#140: Societal Implications of Romans I

This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #140, on the subject of Societal Implications of Romans I.

We began this miniseries with The Sin in Romans I, where we stated

…ultimately there is only one sin listed in the first chapter of the Book of Romans:

    …they did not give Him the glory or the gratitude that they owed Him, robbing Him of what He justly deserved….

We were deriving that from Romans 1:19ff.  We then continued in Immorality in Romans I to explain that the “sins” we see described in that first chapter–the immorality, homosexuality, and total depravity–are not given to us as the proof of guilt but as the demonstration of punishment, that God punishes those who fail to recognize and thank Him by delivering them to the desires that destroy them.  We ended that article with the thought

…if these are the punishment of God, why would I want them?  Obviously, there is this draw that they have, because people are drawn into them, and many Christians will admit being tempted in those directions.  The black hole of death pulls everyone toward it.  The message of the gospel includes that Jesus saves us from this, that He enables us to be free from this death.

Then I noted that there was something else, something I had missed before.

That is where we are today, but to get there we are going to begin with a meandering discussion beginning with divorce law.

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This has been not true for so long that some of my readers might be surprised to discover it was ever true.  At one time, when a man and a woman signed their names to a piece of paper and swore before a public gathering that they would remain together for their entire lives, the government regarded those to be legally enforceable promises which it, the public at large, and the couple themselves fully expected they would keep.  The part about “better or worse…rich or poor…sickness and health” underscored this:  there were no outs.  In England, if you wanted a divorce you often needed an Act of Parliament.

Of course, exceptions were made, what some will remember as “divorce for cause”.  The promises that were made to each other included loving and caring for each other, and forsaking all others.  If it could be demonstrated in court that one party had breached those promises, the other party was entitled to damages, including dissolution of the marriage.  If the husband beat the wife, or abandoned her; or if the wife was sleeping with the neighbor–these were causes, breaches of the promises, and the injured party could be released from the obligation, often with compensatory damages in property settlements or alimony.

Usually.

By the middle of the twentieth century, affluent Americans who believed that they had earned what they had, and forgot that God had given it to them, began to be bored with monogamy.  They felt like they should be able to divorce each other for no better reason than that they wanted to marry someone else, to find “happiness” with another lover.  Hollywood gossip certainly fueled this–the stresses on the marriages of movie stars who were frequently separated working on different projects, frequently put into close relationships with other actors, and adored by fans who made them believe they deserved better caused many of them to fail, and the tabloid press popularized the idea that a star or starlet was escaping a bad relationship for a better one.  Ordinary people thought that happiness was found in leaving the wrong person and finding the right one.  The law in most places, though, was very much against them:  you could not be divorced for a whim, only for a cause, a breach of the promise by one party against the other.

And the law was strict.  There is a New York case in which a couple wanted a divorce but could not get one without cause, so the husband arranged for his wife to have an affair with his best friend, and they went to court and presented the matter to the judge–and the judge said no, that since the husband colluded in his wife’s infidelity he could not claim that he had been harmed by it, and therefore had no cause for a divorce.  People were being forced to stay married to each other for no better reason than that at one time years before they promised each other and the government and the world at large that they would.

And somehow we no longer thought that a good enough reason.  Why should you have to do something just because you promised, and benefited from the promise?

Gradually over several decades we changed those laws, to allow ourselves to break those promises.  In the wake of that, the upcoming generation saw that the promises were becoming meaningless, and we entered the beginning of a “sexual revolution” in which such promiscuity became more open, accepted by larger and larger segments of society.  Today promiscuity is the assumed norm.  Unmarried adult virgins are treated as a comic element in popular media, a rarity, and sex among teens is expected even by their parents who don’t counsel them to wait but to be careful when they don’t.

And the law has moved to a place where it says, it is nobody’s business whether you have sex, whether you break promises made to a spouse, whether you get your pleasure from the opposite sex or the same sex.  Follow your own moral compass, and if you don’t like where it points, break it and go where you want.

In the process we have lost the ability to commit, to keep promises, to love and trust each other.  That is a serious loss.

This was the part I did not see a decade ago when I taught that class (or three decades ago when I taught Romans to those college students).  I could see that the immorality, the homosexuality, and the depravity were punishments on individuals who were destroying themselves because they refused to acknowledge God.  What I did not then see was that it was bigger than that.  It was not that Joe would not acknowledge God and now was having an affair with Alice, or that Bill was rejecting God and now found himself in a relationship with Steve, or that Mary ignored God’s kindness toward her and now could not figure out what was right and what was wrong.  That was all true, but it was also true that there were others who had failed to acknowledge God who still lived moral upright lives, who were not suffering from the punishment Paul described.  It was not targeting every individual evenly.

