In three different places Paul speaks solely to men without the Bible. The first is in Lystra (Acts 14:15-17), where the message is fragmentary because it was interrupted. The second is on Mars Hill (Acts 17:16-32), where he has a longer speech, but that also was broken off. Third is the Book of Romans, 1:18—2:16, where he can develop his argument at ease. We can see here what he was really saying in all these places, for the other two conform to this early section in Romans.
Here, I believe, is where God gives us the method of preaching to our generation, for our generation is largely made up of men without the Bible. How are you going to start talking to them? Are you only going to quote from the Bible if they don’t know anything about it, or if they despise or ignore it or do not know its authority? Paul didn’t. In this passage from Romans 1:18 to 2:16 he does not once quote from the Old Testament. When he begins to talk to the Jew, however, after 2:17, he does quote from the Scripture, because the Jews knew what the Bible was. But in the first part, where he talks to the Greek, the man without the Bible, he talks to him in a different way. And I repeat: I believe that we can learn from this the method of preaching to our generation.
How, then, does Paul begin to speak to the man without the Bible? He says this in 1:18: “For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who hold the truth in unrighteousness.”Many of the new translations read “hinder the truth,” but I think “hold,” from the King James Version, is the better translation. The first thing Paul says to the man without the Bible is this: “You’re under the wrath of God because you hold the truth in unrighteousness.” Notice that he immediately begins to preach the wrath of God. Think now of this man without the Bible (he is no different then than now). If you merely say what Paul said in 1:16 and 17, “Here’s salvation,” he will shrug his shoulders and say, “Why do I need salvation?” Or if modern man thinks he needs salvation, it will be some modern psychological salvation. But Paul says, “No. What you need is moral salvation. You are guilty. You have true guilt in the presence of God.”
Terry Southern (who wrote Candy and The Magic Christian) had something important to say in the preface to Writers in Revolt. He made a distinction between the communist countries, in which the state has built arbitrary absolutes on the basis of arbitrary law, and the modernWest, which has oriented everything psychologically. He had a clever sentence which said that we are the first generation in history to do away with crime. He did not mean there is no crime, but that we no longer call it crime; we explain everything as only psychological. When modern man (whether he is educated or not) thinks he needs salvation, usually he is not thinking of salvation from moral guilt, but rather relief from psychological guilt-feelings.
I am convinced that many men who preach the gospel and love the Lord are really misunderstood. People make a “profession of faith,” but because they haven’t understood the message, they are not really saved. They feel a psychological need and they want psychological relief, but they don’t understand that the Christian message is not talking only about psychological relief (though it includes that), but is talking about true moral guilt in the presence of a holy God who exists. The real need is salvation from true moral guilt, not just relief from guilt-feelings. And I am certain many people who make a profession go away still unsaved, having not heard one word of the real gospel because they have filtered the message through their own thought-forms and their own intellectual framework in which the word guilt equals guilt-feelings.
But Paul will not allow this. He speaks immediately of the wrath of God, and anyone who is unwilling to speak of the wrath of God does not understand the Christian faith. We have a great verse telling us how to be saved: “He that believeth on the Son hath everlasting life” (John 3:36). But you must remember that the end of that verse is this: “and he that believeth not the Son shall not see life; but the wrath of God abideth on him.” There is no real preaching of the Christian gospel except in light of the fact that man is under the wrath of God—the moral wrath of God. So Paul has a reply to the man who shrugs his shoulders and says, “Why do I need salvation?” His response is this: “You need salvation because you are under the wrath of God. You have broken God’s law.”
We must be careful here, for there is, of course, a very false Christian legalism. Paul preaches against it in Galatians. Nevertheless, there is no Christian message without a proper legalism. It is this that demarcates Christian from non Christian thinking at this point. The non-Christian, in this century especially, has no legal and moral base. Everything floats in space: a 51 percent vote of some type of right-wing or left-wing authoritarianism must decide what is acceptable, or some form of hedonism must be adopted, because, as Plato understood so well, an absolute is necessary for real morality. Plato never found such an absolute, but he understood the problem, and so did the Neoplatonic men of the Renaissance.
But the Bible is clear: there is a moral law of the universe. And that basic law is the character of God Himself. There is no law behind God that binds God. Rather, God Himself is the law because He is not a content less God, but a God with a character. His character is the law of the universe. When He reveals this character to us in verbalized, propositional form, we have the commands of God for men. Thus there are absolutes and categories; the law which the God who exists has revealed and which is based upon His character is final. This is the biblical position.
