Romans 1:28

ff. In Romans 1:28-30 we have the third and last παρέδωκεν expanded. As they did not think fit, after trial made (ἐδοκίμασαν), to keep God in their knowledge, God gave them up to a mind which cannot stand trial (ἀδόκιμον). The one thing answers to the other. Virtually, they pronounced the true God ἀδόκιμος, and would have none of Him; and He in turn gave them up to a νοῦς ἀδόκιμος, a mind which is no mind and cannot discharge the functions of one, a mind in which the Divine distinctions of right and wrong are contused and lost, so that God's condemnation cannot but fall on it at last. νοῦς is not only reason, but conscience; when this is perverted, as in the people of whom Paul speaks, or in the Caananites, who did their abominations unto their Gods, the last deep of evil has been reached. Most of the words which follow describe sins of malignity or inhumanity rather than sensuality, but they cannot be classified. τὰ μὴ καθήκοντα covers all. καθήκοντα is the Stoic word which Cicero renders officia. κακοηθία, the tendency to put the worst construction on everything (Arist. Rh. ii. 13), and κακία are examined in Trench's Synonyms, § xi., and ὑβριστής, ὕπερήφανος, ἀλάζων in § xxix. θεοστυγεῖς appears to be always passive in the classics, not God hating, but God hated: Deo odibiles, Vulg. The characters are summed up, so to speak, in Romans 1:32 : οἵτινες τὸ δικαίωμα τοῦ θεοῦ ἐπιγνόντες κ. τ. λ.: such persons as, though they know the sentence of God, that those who practise such things are worthy of death, not only do them, but give a whole-hearted complacent assent to those who follow the same practice. τὸ δικαίωμα τοῦ θεοῦ is that which God has pronounced to be the right, and has thereby established as the proper moral order of the world. θάνατος is death, not as a natural period to life, but as a Divine sentence executed on sin: it is not to be defined as physical, or spiritual, or eternal; by an such abstract analysis it is robbed of part of its meaning, which is as wide as that of life or the soul. ἀλλὰ καὶ συνευδοκοῦσιν : to be guilty of such things oneself, under the impulse of passion, is bad; but it is a more malignant badness to give a cordial and disinterested approval to them in others.

It is a mistake to read these verses as if they were a scientific contribution to comparative religion, but equally a mistake to ignore their weight. Paul is face to face with a world in which the vices he enumerates are rampant, and it is his deliberate judgment that these vices have a real connection with the pagan religions. Who will deny that he was both a competent observer and a competent judge? Religion and morality in the great scale hang together, and morality in the long run is determined by religion. Minds which accepted the religious ideas of Phenicia, of Egypt or of Greece (as represented in the popular mythologies) could not be pure. Their morality, or rather their immorality, is conceived as a Divine judgment upon their religion; and as for their religion, nature itself, the Apostle argues, should have saved them from such ignorance of God, and such misconceptions of Him, as deformed every type of heathenism. A converted pagan (as much as Paul) would be filled with horror as he reflected on the way in which he had once thought of God; he would feel in himself that he ought to have known better, and that everything in the world cried shame upon him. Now to recognise this fact is to accept the premises of the Apostle's argument, and the use to which he puts it. “Once we went after dumb idols; our very worship led us into sin, and sometimes even consecrated it; now we can only see in this our own blindness and guilt, and God's judgment upon them” so we can fancy the converted pagan speaking. Such a world, then, as the Apostle describes in this chapter, with this terrible principle of degeneration at work in it, and no power of self-regeneration, is a world which waits for a righteousness of God.

For an interesting attempt to show Paul's indebtedness for some of the ideas and arguments of Romans 1:18-32 to the book of Wisdom, see S. and H., p. 51 f.