However, it was targeting society.  People who kept their marriage vows started to discover that their spouses did not.  People who embraced only heterosexual relationships discovered that they had homosexual children.  People who lived moral lives based on a moral compass that followed sound principles but not God found that those around them, even those closest to them, could see no reason to follow those principles and were ready to do whatever profited them, whatever felt good, whatever they wanted.  The society that rejected God, the society that failed to acknowledge Him, was falling into a downward spiral into depravity.

The wrath of God has come upon us.  We can see it in the world around us, and as Paul said, it proves that God has begun the end of the world with the judgment of those who reject Him.

There is at least one more piece to this miniseries, because this is not the end of the story.

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#139: Immorality in Romans I

This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #139, on the subject of Immorality in Romans I.

We began a miniseries with The Sin in Romans I, where we stated

…ultimately there is only one sin listed in the first chapter of the Book of Romans:

    …they did not give Him the glory or the gratitude that they owed Him, robbing Him of what He justly deserved….

We were deriving that from Romans 1:19ff.

Some of you were undoubtedly struggling with that, because your understanding of Romans 1:24ff is that Paul begins cataloguing the sins for which mankind is being judged.  He starts to talk about immorality, promiscuity, segueing into homosexuality and lesbianism, and then into an entire catalog that we can best describe as total depravity.  Surely these are the sins for which men are punished, no?

Painting by Thomas Rowlandson
Painting by Thomas Rowlandson

No.

If we read what the next two verses say, we find

Therefore, God in His wrath handed them over to their promiscuous drives, so that they would lose all respect for their bodies.  He punished them because they traded the truth they had about God for a lie, and worshipped and served creatures instead of their Creator, who is the source of all good things forever, and that’s certain.

All that promiscuity, all that immorality, that is not the sin–it is the punishment.

Some of you are thinking, what kind of punishment is that?  God gets upset because we don’t recognize how good He has been to us, so He punishes us by sending us lovers, causing us to have affairs?  Bring it on!

That actually demonstrates to some degree that you are already touched by that wrath; but then, why should sexual immorality be punishment?  It has always been a temptation, something we desire.  It seems, then, if we’re bad, God gives us what we desire.  How should that be a problem?  It sounds like punishing a bad child by giving him ice cream and candy.

It should be said first that if God says this is a punishment, there must be a reason for us to perceive it as a punishment.  There must be something fundamentally undesireable about that thing that we desire.  Maybe we don’t see what it is, but it must be there.

In fact, speaking in the abstract, God never forbids anything just because He doesn’t like it.  He forbids that which is bad for us and others.  We see short-term enjoyment in promiscuity, but God sees damage to people.  Years ago I wrote a page entitled Why Shouldn’t You Have Sex If You Aren’t Married? in which I talked about all the people who are hurt by these casual liasons–beginning with the partners themselves, extending to their future loves, their children, and people around them.  There I put some time into discussing how such promiscuous conduct is self-destructive, destroying the person’s reputation, their trustworthiness, their ability to love and be loved, and never really bringing any fulfillment.

God created us to form us into creatures who could engage in honest, trusting, loving relationships with each other and ultimately with Him.  Promiscuity, immorality, adultery, fornication–whatever specific form you give it–destroys that.

So, too, as the punishment worsens, we find in 1:26f

Because they did this, God handed them over to strong self-destructive feelings; their women traded all for which their bodies were made for something unnatural, and the men also abandoned that for which women’s bodies were made and felt strong passions for each other, and so men performed indecent sexual acts with other men, and suffered the consequences of having rejected God.

–that is, God punishes those who refuse to acknowledge and thank Him by pushing them into homosexuality, another even more self-destructive conduct.  This is the punishment.  It then worsens in 1:28ff, restating the crime,

Further, since they were no longer willing to recognize God, God handed them over to depravity in their thinking, so that they could no longer understand that anything could be wrong in itself, being completely filled with injustice, cruelty, greed, malice; full of envy, killing, rivalry, deceit, nastiness; they are rumor mongers, slanderers, God-haters, insulting, prideful, braggarts, inventing new evils, disobeying parents, foolish, promise-breakers, unloving, merciless, who fully aware that God is right to sentence to death those who do things like these not only do them themselves, but encourage others to do them as well.