Therefore, when men break these commands, they are guilty, guilty in the same way a man is guilty when he breaks the law of the state. When a man sins, he sins against the character of God, and he has moral guilt in the presence of the Great Judge. I know very well that people don’t talk in these terms often any more. But it’s to our loss. In contrast to left-wing or right-wing totalitarianism with its changing arbitrary absolutes and in contrast to modern man’s relativistic, moral and legal chaos, the Bible’s teaching alone gives moral answers to men.
We are told in Romans 1:18 that the man without the Bible holds the truth in unrighteousness. Or if you choose, you can say he hinders or suppresses the truth. I will deal later with the difference between hold and hinder. For the moment I will use the word suppress, which is used in many modern translations.
What truth then does the man without the Bible suppress? Formerly we talked about apostasy in a generation which knew the gospel and turned away from it. The Jews of Jeremiah’s day suppressed the truth of the Bible which they had. But what truth does man suppress if he does not have the Bible? We read in 1:19 and 20, “Because that which may be known of God is manifest in them; for God hath shown it unto them. For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made.”
Paul divides the truth which they suppress into two parts. It’s interesting that they are the same two things that Carl Gustav Jung said cut across man’s will: first of all, the external world; and secondly, those things that well up from inside the person. Jung, though he has no real solution, exactly identifies the two basic things that confront man—man himself, and the external universe. And Paul said long ago these are the two truths which man, even the man without the Bible, suppresses. As we have seen, Paul preached in other places to the Gentiles without Jews present, in Lystra and on Mars Hill. There too he used the same approach to the man without the Bible.
We should look in more detail at the truth about man which those without the Bible suppress. The list is rather long, for man is distinguished from both animals and machines on the basis of his creativity, his moral motions, his need for love, his fear of non being, and his longings for beauty and for meaning. Only the biblical system has a way of explaining these factors which make man unique.
In Romans 2:15 Paul put special emphasis upon the moral motions of man: “Who show the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience also bearing witness, and their thoughts the meanwhile accusing or else excusing one another.”
God through Paul is saying here exactly what I feel we should say to modern man. And it is this: despite what a man may say in theory, he cannot escape having moral motions. The man who says morals do not exist is not amoral in the sense that he has no moral motions. Men may have different mores, but one never finds people without moral motions.
Talk to any men or women, and they may seem absolutely amoral. But if you can really talk to them, you find that they do have their own moral standards. They may be different; they may be very poor. But they are not just a machine. Modern people, as I have said, see themselves as in a deterministic situation where morals have no meaning; but they cannot, and do not, live this way.
We have a startling illustration of this in the Marquis de Sade, who was not only a pornographer, but a real philosopher. Those who are materialists have something to wrestle with in the Marquis de Sade’s formulation, something that no determinist has ever been able to answer. The Marquis de Sade said that since everything is chemically determined, then whatever is, is right. Think about that for six months. The simple fact is that there is no way around that conclusion. De Sade is right. And sadism is the perfectly logical result. Obviously nature made man stronger than the woman; therefore, a man has the right to do anything he wants to a woman. That was de Sade’s particular form of sadism. Nobody who holds any concept of determinism, either chemical or psychological, can explain why the Marquis de Sade is wrong. Determinism leads in the direction of cruelty and inhumanity, whether it takes the specific form of de Sade’s sadism or not.
But even the Marquis de Sade, who indeed would have claimed that all men were merely determined, couldn’t live this way. If you read carefully in what he wrote and examine his history, you find that at the end of his life, he was in an insane asylum in Charenton. What he was doing hardly seems possible. He was spending his time grumbling about the way he was being treated by the sailors, and he was reading the letters of his wife with meticulous care, having worked out some sort of system whereby he thought he could figure out from the number of letters in the lines the day he was going to get out. The simple fact is that men, even a Marquis de Sade, may say there is no such thing as morality and that all is a fixed situation, but in their own actions they demonstrate what they deny in their writings.
I have always enjoyed the thought of Khrushchev sitting at the United Nations, pounding on the table with his shoe and shouting, “It’s wrong. It’s wrong.” Isn’t that an interesting thing for a materialist to say? He didn’t mean that something was merely counter to the best interests of the Soviet Union. He was saying something was wrong.
