Reflections on Romans 1

theology, metaphysics, meta-ethics, meta-epistemology, history of ideas

Verses

“For I am not ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God that brings salvation to everyone who believes: first to the Jew, then to the Gentiles. For in the gospel the righteousness of God is revealed—a righteousness that is by faith from first to last, just as it is written: ‘The righteous will live by faith.’” (Romans 1:16-17, NIV)

“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, so that people are without excuse. For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like a mortal human being and birds and animals and reptiles.” (Romans 1:20-23, NIV)

“Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural sexual relations for unnatural ones. In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another … Furthermore, just as they did not think it worthwhile to retain the knowledge of God, so God gave them over to a depraved mind, so that they do what ought not to be done.” (Romans 1:26-28, NIV)

 

Lexicon

gospel—euaggelion (εὐαγγέλιον): good news

power—dunamis (δύναμις): power (= dynamis)

belief/faith—pistis (πίστις): trust, faith

righteousness—dikaiosuné (δικαιοσύνη): righteousness, justice

invisible—aoratos (ἀόρατος): invisible, unseen

divine nature—theiotés (θειότης): divinity, divine nature

know—ginóskó (γινώσκω): to know, recognize, perceive, discern, judge, determine

glorify/glory—doxazó (δοξάζω): think, suppose, imagine (*from doxa: opinion, judgment, belief, reputation)

thinking—noeó (νοέω): perceive, observe, see, notice, think

natural/nature—phusis (φύσις): origin, birth, nature, form, type, kind

knowledge—epignósis (ἐπίγνωσις): acquaintance, knowledge (*from gnosis: knowledge)

ought to be—kathékó (καθήκω): fitting (kata + hékó)

 

Summary

Paul is introducing the gospel (good news) to Romans (gentiles). According to Paul, this good news is about the power of God. This power is capable of saving people. Paul adds that the good news tells us about the righteousness (justice) of God, i.e., the way things ought to be according to God. Thus, it could be inferred that the power of God is what actualizes or executes the righteousness of God. That is, the power of God saves people by imposing on them the rules of conducts (how things ought to be, how one ought to behave accordingly). One participates in the rules by having faith in their jurisdiction, i.e., by trusting God’s reasons for imposing these rules.

One way to verify the legitimacy of God’s authority is by reading it off from nature. The proper understanding of nature should supposedly convince one of why God’s authority is legitimate and why he should follow its rules. This is because, by properly understanding nature, one could learn about God’s qualities which are divine and are the sources of his power. However, it is possible that one could know about God, yet do not glorify him (i.e., do not accept his rules). When one does not follow (or trust) God, his conducts are unnatural. Such a person does what ought not to be done. Here, what is natural is defined as what is lawful according to God.

 

Reflections

Rules are codes for oughts. According to Sellars, there are two kinds of ought: ought-to-be and ought-to-do. On the one hand, there are ways things ought to be. These ways are enforced as to place or position objects in particular manners. For instance, it ought to be the case that the minute hand of a clock should be pointing to the bottom center at 12:30 pm or that the mercury inside a thermometer should fill up to a certain point on the gradation. The minute hand or the mercury may in fact not be as positioned. However, how things actually are is irrelevant to how things should be. This is what is known as Hume’s law, which states that “is” does not imply “ought,” i.e., just because something is the case does not mean that it should remain to be so. To impose rules on objects is to treat them as subject to prescriptions (ought) over descriptions (is). On the other hand, there are what one ought to do. If the minute hand is pointing at a wrong direction, one must fix it by moving the hand. A person may in fact ignore the problem or move the hand to another wrong direction. However, this is irrelevant to what he should have done. Ought-to-do is the agential part of rules. To impose rules on people is to treat them as being responsible for their behaviors and thoughts, as capable of making choices and conducting their life accordingly, and things are treated as subject to prescriptions in virtue of being seen as such by moral agents responsible for managing and maintaining the objects as demanded by the rules.

