The Greeks who knew the “unseen things” of God

The group of people criticised in Romans 1:18-32 is said to have known the truth about God and to have known God but also to have departed from that knowledge by worshipping and serving the creature rather the creator. Jason Staples has argued that this can be said only of Israel, not of the gentiles because only Israel has known God.

I want to have another look at this conundrum, because it occurs to me that there may be a very straightforward way to explain how this may be said of the Greeks. I will suggest that Paul was aware of Greek philosophical traditions that intuited, from reflection on the nature of things, the existence of a supreme and perhaps sole deity, but he bemoaned the fact that this enlightened view was swamped by the dominant religious culture of idol-worship.

Read more...
Pistis Christou and Paul’s controlling narratives
Some prominent scholars (so far Thomas Schreiner and Craig Blomberg) have been posting their views regarding the much debated translation of pistis Christou in Galatians 2:16 on the new BibleGateway translation forum. I think the debate is important, but not as important as the underlying… ()
New Perspective and Reformed theologies at a crossroads
Jim Hoag has a couple of pertinent questions about my “Postconservative evangelicalism and beyond” post—pertinent, in fact, to the point that he makes me wonder whether the piece had much in the way of substance to it at all. The first question has to do with what we understand by the “New… ( | 4 comments)
Douglas Campbell and the wrath of God
A few pages from the end of The Deliverance of God Douglas Campbell appends a rather limp section—less than a page—on the “wrath of God” (929-30). The discussion, admittedly, concludes a chapter examining only Philippians and a smattering of “ancillary’ texts in the light of his re-reading… ( | 3 comments)
Becoming like Jesus—not all that it’s made out to be
I wrote a couple of weeks back about the close and defining connection in Paul’s thought between sonship and the specific theme of suffering and vindication. Paul appears to make a crucial distinction in Romans 8:16-17 between being ‘heirs of God’ (klēronomoi… theou) and being… ()
Postconservative evangelicalism and beyond
I thought I had found a nice new label for myself: a ‘postconservative evangelical’. Roger Olson defines the term in Reformed and Always Reforming: The Postconservative Approach to Evangelical Theology and makes reference to it in a post on NT Wright and the New Perspective. Wright… ( | 2 comments)
Daniel Kirk on Mark 13
Daniel Kirk has been running an excellent series of posts on Mark 13—excellent in the sense that I agree with pretty much everything he says. For convenience I have listed his posts here, starting with the most recent: ( | 1 comment)
Salvation comes a close second
In a chapter in The Deliverance of God exploring the ‘yawning gap between Justification theory’s description of Judaism and the actual nature of of surrounding Judaism’ (124) Douglas Campbell makes the point that by no means all forms of Judaism were preoccupied with matters of… ( | 4 comments)