Moral motions distinguish man from non-man, but so does the need for love. Man feels the necessity of a love that means more than a sexual relationship. Many of the same people who say that love is only sexual go through marriage after marriage, hoping to find something more than physical satisfaction. Even when they say love is only sexual, they are looking for something to make love mean what the heart of man longs to have it mean. They simply cannot live consistently with their own view.
For a few men, the need for beauty is the point at which the mannishness of man most clearly shows through, even though on the basis of their own concept of man as a chance configuration of atoms in an impersonal universe, the very meaning of the word beauty is open to question.
All men, however, have a deep longing for significance, a longing for meaning. I was struck by the opening to Will and Ariel Durant’s The Lessons of History. In the first paragraph they meditate on the cosmic dimensions of the universe, on the fact that the planets will remain not only when individual men are gone, but even after the whole race of man is gone. They were impressed with man’s transience much as Proust was when he said that the dust of death is on everything human. But as to man’s significance, all the Durants can point to is a kind of dignity that man has because he can observe the planets and they cannot observe him. It’s quite clear: no man—no matter what his philosophy is, no matter what his era or his age—is able to escape the longing to be more than merely a stream of consciousness or a chance configuration of atoms now observing itself by chance.
In an extreme form, the longing for significance expresses itself most clearly in the fear of non being It has been obvious for centuries that men fear death, but depth-psychologists tell us that such a fear, while not found in animals, is for man a basic psychosis: no man, regardless of his theoretical system, is content to look at himself as a finally meaningless machine which can and will be discarded totally and forever. Even those who seek death and cry for the fulfillment of the death-wish still have a fear of non being somewhere inside them. I am struck that when you talk to men contemplating suicide, somewhere inside they see themselves as a continuing spectator.
If you go back in art as far as you can go, you find that wherever man is, his essential mannishness is there too. Archaeologists unearthed a man that they say lived something like 40,000 years ago. They found him buried in a grave of flower petals. Now that’s intriguing. You don’t find animals burying their dead in flower petals. Or examine the Spanish and French cave paintings—the largest early work of art which gives us extended content. (I would accept the date of about 20,000 B.C. concerning these.) The paintings reveal that those cave-dwellers had the same human longings we have. Right there in the midst of the painting are indications that a man is crying out, “I know within myself that I am more than the dust that surrounds me.” As a matter of fact, there is a theory that explains the cave paintings in southern France and northern Spain as a symbol system expressing the longings of man. Although it is open to discussion, I think it’s probably right; and even if that theory proves not to be correct, still they do show man considering himself as uniquely distinguished from that which is non-man.
We may also mention the testimony of the scholar LeviStrauss. Though his theories are highly controversial, LeviStrauss has been a most important anthropologist. This French scientist put forth a concept that shook the world of anthropology. It is this: no matter where you go, into the past, into the present, to primitive peoples or cultured societies, you find that all men think in the same fashion. Man’s thinking has not basically changed along the way. Thus, although primitive tribes may not make high-level, analyzed antitheses, still there is in tribal thinking a clear antithesis between tribe and nontribe, hot and cold, and so forth. The mannish ness of man is evident as far back as anybody has been able to penetrate.
Michael Polanyi’s arguments concerning the DNA template show much the same thing. Without going into details, let me say simply that Michael Polanyi specifically rejected the chemical determinism of Francis Crick. The chemical and physical properties of the DNA template do not give an explanation of what man is merely on the basis of those chemical and physical properties.
So Levi-Strauss said to look at the thinking of man; wherever you go into the past, into the present, man is man. Polanyi said the DNA template does not explain those peculiar things which man is. Mortimer Adler also testified to the problem of man’s uniqueness in The Difference of Man and the Difference It Makes. He did not have an answer, but he said there is something different in man, and we had better identify it or we will start to treat people as nonhuman and even more tragedy will result. No matter what his theoretical system is, man knows within himself that he cannot be equated with non-man.
What Paul says in Romans is as up-to-date as the present ticking of the clock—men, even men without the Bible, suppress the truth of what they themselves are. Primitive man, cultured man, ancient man, modern man, Eastern man, Western man: all have a testimony that says man is more than their own theories explain.
Paul then turns to the second area in which men suppress the truth. In Romans 1:20 he says, “For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made.” So the second testimony man suppresses is the truth of the external world. JeanPaul Sartre has said that the basic philosophic question of all questions is this: why is it that something is there rather than nothing? He is correct. The great mystery to the materialist is that there is anything there at all.
