Sunday, August 29, 2021

James Beilby on Romans 1:18-20 and Posthumous Salvation

  

While some have used Romans 1 to justify natural theology and argue that it is possible to arrive at knowledge of God based on logic and observation alone, there is nothing in this text to justify that contention. While it is obvious that this text teaches that people “clearly see” something about God, that which people see is clearly not the result of sophisticated logical argumentation, and Paul does not here refer to or seek to justify “a long process of reasoning by which people come to a knowledge of God’s existence and power” (Thomas R. Schreiner, Romans [Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 1998], 86). Moreover, the claim that this text teaches that humans have “knowledge” of God is liable to be misunderstood. It is better to see this text as teaching that humans have a “vague, unformulated knowledge or experience of God” (Joseph A. Fitzmyer, Romans, Anchor Bible Commentary [New York: Doubleday, 1993], 200). Richard Alan Young argues persuasively that the best way to see the understanding of God described in Romans 1 is a “vague unthematic awareness.” See his “The Knowledge of God in Romans 1:18-23: Exegetical and Theological Reflections,” Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 43, no. 4 [December 2000]: 695-707). From this perspective on this passage, Karl Barth writes, “We know that God is He whom we do not know, and that our ignorance is precisely the problem and the source of our knowledge” (Karl Barth, The Epistle to the Romans [London: Oxford University Press, 1968], 45). And, in a similar vein, but from the perspective of one more open to the concept of natural theology, Wolfhart Pannenberg argues that “to understand the complex issue, we need to separate the natural human knowledge of God, no matter how it is to be described in detail, very sharply from the phenomenon of natural theology, which may be related to it in some way but which must not be equated with it. The lack of clear differentiation in this matter is partly responsible for the hopeless confusion in the modern discussion of natural theology” (Wolfhart Pannenberg, Systematic Theology, 3 vols. [Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1998], 1:76).

 

But doesn’t the fact that all people are aware of God, even if that awareness is vague and unthematic, suggest that there are no people who are truly unevangelized and, therefore, that attempts to argue that some will be given a Postmortem Opportunity to hear the gospel are both unnecessary and presumptuous? No, for two reasons. First, it doesn’t seem at all plausible that “all are aware of God’s external power and divine nature” and have seen that “through what has been created.” For instance, how could Anna and Sam come to an awareness of God’s nature through observing creation? Now it might be possible to say that this unthematic awareness of God is only possessed by those who suppress the truth by their wickedness, but such an avenue of argument both raises questions about the nature and extent of original sin and fails to show that all people have an awareness of God. A second reason why Romans 1 does not function as an objection to Postmortem Opportunity is that even if this text teaches that all are aware of God in some sense, people are not aware in that requisite sense that renders the question of the destiny of the unevangelized moot, or undercuts the Postmortem Opportunity answer to that question. To see this, consider the question, What does it mean to say that “people are without excuse”? Does this mean that “people do not need to hear the gospel”? Surely not, for such a claim would invalidate the Great Commission. Does it mean that God does not desire the salvation of those who do not hear the gospel? Again, no. Human sinfulness and our unworthiness to stand before God and demand anything does not change the fact that “God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son” (Jn 3:16). The lesson here is that our need for a salvific opportunity is unchanged by the fact there is a very important sense in which people are aware of God and therefore lack an excuse.

 

It would be one thing if people who pressed this sort of objection to answers to the problem of the destiny of the unevangelized also asserted that it was possible to be saved via awareness of God’s invisible qualities on display in creation. Unfortunately, many who press the “no excuse” argument claim that God’s general revelation is sufficient to damn, but insufficient to save. For instance, Restricivists like J. I. Packer argue, “The Bible says that God’s general revelation, even when correctly grasped, yields knowledge of creation, providence and judgment only, not of grace that restores sinners to fellowship with God” (J. I. Packer, “The Way of Salvation, Part IV: Are Non-Christian Faiths Ways of Salvation?”, Bibliotheca Sacra 130, no. 518 [April 1973]: 115). This is problematic . . . not because God owes humanity an opportunity to be saved, but because this articulation of God’s love and salvific will is incompatible with what Scripture itself actually teaches. And perhaps that is the heart of what the “no excuse” objection is all about. What they are objecting to is a sense that the problem of the destiny of the unevangelized is being driven by a demand for “equal opportunity” or “soteriological opportunity justice.” The problem of the destiny of the unevangelized is driven by the sense that there are some that do not have an opportunity to be saved combined with the belief that this state of affairs is deemed to be undesirous by God himself. (James Beilby, Postmortem Opportunity: A Biblical and Theological Assessment of Salvation After Death [Downers Grove, Ill.: IVP Academic, 2021], 122-24)