Romans 1:18–32

Original Meaning

God’s Wrath against Sin and Its Basis (1:18–20)

VERSE 18 APPEARS at first sight to be closely related to verses 16–17. A gar (“for”) connects verse 18 with what comes before it, and both verses 17 and 18 use the verb “reveal.” On this basis a few interpreters have concluded that the revelation of God’s righteousness (v. 17) and the revelation of his wrath (v. 18) are both parts of the gospel (v. 16).1 But the negative note of God’s wrath does not fit Paul’s consistently positive use of the word “gospel.” Probably, then, the “for” that begins this verse introduces all of the section that follows: It is necessary for God to reveal his righteousness in the gospel because God has also found it necessary to reveal his wrath against sin.

Some modern translations use the term “anger” instead of “wrath” for the Greek word used here (orge). But “wrath,” while a bit old-fashioned, preserves the more objective sense the Greek word has when applied to God. God’s reaction to sin is not the “anger” of an emotional person; it is the necessary reaction of a holy God to sin. The Old Testament regularly speaks of God’s inflicting wrath on people, both in the course of history (e.g., Ex. 32:10–12; Num. 11:1; Jer. 21:3–7) and, especially, at the end of history. Paul usually also depicts God’s wrath as coming at the Parousia (see, e.g., Rom. 2:5, 8; 5:9; Col. 3:6; 1 Thess. 1:10). Because of this, some interpreters think that the verb “is being revealed” is a futuristic present, meaning “will be revealed.”2 But Paul is probably referring broadly to the sentence of condemnation that all people stand under—a sentence that God sometimes inflicts in the events of history but will carry out with finality at the end of history.

Especially important for Paul is his insistence that God’s wrath falls on people who “suppress the truth.” One can only suppress something of which one has knowledge. As a result, Paul goes on in verses 19–20 to show that this word is entirely appropriate to use in describing people’s relationship to God’s truth. Human beings do have knowledge about God. He has revealed it to them (v. 19b), manifesting some of his divine qualities in the world he has created (v. 20). Moreover, these qualities “have been clearly seen” by people.

Paul here establishes the truth of what we sometimes call “natural revelation”: God discloses something of his existence and nature to all people in the created natural world (for more on this, see the Contemporary Significance section). Yet the end of verse 20 already anticipates the negative direction that Paul’s argument about natural revelation will take: “so that men are without excuse.” Rather than bringing people into relationship with God, natural revelation makes them guilty. Why this is so and how it has happened will be the focus of the next section.

Bridging Contexts

PERHAPS THE BIGGEST obstacle to accurate interpretation of Scripture is the conflict in worldview between the biblical author and readers on the one hand and the contemporary reader on the other. Biblical authors will frequently touch on a concept that is everywhere accepted in their own culture but which clashes violently with the culture of the reader. Two important issues raised in these verses are clear examples of such notions: the wrath of God and homosexuality.

Cultural influences on our understanding of God’s wrath. One famous scholarly reaction to Paul’s teaching on God’s wrath in Romans 1:18ff. will help us to put the problem in focus. C. H. Dodd, a British scholar active in the middle of the century, made significant contributions to our understanding of the New Testament. But he struggled with Paul’s teaching about God’s wrath. Dodd was deeply trained in ancient Greek literature. Throughout this literature (as, indeed, in the literature of many cultures) the “wrath” of the gods is emotional and capricious, often driven by ego rather than by justice.

A person, a family, a town, or a whole nation, for example, might inadvertently offend a god by failing to offer a sacrifice in the right manner or by refusing hospitality to a visitor. Such a “sinful” act may be the cause of the wrath; in this sense, one could say the wrath was “justified.” But the degree of wrath inflicted is all out of proportion to the offense. The motivation for the wrath is not a desire on the god’s part to establish justice but to assuage his offended pride or dignity. Dodd had a hard time believing that the God of the Bible ever acted in such a way. Thus, to avoid any hint of emotionalism or capriciousness in the biblical concept, he argued that God’s wrath was nothing more than “an inevitable process of cause and effect in a moral universe.”5

But such an understanding of God’s wrath is more in keeping with a deistic view of God. For deists, God is little more than the original cause of the universe. Having set it in a motion, he is now content to let it run its course without intervention (the usual analogy is the watchmaker). But the Bible presents God as a personal being, interested in and intervening in the course of human history in all kinds of ways. To be sure, we must allow for the frequent anthropopathic element in the biblical description of God. The biblical writers often use analogies with human emotions to depict God, and we are wrong if we attribute these emotions to God in the same way as they are present in us. But we cannot avoid the distinctly personal language used to describe God’s relationship to his world. He chastises, tests, repents, rejoices, and, yes, he grows angry.