People who do not recognize God ultimately become parodies of what we are supposed to be.

Of course, arguably not all of them do, or at least, not that we can see.  This punishment falls on some more harshly than others.  Yet it is evident that today people are rushing into these traits.

I would say one more thing about the immorality, the homosexuality, and the general depravity before I end this article:  if these are the punishment of God, why would I want them?  Obviously, there is this draw that they have, because people are drawn into them, and many Christians will admit being tempted in those directions.  The black hole of death pulls everyone toward it.  The message of the gospel includes that Jesus saves us from this, that He enables us to be free from this death.

All of this I have covered elsewhere.  Yet there was something else I only recently realized–which will be the next article in the miniseries.

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#138: The Sin in Romans I

This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #138, on the subject of The Sin in Romans I.

Just over a decade ago, on February 6, 2006, with the permission of the Christian Gamers Guild, I began using one of their Yahoo!Groups lists to teach a Bible class–something more than a Bible study, on the level of an undergraduate course but that the pace would be moderated and there would be no homework assignments.  I began with Paul’s Epistle to the Romans for some significant reasons–I had taught it as an undergraduate course before, I had recently rebuilt the notes I needed for it, and as primarily a Pauline scholar it made sense for me to begin with his most recognized and comprehensive work.  That class is still continuing, currently studying the First Epistle of John; you can read more about it here.

I mention it because there are several significant points I learned from that book that most people get completely wrong, and in those lessons (still available through Yahoo!) you can read about this in detail–but I have more recently begun to realize that there was something very important in that which I missed.

It is going to take more than one article to explain it, so I will begin by trying to get you up to speed so you don’t have to read all of those posts.

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The first thing to grasp is that this is, in a sense, Paul’s resume.  He has never been to Rome, and it appears that the people he names in the greetings he sends at the end of the letter are all people he met somewhere else.  He wants to preach in Spain, but he needs a base of operations, a church that will support him and send him that direction.  Thus he is sending a letter to them in which he lays out the message that he preaches, the gospel of Jesus Christ as he understands it.  This is what Paul preached in cities throughout the Roman Empire that changed the world; this is the fundamental Christian message.

He launches into this in the seventeenth verse, where he writes

For I am not ashamed to talk about the good news.  The good news is what makes it possible for God to save everyone who believes in God from the just punishment that comes upon all wrongdoers as the world now comes to an end, starting with the Jews and reaching to everyone else.

That’s my translation from the Greek, made with a lot of comparison to a lot of other translations and a strong reliance on whatever materials I had available at that time.  Notice, though, that what Paul is saying is that the end of the world has begun–sometime in the middle of the first century.  However, any Jew then would have told you that the there would be two things that would happen at the end of the world:  the righteous would be rewarded and the wicked would be punished.  Paul says that this is now happening, that the punishment is starting and those who believe God are being rescued from it.

Then the surprise comes in verse eighteen, where he says

The good news shows us how God is right now acting as the just judge of the world, meting out rewards and punishments even now, if we have the faith to see it.  After all, the scripture says, “The righteous person will live because of his faith.”

He in essence says that we know that the end of the world is arriving because judgment has already begun.  The wicked are already being punished, and the righteous are already being saved.

We might at this point expect that he is going to launch into a description of how the gospel saves us, but he surprises us again:

We can see God’s just judgments in the world because His wrath can be seen plainly against all the ungodliness and injustice of men who unfairly try to deny and hide the truth, because within themselves they know something about God, and God has made his existence clearly evident to everyone.  For God’s invisible attributes have been readily recognized and understood since the beginning of creation, in creation itself, which shows us His eternal power and divine nature, so that they cannot claim they did not know.  Even though they knew God had to exist, they did not give Him the glory or the gratitude that they owed Him, robbing Him of what He justly deserved, but instead started to think and believe all kinds of silly things, and all together lost the light that they had.  Claiming that they were becoming truly wise, they actually became fools, and gave up the glory of the God who remains forever in exchange for something that looked like a picture of men and birds and beasts and other creatures which all ultimately decay and are destroyed.

The chapter is going to continue to describe a lot of things God apparently thinks are terrible–beginning with immorality and infidelity, moving into homosexuality and lesbianism, and ending with a level of depravity that suggests the complete loss of any moral compass.  Many who read this chapter, many who preach on it, think that it is telling us all the wickedness, all the sins, for which men and women are being punished.  God rightly punishes people who act like that, we are told, and the punishment will come.