According to virtue ethics, what is proper (or how it should be) for something/someone is that which makes the object/person excellent in what it/he is. What counts as excellence is determined by the object/person’s essence. In other words, what is proper for an object/person is that which exercises or is in tune with its/his non-accidental qualities. For instance, the essence of a hammer is to hit on nails. Thus, what is proper for a hammer is the way it should be kept, used, or maintained that enhances and exercises its capacity to hit on nails. Here, one may raise the issue that virtue ethics is in conflict with Hume’s law because virtue ethics seems to imply that “is” does imply “ought” since, it may be argued, qualities are descriptive matters. However, virtue ethics is neutral on whether qualities are purely descriptive or prescriptive. For instance, a rusty hammer has qualities that interfere with its proper functions. From the perspectives of a craftsperson, the hammer’s qualities conducive to its functions (hardness, durability, etc.) are more essential than others (rustiness, heaviness, etc.). Thus, the craftsperson will fix the hammer into the condition in which it ought to be by removing rust. That is, the hammer’s prescriptive qualities are essential (non-accidental), and this is so in relation to the intention of the craftsperson. In some sense, virtue ethics in light of Hume’s law corresponds with the lesson from contemporary physics that observers are part of the observed system (observer effect). How things ought to be, what one ought to do, and what is natural for something/someone are intertwined in such a way that we cannot talk about one of them without considering the others.

Applying this interpretation of virtue ethics to Romans 1, the legitimacy of God’s authority that Paul insists as readable from the creation is not purely descriptive. Here, Paul is not (or should not be construed as) making the so-called intellectual design argument (which is thoroughly refuted by various philosophical and scientific arguments). Homosexuality is found to be practiced among non-human animals. That does not make homosexuality part of the creation on the Pauline view. What is natural and is therefore part of the creation from which one could read off the legitimacy of God’s authority is not what one acquires by (inferring from) descriptive inquiries. Darwin inferred evolutionism from observing nature carefully and his theory has come to refute much of the theological worldview then. (The arguments against the intellectual design argument were already under the way in the Enlightenment Era, and they are evident in some of Hume’s writings. But it was Darwin’s theory of evolution that really put an end to the intellectual design argument.) What atheism based on evolutionism misses is not a careful descriptive understanding of nature, but rather the consideration that evolutionism still presupposes the concept of life as its explanatory primitive. As Thompson explicates in Life and Action (2012), life cannot be reduced to any more naturalistic concept without losing what is essential to its concept: purposiveness or telos; homeostasis comes very close to its reductive concept, but still presupposes telos; here, one must distinguish between ontological and explanatory reduction whereby Thompson and I do not question the former kind of reduction.

What is proper or fitting, what is natural, and therefore what ought to be done—i.e., how things are as created according to their proper natural kinds—is a prescriptive matter, and what provides the prescriptive framework is God’s jurisdiction (standard of righteousness). Since one of the essential qualities of God is life (John 1:1-5; zóé), there is a sense in which homosexuality that inhibits reproduction is a sin according to the divine laws. However, the sense in which homosexuality is a sin, in my opinion, is very complicated and is not what many think it is. The topic of homosexuality is beyond the scope of our present discussion. A jurisdiction is real only as much as it is enforced. The Constitution that is not enforced by any political power does not have much authority. Thus, what is crucial to the realization (or legitimacy) of God’s authority is the power that could enforce it. The gospel is a sort of brochure with the information about how it is possible that the divine rules could be enforced so that God’s authority is legitimate.

As a side-note, the notion of power requires its own exposition (although this would be beyond the scope of our current discussion). Here is a little context. The Greek word for power is dunamis whose alternative form is dynamis. I think that the notion of power (or dynamics) has originally pertained to agential capacity. But, after Galileo, the mechanical view of cosmos replaced the Roman Catholic’s agential view that God constantly ordains the universe. Thus, the notion of power lost its agential aspect and became a mechanical concept used to explicate the concept of efficient cause. Within this tradition, Locke associated power and causation with (primary) qualities. One of the major legacies of Newton is that he provided an algorithmic code for expressing the dynamics of nature (power, change, etc.) which became the ground for the so-called scientific image (in which the primary objects are non-human matters whose identities are nominal)—the framework for descriptive inquiries in contrast to prescriptive (manifest image).