But God’s anger is not like ours, nor is it like the wrath of the Greek gods. His anger is like theirs in that it is motivated by an offense against divine standards, but it is never egotistic, as if he feels he needs to defend his dignity. Nor is it capricious, for God always acts justly, on the basis of his own unchangeable standards revealed in his Word to human beings. In fact, rather than dismissing pagan notions of the wrath of the gods entirely, we should perhaps see in them a pale reflection of the truth about the wrath of the real God. In the pagan impulse to appease an angry deity, in both ancient and modern times, we can detect one way in which God has left in the world he created some evidence of himself.

But if immersion in certain cultures leads people to interpret God’s wrath inaccurately, immersion in others can lead us to dismiss the concept altogether. Modern materialism, of course, denies the possibility of God’s wrath. But perhaps a greater danger to the church is the persistent tendency in the midst of the awakened interest in “spirituality” to view God as a purely benign being. If God exists, so many people seem to reason, then he must be a good God who has our own interests at heart. Surely he could never be angry with us or do anything that might inconvenience us!

This view of God is far from the biblical view of a holy and righteous God whose very nature demands that he react negatively to sin. Ultimately a failure to appreciate the reality of God’s holiness and its implication, wrath against sin, warps our understanding of the Christian faith generally. Thus, believers seeking to understand Paul’s presentation of the gospel in Romans need to adjust their own perspective to match the biblical worldview. Reading and rereading Scripture is the only practicable way to soak up that biblical worldview.

Cultural influences on our understanding of homosexuality. Most modern cultures have undergone a bewilderingly rapid sea change in views on homosexuality. What was condemned twenty years ago is now accepted—indeed, sometimes advocated—as an “alternative lifestyle.” It is not easy for Christians to get their bearings when so sudden and violent a shift occurs. Some too quickly go with the flow and read the change in culture into the Bible; others so strongly resist the flow that they go beyond what the Bible says. Romans 1:26–27 is one of the three most important passages in the New Testament on homosexuality (see also 1 Cor. 6:9–10; 1 Tim. 1:10). Since understanding the context of Paul’s teaching is vital to correct interpretation of the passages, we must treat this matter in the present section.

Interpreters agree that Greek culture, in general, tolerated and sometimes even looked approvingly on homosexual relationships, especially between men, and that Jewish culture universally condemned them. The Jewish viewpoint is well summarized in Sybilline Oracles 3.594–600: “Surpassing, indeed, all humans, they [Jewish men] are mindful of holy wedlock and do not engage in evil intercourse with male children, as do Phoenicians, Egyptians, and Romans, spacious Greece and many other nations, Persians, Galatians, and all Asia, transgressing the holy law of the immortal God.” The Jews’ condemnation of homosexuality is rooted, of course, in the Old Testament, which plainly and repeatedly denounces the practice (see, e.g., Gen. 19:1–28; Lev. 18:22; 20:13; Deut. 23:17–18). Paul seems to take over the typical Jewish viewpoint, highlighting homosexual behavior as an especially obvious indication of the way human beings have turned from the true God.

But modern revisionists, seeking to bring the Bible in line with contemporary culture, argue that this is not the case. They take two different, though sometimes overlapping, tacks. (1) Some interpreters suggest Paul may be citing the Jewish teaching on homosexuality not because he necessarily agrees with it but simply because it is part of the tradition he is using at this point.6 But would Paul take over teaching he does not agree with? He is not quoting from a source, so he is at liberty to take over whatever part of the tradition he wants and to omit whatever he wants. Surely his inclusion of this part of the tradition shows that he agrees with it.

(2) Other interpreters have seized on the language of “against nature” that Paul uses in 1:26–27 to argue that those whom Paul condemns here are only those who practice homosexuality when it is against their own nature.7 In other words, it would be wrong for a person with a heterosexual orientation to engage in homosexual relations, but not for a person with a “natural” homosexual orientation. The problem with this view is a failure to understand Paul’s “nature” language against its proper background. Paul is using this word as other Jewish writers did, to refer to the natural order of things as ordained by God. The historian Josephus, for example, writes that “the law [of Moses] knows no sexual connection but the natural intercourse with a wife” (Against Apion 2.24). “Nature” in this passage refers not to individual human nature or orientation but to the world as God has made it. Engaging in homosexual activity is to violate his created intention in making human beings male and female.8

Paul therefore endorses the Old Testament and Jewish view: Homosexual relations violate the order of creation established by God for all people. Believers ought to judge our culture by biblical standards and not force the Bible into the mold of our culture. Yet in a laudable insistence on maintaining biblical standards, we should not go further than Scripture. The Bible does not brand as sinful a homosexual orientation as such, only the indulgence of that orientation in lustful attitudes or actual sex.

