior one remains spoken of with seriousness and piety that belongs only to God’s Word.
Not is it admissible that all one needs for real belief is belief in some strange guy like Paul stating that a messiah rose from the dead. The passage here does not suggest immediacy of a decision on the part of the believers but implies that Paul took his chance to explain with more detail first. Because the entire discourse is not recorded, assumed is that the essence of Paul’s preaching was was recorded. But even if this is not the case, and a decision was made immediately after the conclusion of Paul’s very brief speech, belief was still based not upon the preaching of a general gospel or general conception of the Word of God or an unexplained miracle, but specifically on belief in the prophetic revelation of Christ (vss. 30-31). If that detail was not given by Paul, so what? We know that at some point it must be if a real truth-seeker is to find God.
What happens after this is every bit as explanatory of the event than the event itself. Let us establish the subject context in a particular stream of Scripture. Paul uses this introduction:
Paul removed himself from Athens and went to Corinth, and, as we see over and over in Acts, he went into the synagogue. In Chapter 18, we read that he “reasoned in the synagogue every sabbath, and persuaded the Jews and the Greeks.” This language indicates a prolonged teaching session. This teaching is not what we see in our Sunday schools or seminaries today. It’s the exclusive preaching of messianic prophecy and its fulfillment: “And when Silas and Timotheus were come from Macedonia, Paul was pressed in the spirit, and testified to the Jews [that] Jesus [was] Christ.” That, of course, smashes the idea that messianic prophecy was used only for the Jews.
In Romans 1, there seems to be a stronger statement on the value of the argument from natural revelation, but on closer inspection, we see that it is used in the same way:
Romans 1:19-21 (KJV) Because that which may be known of God is manifest in them; for God hath shewed [it] unto them. 20 For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, [even] his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse: 21 Because that, when they knew God, they glorified [him] not as God, neither were thankful; but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened.
Just take a glance at the patristic Fathers at this point. Note: all quotations brought from the Anti-Nicene Fathers of Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson, 10 vols., Hendrickson 2004.
wicked men are “not wise in things which relate to the understanding, and which are unseen and eternal; but that in busying themselves about things of sense alone, and regarding these as all important, that are wise men of the world; for as there are in existence a multitude of opinions, some of them espousing the cause of the matter of bodies, and asserting that everything is corporeal which has a substantial existence, and that besides these nothing else exists, whether it be called invisible or incorporeal, it also says that these constitute the wisdom of the world, which perishes and fades away.”
Origen says that Paul is speaking of the advanced pretensions of Greek philosophy in claiming to know God, not the common discernment of God directly from the created order.
Origen says Celsus takes the idea of the “world” to be both heaven and earth, but this idea destroys the idea of living persons being immortal and coming to live in that other world. He connects 1 Co 4:1 to Romans 1:20 that those things that were once in the world are removed out and into another. He quotes Rom 1:20 to say that this means that knowledge is not supposed to stop at the objects of sense. Paul says that this is only the first means of obtaining knowledge which he, again, says is through the prophets and the “mysteries.”
Tertullian, in Against Marcion, says that God conceals the truth to these people by the “preparatory apparatus of prophetic obscurity, the understanding of which is open to faith (for ‘if ye will not believe, you shall not understand’).” Note: this is a quote from Isa 7:9, which clearly sets the disbelief in the prophecy of the Messiah that follows as the reason for the prophesied captivity to come. Tertullian says, “and he had offenders in those wise and prudent ones who would not seek after God, although He was to be discovered in His so many mighty works, or who rashly philosophized about Him, and thereby furnished to heretics their arts.”
Tertullian’s Treatise on the Soul talks about the visible world as only appearances of Plato’s heavenly forms. But as the intellect is superior to the senses and not to be separated from it, as an instrumentality is not in itself informative of what it signifies, which is invisible. The visible symbols, the natural order, are used as a means of discovery of the unseen.
Tertullian in Against Marcion says that it is impossible to know God through natural revelation, charging the heretic Marcion of thinking that something like it is sufficient. Marcion believed that the Old Testament was not part of the canon and described a cruel god that has nothing to do with the New Testament God, who is very kind. He, therefore, thought that the prophetic revelation is not a player in determining the truth. That he “seeks to obtain it without cause from man, who is otherwise accustomed to believe in God from the idea he gets of Him from the testimony of his works, because he has provided no such proof as that whereby man has acquired the knowledge of God.” This knowledge by Tertullian is constantly said to be of the prophets and is this proof which Marcion rejected.1.
In fact, Marcion rewrote the Gospel of Luke to reflect this disbelief and changed for example
(24:25) O foolish and hard of heart to believe in all that the prophets have spoken
to
O foolish and hard of heart to believe in all that I have told you
Lactantius in the Divine Institutes does much the same. He says that the Greek philosophers could use reason to determine what was false, but could not determine, or be committed to, the determination of what is absolutely true in respect to different kinds of religious belief. He says they were not then able to determine what depresses true religion, which is a religion that “partakes of a divine mystery, and a heavenly secret. No one can know this unless he is taught by God”2. Taught by God” is not God speaking in your head or God only influencing your understanding, its is a figure for the reading of God’s Word, since God wrote that Word.
Paul in Romans 1 is not accusing the Gentiles of going away from God because they did not believe from a grounding in natural revelation, but because they twisted it to mean that this represents the limits of revelation. Therefore, the “Unknown God.”
Question: do you limit “revelation,” the Word of God, to a “general” revelation, or a particular “special” revelation? If to a general revelation, get out of it, or else allow general revelation to be a judge against you.
Try these articles:
Prophesying, Preaching, and the Prophetic: Passing by Nehushtan
Amen Jesus, Amen, and his Prophetic Worship: Passing by Nehushtan