However, Paul’s entire case rests on the idea that the punishment already has come, and that he is going to describe that punishment which is obvious to everyone who looks at it the right way–and if those statements are the sins for which people are punished, he never gets to the punishment.

That’s because ultimately there is only one sin listed in the first chapter of the Book of Romans:

…they did not give Him the glory or the gratitude that they owed Him, robbing Him of what He justly deserved….

That is the crime of which humanity stands accused, and of which I think we all at some point have been guilty.  That is the sin of which we repent to be saved.  We agree to acknowledge that God is right, we should be grateful to Him for what He has given us, and we owe Him everything.  Otherwise, we are robbing Him.

So, what about the rest–the infidelity and homosexuality and depravity and all that?  Well, that’s the second thing everyone misses, and that’s the second article in this miniseries.

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#137: Conservative Penny-pinching

This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #137, on the subject of Conservative Penny-pinching.

Over a year ago, I addressed the the notion that people who are against abortion claim to be concerned for the lives of the unborn up to the moment they are born, but after that they no longer care.  Then just over two weeks ago I was at a gathering where someone made exactly that claim, and I realized something–something I hadn’t felt when it was merely arguments on a page:  the assertion that people who are against abortion are unwilling to do anything to help the born is not only untrue and irrelevant, it is insulting.

Why it is untrue and irrelevant is covered in that previous article, web log post #9:  Abolition.  Because of the way the meeting dissolved then I was unable to call his attention to that response; knowing, however, that I would see him again, I printed it and delivered it to him two weeks later.

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His response was civil, even friendly.  However, he kept saying that “they” were taking all the money away from helping people, from helping young girls who were just children having children.  I asked him who “they” were, and he said “conservatives”; I pointed out that the people mentioned in the article, working hard to provide assistance to exactly those people, were in the main “conservatives”, but his feeling was that it was not “those conservatives” but some other group of “right wing conservatives”.  Having worked with those people, I observed that some of them were certainly “right wing”.  Yet he insisted that there was this conservative effort to take money away from helping the people who needed it.  It was not at all clear just who was taking what money from whom, but he was certain it was being done, and being done by “conservatives”.

If we’re honest, we have to admit that there are a lot of people who don’t care about the poor, and indeed many of them are “conservatives”.  At the same time, many of them are “liberals”–I don’t see a lot of Hollywood millionaires giving ninety percent of their income to charities, or spending their evenings working in soup kitchens or at homeless shelters.  There are also a lot of people who do care, at both ends of the spectrum and through the middle.  Not every liberal politician who argues for aid to the poor does so because he cares; some do it because they want votes.  Wealthy liberals who call for more government spending on welfare programs are not really offering to give their own money to these, but suggesting that the government should give them more of yours.  Conservatives are wrong to think that all liberals pretend to care about the poor in order to use them to advance socialist and progressivist policies; yet it is equally wrong to think that this is not true of any.

However, in our conversation I couldn’t help feeling that, at least in part, he meant conservatives were taking money away from Planned Parenthood.  You don’t have to be too far to the right of left-wing progressivists to believe that the government should not be funding an organization that in turn promotes and funds the slaughter of children.  The argument has been made that Planned Parenthood spends none of its government-granted money on abortion services, but as we noted in post #2:  Planned Parenthood and Fungible Resources, no matter how they do their accounting it is evident that they could not spend as much on abortion as they do were their other programs not subsidized by federal money.  Certainly people who believe that killing unborn babies should be criminal are going to cut funding for any program that promotes the practice.  That does not mean that these people have no interest in helping pregnant teenagers and others struggling with unexpected pregnancies, any more than that those who want to bring an end to capital punishment and stop funding executions have no interest in stopping murders and other violent crimes.  You will say that it’s not the same thing, and in a way you’re right, and in a way you’re wrong.  If you tell me that grapefruit juice is not orange juice, you are certainly correct; if you tell me that because grapefruit juice is not orange juice it therefore is not citrus juice, you are mistaken.  It is quite possible to be very much in favor of a stated objective, whether it is helping pregnant women or reducing violent crime, and still object to a specific method of achieving that objective, whether it is killing unwanted children or terminating murderers.  It is quite possible to want to do something about a social problem without resorting to an extreme measure like killing people.  It is also possible to believe that such an extreme measure is appropriate and necessary for one type of problem but not for another.  The problems are not identical; only the solutions are similar.