Nor is it so clear that the Bible presents homosexual activity as a perversion worse than any other—as many Christians have thought. To be sure, Romans 1 singles out homosexual activity for special attention. But Paul’s purpose in doing so may not be because he regards it as a more serious sin than others but because he sees it as a particularly clear illustration of the violation of the created order. In any case, we are clearly called on to offer the same love and hope through the gospel to homosexuals that we offer to any caught up in any forms of sin.

Contemporary Significance

IN THE BRIDGING CONTEXTS section, we have already moved into the application of this paragraph to contemporary life. But the passage is rich in implication, and we will explore here the significance of two more issues Paul raises in these verses.

Natural revelation. In what becomes both a fascination and a frustration, the interpreter of Romans is confronted in virtually every chapter with a text that is one of the most important in the Bible on a huge and usually debated theological issue. The fascination comes from getting into issues of such far-reaching significance; the frustration comes from the need to study so much Scripture in order to come to a right understanding of the particular text in Romans. Nothing in Romans 1 stimulates these reactions more than Paul’s teaching on natural revelation.

This issue is unclear in the Bible, with many texts to be considered and not all them appearing to move in the same direction. Moreover, the religious pluralism of our culture has put the whole matter of God’s revelation in other religions at the top of the theological agenda. We have neither the space nor the expertise to treat this issue adequately. But several points can be drawn from what Paul teaches here in Romans 1.

(1) There is such a thing as natural revelation. A few scholars, notably the important twentieth-century theologian Karl Barth, have denied the existence of any true revelation of God apart from Christ. But Paul seems clear: “For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made” (v. 20). Not only has God left clear evidence of himself in the world he has made, but this evidence is actually perceived by people: It is “clearly seen”; “God has made it plain to them” (v. 19).

Most theologians have, therefore, rightly concluded that alongside “special” revelation—God’s acts and their authoritative interpretation in Scripture—we must also place “natural” revelation—God’s disclosure of information about himself in the world. The reality of natural revelation and its universal availability has consequences for one of the most often-asked questions about God’s justice: What about the fate of those who have “never heard”? This is a question I myself asked when people were witnessing to me in my college days. It has no easy answer. But one thing we can say on the basis of Romans 1: All people have heard. God has revealed certain truths about himself in the world, and all people have access to that truth. Every person is guilty of rejecting that knowledge of God universally available.

(2) What God reveals to people in nature is limited. In this context, Paul refers to certain “invisible qualities” of God and to a recognition that sinful acts are worthy of death (v. 32). He does not mention any other theological truths as available to people through natural revelation. His silence does not, of course, mean that God might not reveal other truth through this means. But natural revelation is rather limited in the amount of information about God that it conveys.

(3) The results of natural revelation are negative. We must recall the larger purpose of Paul at this point in Romans. He is showing why the revelation of God’s righteousness in the gospel is necessary—because all people are locked up under sin’s power (3:9) and are helpless to free themselves from its grip. The drastic step God has taken in the gospel—sending his Son to die on a Roman cross—would surely be unnecessary if rescue were available elsewhere. We will pursue this issue further when considering 2:14–16. Suffice it to say here that Paul’s whole argument makes any positive role for natural revelation at this point in Romans unlikely.

More important is what Paul explicitly says about natural revelation in this passage. For verse 20 concludes: “so that men are without excuse.” Paul presents the reality of natural revelation in order to justify his assertion that people “suppress the truth” (v. 18). His purpose is to vindicate God by proving that he is perfectly just in inflicting his wrath on people. They had some knowledge of God; they turned away from that knowledge; thus, they are “without excuse” before God when he pours his wrath out on them.