What makes the enforcement possible is God’s power, and the gospel tells us about the qualities of God that are the sources of the power. The most essential quality relevant to our concern is the resurrection life (i.e., God’s disposition of eternity), and the narrative of Jesus Christ is the story about this essential quality. What is interesting about Paul’s claim is that one participates in the rules of God and thus become subject to their jurisdiction by having faith in God. Here, the Greek word for faith/belief is pistis which is to be contrasted with another Greek word for belief, doxa. The latter word (doxa) is also translated as glory. However, the primary meaning of doxa is opinion, judgment, or acceptance. Doxa is also contrasted with episteme (knowledge). According to the JTB theory, knowledge is defined as a justified and true belief. As such, belief (doxa) is something that falls short of, but is on its way to becoming, knowledge. For an opinion to be counted as knowledge, it must first be true (i.e., correspond with facts) and second be justified (i.e., based on good evidence and inference). Reversely, since knowledge is a justified and true belief, if one knows that P, then he also believes that P (although characterizing a knower also as a believer is redundant). This sense of belief (doxa) is not what qualifies one as the participant or upholder of the divine rules. Pistis is associated with trust and reliability and, moreover, with rhetoric persuasion rather than with evidential inference. That there is good empirical accumulative evidence that the Bay Bridge will not collapse (based on Newton’s laws, statistical data, etc.) is one thing. That one trusts this evidence enough to actually cross over the bridge is another. In trusting something or someone, one literally takes the leap of faith. As such, faith or trust cannot be a posteriori (i.e., based on experience). Since the assurance that faith provides is a rhetoric, i.e., linguistic, matter, it must be a priori (either analytic or synthetic). To borrow a Kantian example, there is no empirical evidence of causation itself since causation is what is presupposed in categorizing observations. Causation is synthetic a priori, and we buy into its framework because it is one of the transcendental conditions (categories) of human cognition.

It is therefore not a coincidence that the Bible identifies one of God's qualities as logos (John 1:1), and there is something intellectualist about the Christian belief in God. Furthermore, I believe that it is in respect to this intellectualist ground of belief that Paul claims one could read off the power of God from observing the creation. But, if so, what would be the ground for this rhetoric persuasion? What is this persuasion a persuasion of? The object of pistis (i.e., the matters of facts about which we are convinced) cannot be the physical world, i.e., the class of objects of senses, for as explained above descriptive inquiries do not result in any conviction. That about which we are to be convinced, i.e., that in respect to which our statements about God are assigned with a truth-value, must then be the spiritual world. To use the Tarskian semantics, the spiritual world is a model (universe of discourse) for statements such as that God exists, [∃x God(x)]. To use the Lewisian semantics, the spiritual world is a possible world, and trusting God is to be committed to the idea that our actual world and this spiritual world coincide, [∃x ∃y (((God(x) & Ixy) & Wy) & (y = @))]. The ontology of spirituality must then be worked out somehow, but this would not be easy because spirituality, at least in the usual use of its linguistic token in religious language-games, is partly defined as being beyond human understanding and intelligence. As of now, I am not sure how to approach the matter of ontology and semantics concerning spirituality.

Paul states that one could know God without glorifying (upholding) him. Here, glory is doxa. Therefore, the better way to understand the statement is that one could know God without accepting him in one’s judgment (or give proper credits to his reputations). However, as I have explained above, one cannot be a knower without being a believer (doxa) as well. Thus, the kind of knowledge (gnosis) that Paul is talking about here must be a different kind than episteme although he used the epistemic term, gnosis, to express the idea. Or, perhaps, he meant that one could epistemically know that God is real without doxastically believing it so. In such a case, there is a mismatch between one’s knowledge and belief. That is, one has all the good evidence and inference to have concluded that God is real, but for some reason he refuses to endorse it as his opinion as well. If this is what Paul meant to point out, then he is describing the case in which a rational agent is violating the epistemic norms. That is, Paul is highlighting the moral aspect of epistemic activities, the issue of commitment accompanying one’s claim to knowledge. The example of such an agent would be someone who knows (or has good evidence to believe) that the climate change is real, but refuses to accept it for non-epistemic reasons (perhaps because accepting this fact is in conflict with his social identity, political association, or personal agenda).

What is the lesson that I learn from these reflections? I have hinted at it two paragraphs above. It seems that pistis is central to practicing Christianity. I do intuitively identify myself as a Christian. Therefore, if my intuition is right, then I must be the bearer of pistis. However, if I am trusting in God, why am I still under the influence of the laws of flesh? Am I a non-believer to the extent that I am under that influence? Am I a fanatic who believes that he lives in one reality (spiritual) while in actuality living in another (physical)? Am I a schizophrenic who has summoned a Christian personality in order to exculpate myself of immoral behaviors? What does it mean to be justified by faith? In what sense could the spiritual world be real, if not empirically? These all once again come down to the original anxiety in my existential crisis: Is my utterance of the word, ‘God,’ really denoting what it purports to be? As I am rereading the Epistle to the Romans, I hope to find clues to answering some of these questions.