Of course, some people argue that the unborn are not actually people.  To his credit, he did not suggest that; he rather suggested that they were unwanted human beings that should not be forced to come into a world that does not want them.  It strikes me that this is very like an ambulance crew saying they’re not going to take this injured homeless person to a hospital because he’s a worthless human being and he might as well just die anyway.  It is rather arrogant for any of us to put a value on someone else’s life, whether or not that person has yet smelled air.

Perhaps, though, he is not talking about abortion funding; perhaps he is talking about welfare.  In thinking about this issue I did a bit of research, and learned that the Federal debt is presently increasing by about one trillion dollars each year.  The population of the United States is a bit above three hundred twenty-five million, so that’s about three dollars for every person–every man, woman, or child, legal or illegal, in the entire country.  Of course, those who are in the country illegally aren’t going to pay that, and there is not much logic to expecting those who are receiving the benefits to pay part of that.  At some point we are going to have to stop spending as much or find a way to collect more.

So where could we cut it?

The total federal budget for 2017 is just above four trillion dollars–that’s four thousand billion (4.1472 trillion).  Sixty percent of that–about two trillion five hundred million–goes to what is loosely called “welfare”, that is, money that goes to taking care of people who can’t afford to take care of themselves, that “safety net” about which we are always talking (2.4971 trillion).  In fairness, the biggest piece of that–a bit less than one trillion–is social security (972.6 billion), which includes all those retirement checks and the federal disability program (and the salaries of the people who run it), giving a meager income to people who genuinely cannot or can no longer work.  More than a trillion goes to medical assistance, that is, Medicare (605.0 billion) and Medicaid (527.4 billion) including the Obamacare expansions, providing health services to people who cannot otherwise afford them.  Less than half a trillion goes to everything else we loosely consider “welfare”, social support services (392.1 billion).

It is argued that we should cut our outrageous military spending, but that outrageous military spending is less than a trillion dollars (0.8536 trillion), less than the medical care spending, less than Social Security.  We’ve been working on reducing military spending for a long time, and it is a much smaller portion of the budget than it was in the past–but in that time our “entitlements” and “welfare” programs have exploded to take the largest share of the budget.  Together, that’s over eighty percent of the budget; all other programs combined come to only seven hundred ninety-six and a half billion dollars, less than twenty percent, less than the military portion.  Saving money there is a bit like trying to make a package lighter by using less tape to seal it.

It is not unkind for me to cut my son’s allowance in order to pay the utility bill; he might think I should pay less to the utility company, but he would be upset if we said we couldn’t afford to run his video games or heat the water for his showers.  That national debt that’s going up another trillion dollars this year is very nearly twenty trillion already–sixty dollars for every person within our borders.  We keep saying that we’ll pay it off when things get better, but they’re getting worse and the amount is increasing like a bad debt owed to a loan shark.  Economists argue about whether it is bad for nations to go into debt, just as they argue about whether it’s bad for people to go into debt, but although we’ve at times managed to reduce the debt we have not paid it off entirely in a long time, longer than my lifetime, and the people who are lending us the money (what, did you think we borrowed it from God?) are beginning to think maybe we’re not so good a risk as they once thought.  Many economists assert that a high national debt depresses the economy, raises the prices of goods, and reduces the availability of jobs.  Somehow we have to reduce our spending.  It certainly is important for us to help the poor, but this ongoing forced philanthropy might not be helping so much as we want to think, and can’t continue at this level forever.

One way or another, there is going to be less money for those in need, because the way things have been going there has been less and less money for all Americans.  We laugh when in Fiddler on the Roof Nahum the Beggar complains to Lazar Wolfe about the smaller donation he gave this week, “So if you had a bad week, why should I suffer?”, but the truth is that when the rich have less money, everyone has less money, and when we make the pie smaller everyone’s piece gets smaller.  Not everyone can work; not everyone can contribute to the productivity of the nation–but if we don’t find a way to get more people working productively, there won’t be enough money for those who can’t.

Someone once challenged the original Mr. Rockefeller that his millions (which were then worth a lot more than they would be today) should be shared among everyone.  Rather than arguing the point, Rockefeller agreed, reached into his pocket, and handed the man a dime as his share.  If you stripped the top one percent of everything they owned and gave it everyone else, it would be a small amount divided so many ways, and there would be no comparable wealthiest people to rob the next year.  You cannot feed the poor by robbing the rich; you have to teach them to fish, that is, give them jobs, not money.  How to do that is much debated, but it seems that part of it has to be to reduce the amount the government is spending, and the obvious place to do that is where it is spending the most.

That hurts, but it may be necessary.

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