Calvin’s summary of the matter is worth quoting at length:

It is therefore in vain that so many burning lamps shine for us in the workmanship of the universe to show forth the glory of its Author. Although they bathe us wholly in their radiance, yet they can of themselves in no way lead us into the right path. Surely they strike some sparks, but before their fuller light shines forth these are smothered…. But although we lack the natural ability to mount up unto the pure and clear knowledge of God, all excuse is cut off because the fault of dullness is within us.9

But we must not take this negative point too far. As Calvin has rightly put it, the truths revealed by God in nature “of themselves” cannot bring one to a true knowledge of God. But Paul does not deny that these truths may help lead people to search for true knowledge of God or to illustrate that knowledge. An important passage here is Acts 17:22–34, where Paul uses natural revelation as a stepping-stone to the presentation of the gospel to intellectuals in Athens. Thus, the evidence of Scripture as a whole leads us to conclude that natural revelation has a real, but limited, purpose. The beauty and intricacy of the world can help people understand that there must be a Creator; that religious traditions can reinforce notions of sin, judgment, and atonement; and that history can point to a providential ordering of events. Such things can stimulate in people a search for the true God. But Paul emphasizes how limited such knowledge is. Apart from God’s grace, it does not lead people to worship the true God. Without further revelation about Christ and his work on the cross, disclosed in the gospel, it cannot bring salvation.

Idolatry. This point is, perhaps, obvious—but no interpretation of Romans 1 would be complete without reminding ourselves of all the varied shapes that idolatry can take. Paul accuses people of turning from the “glory” and “truth” of God to images and lies of their own making (vv. 23, 25). Few of us worship images, but we are all prone to put something in the place that God alone deserves in our lives. That “idol” may be something evil in itself. But more often, the devil is more insidious, using a perfectly good or innocent pleasure to lure us from the wholehearted devotion to God that he deserves and demands.

Recently, for instance, my old love for photography has reawakened, and I find myself as an almost “empty-nester” with a bit (but only a little bit!) more disposable income than in the last couple of decades. I have therefore been buying some equipment (though, of course, one never has enough equipment) and spending time reading books on photography, chatting with other photographers on the Web, and taking trips and walks where I can take photographs. I am convinced that photography is a good creative outlet, a healthy change-of-pace from reading, studying, and teaching, and a wonderful hobby that my wife and I can share together. But I have also seen that photography is capable of taking up far too much of my time and money. It can, in brute fact, become an “idol” for me.

Idols lurk everywhere, lying in wait for those not fully enough aware of the danger. Liberated from idolatry in the ultimate sense by the work of God in Christ applied to our hearts, we can still fall prey to idols in a weaker sense, allowing people, things, or activities to deflect our worship and service of the true God.

Original Meaning

Peoples’ Suppression of Truth and Its Consequences (1:21–31)

THIS SECTION IS dominated by a thrice-repeated sequence:

“they … exchanged” (vv. 22–23)—“Therefore God gave them over …” (v. 24)

“they exchanged” (v. 25)—“Because of this, God gave them over …” (v. 26)

“their women exchanged … in the same way the men also” (vv. 27)—“he gave them over …” (v. 28b)

In each case, human beings put their own “god” or sin in place of the truth God has revealed to them. God reacts by “handing them over” to the consequences of the choice they have made. Just who the people are who make these “exchanges” is never clearly stated; throughout Paul uses the general “they.”

A few interpreters have suggested Paul may be speaking directly about the decision of the first human pair in the Garden of Eden to turn from God. However, while the story of humankind’s original fall into sin has undoubtedly colored Paul’s description, what he says goes far beyond this situation. It is better to think that he has in view human beings generally, prone to turn away from God because of the original fall into sin. What he says, in other words, is typical of human beings who have been given some evidence of God’s truth in the natural world around them. They choose not to worship God but to worship gods of their own making, falling deeper into sin in the process and earning God’s condemnation.

The first “exchange” (1:21–24) focuses explicitly on idolatry. People “knew” God (i.e., they knew about him; cf. v. 20), but they refused to acknowledge him. “Their thinking became futile” (v. 21b), they prided themselves on their own wisdom (v. 22), and they traded the “glory of the immortal God” for their own self-made images (v. 23). Paul echoes language used in the Old Testament to describe Israel’s fall into idolatry when the people fashioned a golden calf to worship (see Ex. 32): “They exchanged their Glory for an image of a bull, which eats grass” (Ps. 106:20; see also Jer. 2:11). Paul implies, therefore, that his condemnation of idolatry in this section may extend beyond Gentiles to include, as least in theory, Jews.