However, it is not that something chaotic is there, but that something orderly is there. Einstein understood this very well at the end of his life. According to his friend Oppenheimer and what we know from his own writing, Einstein at the end of his life became a modern mystic. He didn’t have the answer, he didn’t turn to the Judeo-Christian position or the Bible, but he understood that there had to be a bigger answer because he saw in the universe an order that is indisputable. Einstein worded it beautifully when he said the world is like a well-constructed crossword puzzle; you can suggest any number of words, but only one will fit all the facts. And so Sartre says, “There’s something there,” and Einstein adds, “Yes. Look at the marvel of its form.” Let’s put it another way: there is a distinction between science and science fiction. In science fiction you may imagine any kind of universe, but in science you must deal with the universe that exists.
For several years Murray Eden at MIT used high-speed computers to calculate the possibility of whether on the basis of chance there could be so much complexity in the universe within any acceptable amount of time. His conclusion was that the possibility is zero.
We find the same thing in Charles Darwin himself in his autobiography and his letters. It’s amazing that this old man toward the very end of his life said, “I cannot believe with my mind that all this was produced by chance.” Not his emotions, but his mind. And he has to excuse the testimony of his intelligence by saying that his mind has just come by evolution from a monkey mind, and who can trust that. But, of course, there’s a trick in this. If he could not trust his mind on such a crucial point, how could he trust it to formulate the evolutionary hypothesis itself?
In short, the testimony of the existence and form of the external universe and of man himself, whether in the ancient world or the modern, constantly speaks to man and asks, “Do your presuppositions—your gods, your philosophy, or your naturalistic science—really explain what is?” Paul is saying that the truth that the man without the Bible suppresses is the truth of what is, a truth that surrounds him on every side. The Bible says, “They are without excuse.” The man without the Bible is without excuse because he suppresses the truth of the nature of man and the nature of the external universe.
I would like to return now to a comment I made earlier in this chapter. You will recall that in the King James Version Romans 1:18 contains the phrase “hold the truth in unrighteousness,” and that most modern translations render this verse as “hinder the truth in unrighteousness” or “suppress the truth.” Some experts in Greek have told me that “hold” is better. Here, I believe, is the explanation. Paul is saying that men—because they refuse to bow to the God who is there and because they hold their presuppositions as an implicit faith—hold some of the truth about themselves and about the universe, but do not carry these things to their logical conclusions because they contradict their presuppositions. Therefore, they hold a portion of the truth, but they hold it in unrighteousness. They must hold some of the truth about themselves and the universe, for they must live in the universe as God made it; but they refuse to carry these truths to their reasonable conclusions. Whether they live in the ancient world or in the modern world, they adhere to their false presuppositions. Paul is saying, “Don’t you understand? You really deserve the wrath of God because you, even you without the Bible, hold this testimony in unrighteousness.”
So Paul continues in 1:21 and 22, on which we have already spent so much time. Men have become vain in their reasoning, their hearts have been darkened, and they have become foolishly foolish—holding positions in the very face of what exists. Men then are under God’s judgment, not because God has scattered them like a handful of gravel, but because He has treated them as He created them—as significant. Man’s own choices have led men where they are. In their own way all men are like the 1960 hippie who said, “Well, I don’t care what happens to the next generation. I will take LSD even if it does split the chromosomes. I care only for the moment.” In age after age men who had the truth have deliberately thrown it away. The world is what it is, not as a result of the cruelty of God to man, but of the cruelty of man to man.
In Romans 1:24 we read, “Wherefore, God gave them up to uncleanness through the lusts of their own hearts, to dishonor their bodies between themselves.” Men in our own sociologically and psychologically oriented age have all kinds of explanations for the moral problems of man. But according to the Bible, it is not moral declension that causes doctrinal declension; it is just the opposite. Turning away from the truth—that which is cognitive, that which may be known about God—produces moral declension. The modern artists, the dramatists, and the novelists show how far modern man has turned away into moral byroads. The Bible tells us the cause: men who knew the truth turned away; they are followed by men who do not know the truth, and this results in all sorts of moral turning aside.
Paul repeats this concept three times, in 1:23-24, 25-27, and from 28 on. It seems to me he is saying, “Notice it, and notice it well. You haven’t misread. Don’t just read it lightly, because I’m going to say it three times so that you’ll understand that you read it correctly in the first place. It’s because men turn away from God that moral problems arise.”
