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.

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Theological hermeneutics and the meaning of “Immanuel”
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Adams, Wright, Barth, theology, history, time, eternity, and Paul’s letter to the Romans
The fault line between theology and history is pervasive, persistent and profound. Samuel Adams argues in The Reality of God and Historical Method: Apocalyptic Theology in Conversation with N.T. Wright for a theological hermeneutics at the heart of which is the “apocalyptic … ( | 8 comments)
Explicit and implicit christologies in Mark
The explicit testimony concerning Jesus throughout Mark’s Gospel is that he is the beloved Son, empowered by the Spirit, who will serve the purposes of YHWH, who will suffer, who will be vindicated by his resurrection from the dead, and who will be seated at the right hand of YHWH, having… ( | 4 comments)
Can evangelicalism hitch the wagon of church and mission to the horse of historical narrative?
The cluttered mega-chart below (click for an enlarged version) combines yesterday’s schematic overview of Samuel Adams’ concise and lucid summary of Wright’s account of the relation between theology and history with my earlier attempt to show how the narrative-historical method goes back to the… ( | 1 comment)
Samuel Adams’ summary of Wright's argument about history and theology
In The Reality of God and Historical Method: Apocalyptic Theology in Conversation with N.T. Wright Samuel V. Adams offers an inversion of Wright’s solution to the division between theology and history. Whereas Wright addresses the question of God from the side of history, Adams wants… ( | 2 comments)
In the shadow of Babel (a sermon)
The last few weeks have been busy, and I’ve not had the time, or frankly the inclination, to blog. I haven’t posted a sermon before, and it’s perhaps a rather desperate measure, but I feel under some pressure to show that the narrative-historical approach can work in normal preaching-teaching… ( | 3 comments)