As a punishment for this idolatry, God “gave them over.” What Paul means by this language is not clear. Some give it a passive sense, as Godet illustrates: “He [God] ceased to hold the boat as it was dragged by the current of the river.”3 But the language suggests a more active involvement of God. He does not simply let go of the boat; rather, he confirms its disastrous course downstream. God reacts to the human decision to turn from him by consigning people to the consequences of their actions. As Paul will show, this involves an ever-increasing cycle of sin, but he highlights sexual sins. The NIV rightly interprets the general word “immorality” (akatharsia, lit. “uncleanness”) as “sexual impurity.” In keeping with a widespread Jewish tradition that Paul is adapting in this passage (see Bridging Contexts section on 2:1–11), he shows how the sin of idolatry leads to the disruption of God’s intention in sexual relationships.

The second “exchange sequence” (1:25–26) reiterates the connection between idolatry and sexual sin established in verse 24. The end of verse 26 is then transitional, as Paul both unpacks this sexual sin in terms of homosexuality and introduces the third “exchange sequence” as well (vv. 26b–28). He there singles out both women and men. Paul uses the Greek words for “female” (thelys) and “male” (arsen) to underscore the divine creation of human beings into these two categories and the implications about proper sexual conduct that flow from that distinction. The same emphasis on created intention is also conveyed by the language of “nature” in this passage: Women “exchanged natural relationships for unnatural ones” (v. 26b), and men likewise “abandoned natural relations with women” (v. 27). These “natural” relations are the ones God established for human beings in his creation (see Bridging Contexts section for more on this).

The focus on homosexual acts in these verses again reflects Jewish tradition, which often saw in homosexuality particularly striking evidence of the Gentiles’ idolatry and depravity. At the end of this section, Paul indicates the consequences of the indulgence in homosexual acts (in this case, among men in particular), that they “received in themselves the due penalty for their perversion” (v. 27b). Since Paul in this passage seems to be detailing various ways in which God’s wrath is inflicted on human beings, and since AIDS so often afflicts homosexual men, it is not surprising that some interpreters have thought that this disease is one manifestation of God’s wrath against human sin. But such a conclusion is possible only if we recognize that virtually all that is evil or wrong in our world is likewise a manifestation of God’s wrath. AIDS is simply one visible and deadly evidence of a world that has turned from God and brought on itself tragedies of all kinds.

At the end of verse 28, Paul finally introduces the “handing over” that corresponds to the “exchanged” of verse 26b. He has muddied their close relationship in his desire in verse 28 to emphasize the correspondence between sin and result. The relationship is intolerably awkward in English, but it would go something like this: Because people did not “approve” (edokimasan; NIV, “think it worthwhile”) of God’s knowledge, he handed them over to “unapproved” (adokimon; NIV, “depraved”) minds. Sin affects not only our affections (idolatry) and our senses (sex) but our very thinking.

Turning away from true knowledge of God means cutting ourselves off from any ultimately accurate understanding of this world and our place within it. No wonder that people do not understand the moral stances that Christians take on the basis of God’s truth! Another result is not surprising either: People end up doing “what ought not to be done” (v. 28b). In verses 29–31, Paul provides several illustrations of this sinful conduct. His list falls into three parts, indicated accurately in the NIV in its three-sentence arrangement:

• “They have become filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed and depravity.”

• “They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit and malice.”

• “They are gossips, slanderers, God-haters, insolent, arrogant and boastful; they invent ways of doing evil; they disobey their parents; they are senseless, faithless, heartless, ruthless.”

The syntactical structure reflects a certain logical order as well. The first sentence contains a list of general terms for sin; the second focuses on basic sins affecting human relationships; and the third list is more a potpourri of sinful conduct. Similar lists of sins—usually called “vice lists”—appear elsewhere in the New Testament (Matt. 15:19; Gal. 5:19–21; Col. 3:5; 1 Tim. 1:9–10; 1 Peter 2:1; 4:3) and imitate a widespread secular form.

While some of the Greek terms in these lists are obviously chosen for their appropriateness to the context, many are cited at random. Paul is simply trying to convey in a general way the different forms that sin can take. After focusing on idolatry and sexual sins, he may have been worried that some readers would conclude that only such “major” sins really were a problem. So he adds at the end of the paragraph a long list of sins, convinced that at least one of them will hit home to every person who reads the letter. We may not be worshiping the statue of an animal, but do we gossip? The latter, while perhaps not as serious to us as the former, is nevertheless just as much an indication of God’s wrath against sin.