We must not accept minor secondary causes as to why man sins. Some psychological and sociological conditioning occurs in every man’s life, and this affects the decisions he makes. But we must resist the modern concept that all sin can be explained merely on the basis of conditioning. In our generation there is a constant tendency to explain sin lightly and think that such an explanation is more humanitarian. But it isn’t. It decreases the importance and the significance of man. Consequently, we can be glad for the sake of man that the Bible’s explanation is so emphatic.
Paul repeats it in 1: 25: “Who changed [the word changed is really exchanged in the Greek] the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served the creature [creature means that which has been created] rather than the Creator.” This is the second of the three repetitions.
Paul was thinking of the gods of silver and stone and also the worship of the universe or any part of it. He says men have made such gods rather than worshiping the living God. Even on the basis of what they know themselves to be, they should have known better. Isaiah said 700 years before, “Aren’t you silly to make gods that are less than yourself. You must carry them; they don’t carry you. Now isn’t it silly to make an integration point that is less than you yourself are.” Paul used precisely the same argument on Mars Hill. Men who refuse to bow before God take the facts concerning the universe and man, push these facts through their own presuppositional grid, fail to carry their thinking to a reasonable conclusion, and so are faced with an overwhelming lie. Idols of stone are obvious lies because they are less than man, but so are non-Christian presuppositions such as the idea of the total uniformity of natural cause and effect in a closed system—the final explanation of the impersonal plus time plus chance—which ultimately makes man only a machine.
So Paul continues, “For this cause God gave them up unto vile affections; for their women did change the natural use for that which is against nature; and likewise also the men, leav- ing the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another, men with men working that which is unseemly, and receiving in themselves that recompense of their error which was meet.”
Usually the first of these sins is taken to refer to lesbianism. But I am not sure that lesbianism is what is involved here. I think that this may be parallel to Isaiah 3:16: “Moreover, the Lord saith, Because the daughters of Zion are haughty, and walk with stretched forth necks and wanton eyes, walking and mincing as they go, and making a tinkling with their feet.” If this is so, Paul is first speaking of heterosexuality which has become twisted. Women turn away from the truth and misuse their natural femininity and all the strong sexuality connected with it. Sexuality here is a neutral word, for the rightness of sex depends on what you do with it. Paul would be saying, the women have used their bodies and their proper sexuality as a man-trap, twisting a good gift of God (which surely Eve had) into that which is wrong: “You have taken one of the most beautiful things that has ever existed, and ever will exist in the created world, and you have turned it into evil.”
Romans 1:27 does, of course, refer to homosexuality and includes lesbianism. As people have turned from the truth, they have gotten their sexuality mixed up. A number of homosexuals and lesbians have come to L’Abri where they hoped they could get help. We must show compassion and not act as though this sin is greater than other sins, or as though we are superior since we are not caught in this. But at the same time we must point out that the practice (in contrast to the temp-tation) of homosexuality is wrong. It is not wrong in a way that makes them worse than other sins would do, but under the absolutes of God its practice is wrong.
The third of the three repetitions comes in 1:28: “And even as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over [or God gave them up] to a mind void of judgment.” The King James translation (“a reprobate mind”) misses the point. It’s a mind void of judgment, a phrase referring back to 1:21 and 22, “they became vain in their reasoning,” religiously but also intellectually foolish. These people do not understand what the universe is, and they do not understand who they themselves are. That sounds very modern indeed.
Gauguin, the French painter, brilliant as he was, provides an excellent example. Following Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s idea that man is (or ought to be) autonomous, completely free, he said that what troubled him was that 2 and 2 always equaled 4. He wanted to be so free that on a Tuesday morning at eight o’clock he could say 2 + 2 = 4½.
What Paul is stressing here is that when you turn away from God and follow other presuppositions, the more consistent you are to your presuppositions, the further you get from reality itself. So you see Gauguin trying to paint an autonomous freedom, a primitive simplicity, and, as it were, stamping his feet and saying, “If my system is right, somehow or other 2 + 2 should not always equal 4.”
Let us summarize briefly the course of the argument in this chapter. We began by noticing that Paul speaks in a special way to the man without the Bible. The man without the Bible has not suppressed special revelation (that is, the revelation in the Bible), but the general revelation given by the mannishness of man and by the external world. It is then plain that the man without the Bible holds the truth in unrighteousness; he holds some of the truth about himself and the universe, but he does not follow it to its reasonable conclusions. Thereafter, a breakdown in morality occurs. God says to man in this position: You are under My judgment. And so these questions arise: “How are men without the Bible going to be judged?” and “Is this just?”
Those are the questions with which I close the present chapter.