The Origin Of The World’s Religions

Paul’s Critique of Paganism
(Romans 1:18-25)

In his letter to the Romans, Paul shows how sin affects every area of human life — our religious beliefs as well as our moral behaviour. Today it is commonly assumed that the world’s religions have evolved from primitive animism (worship of spirits) and polytheism (worship of many gods) to monotheism (worship of one God). In this sermon on Romans, preached at Greyfriars’ Classical Service on 4 March 2007, Rob Yule shows that the true situation is exactly the reverse: belief in one God is original, and the prevalence of polytheism and idolatry is because people have ‘suppressed’ this knowledge of God’s existence.

Paul announced the theme of Romans in the previous passage: the gospel is God’s power to save people, through faith in Jesus Christ. Now he goes on to show what the gospel saves us from: the wickedness that characterises every activity of the whole human race. First he looks at the Gentile or pagan world of his day, then at the Jewish world.

Greek and Roman Paganism

The pagan world of Paul’s day, the world of Greece and Rome, had spectacular intellectual and technological achievements, but was morally depraved. ‘Nude sports and lewd theatre,’ is how Bible teacher David Pawson sums it up. Ancient society was far from the noble ideals of classical humanism that have been passed down to us. It was brutal. Life was cheap. Abortion, and even exposure or throwing away of children, was widely practised. Sometimes infants who survived were reared in slavery. Slavery was widespread. According to statistician David Barrett, an estimated 50% of the Roman Empire’s 33 million population were slaves. Homosexual practices were widely approved — including pederasty (sex with children) — particularly among Greeks and in upper-class Roman society.

No wonder Paul says God was angry. God’s ‘wrath’ (1:18) is not vengefulness or spitefulness. It’s not just a name for the moral law of the universe. God’s wrath is God’s reaction to human sin. Just as you would be hopping mad if someone mistreated something precious you had made, so God is angry at the misuse and abuse of what he has created. God’s anger is aroused not just by sinful moral conduct, but also by the sinful religious beliefs and practices which underlie it. Paul traces a progression from ‘ungodliness’ to ‘unrighteousness’ (1:18). Denial of God leads to a decline of morals. Paul’s argument is similar to earlier Jewish apologists, like the unknown author of the book of Wisdom (mid 1st century BC), who recognised the connection between idolatry and immorality:

The invention of idols was the origin of fornication,
their discovery the corruption of life.
They did not exist at the beginning.
(Wisdom 14:12-13, Jerusalem Bible)

Religious decline leads to moral decline. Loss of belief in God leads to loosening of moral standards. What we believe influences how we behave. Change of religion leads to change of ethics; loss of creed to loosening of conduct.

This message concentrates on the first aspect — sin’s effects on religion. The next looks at sin’s effects on morality. Paul shows that sin affects every area of human life, including religious beliefs and practices. Don’t be gullible and romanticise spirituality or religion. Not all religious or spiritual beliefs are true. Some are false, some fanciful, some stupid. Not all religious or spiritual practices are good. Some are corrupt, some even depraved. We must be discerning.

A revelation of truth about God (1:19-20)

Paul shows first that human beings are morally accountable for their sin. There is sufficient revelation of God in the created universe to give people an awareness of God and render them personally responsible. Everyone knows enough about God’s ‘eternal power’ and ‘divine nature’ from his creation to leave them ‘without excuse’ if they turn from him (1:20).

Theologians call this revelation of God through nature ‘natural’ or ‘general revelation’ — as distinct from ‘special revelation’ through Scripture and Christ. In all human beings there is a ‘sense of the divine’ (divinitatus sensum, as Calvin calls it at the beginning of his Institutes, I. iii.1) — a longing for something beyond, a sense of incompleteness, an awareness of God’s transcendent existence and power.

Two modern scientific discoveries confirm this general awareness of God:

1. The expanding universe

The expansion of the universe, first observed by Edwin Hubble in 1929, points clearly to the fact that the universe came from a finite point and therefore had a beginning. This is evidence of a powerful Originator who began it.

2. The ‘Anthropic Principle’

The universe is delicately ordered within an incredibly narrow band of variables that make human life possible. For example, if the universe’s expansion rate was a fraction slower or faster, life and existence would be physically impossible. This is evidence of a wise Designer who has ordered the universe with human life in view.

Paul says that everyone has enough revelation to make them a theist, a believer in God. ‘What can be known about God is plain to them.... So they are without excuse.’ (1:20). When we consider the staggering vastness of the galaxies, the amazing complexity of the cell — there’s no excuse for not believing in God the Creator.

A rejection of truth about God (1:18b, 21)

If there is a revelation of God accessible to all people through the world he has made, why doesn’t everyone believe in God? Why are there so many different religions and religious beliefs?

Paul’s answer is surprising. Paul says that human beings reject the truth about God that God has made available to them. It’s not a problem of transmission. It’s a problem of reception. People ‘suppress the truth’ of God’s existence and power, which can be plainly known through the universe he has made (1:18-20). The word ‘suppress’ can be compared to Freud’s concept of repression; a mechanism whereby unpleasant emotions and experiences are removed from conscious memory and held down in the unconscious mind. Paul is talking of something metaphysical rather than psychological — the repression of the truth of God’s reality and power. People deliberately and wilfully reject this natural awareness of God, they deny it, and hold it down in their subconscious.

According to the Bible, if you suppress truth you don’t become wise, you become stupid; you cease acting rationally and become irrational. ‘They became futile in their thinking, and their senseless minds were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools.’ (1:21-22). With so much evidence for God’s existence, there’s no rational reason to be an atheist. To be an atheist you have to deny the obvious, you have to suppress the truth of God’s existence. That’s why the Bible says it’s the fool who says in his heart, ‘There is no God’ (Psalm 14:1, 53:1).

To deny God is something irrational, because it is denying the very ground of our existence. Once, when I was a boy, a sawed through a pine branch about four metres off the ground, and forgot that I was standing on the wrong side of the cut! Denial of God is like chopping off the branch on which we stand.

When we worship God, we honour him as our Creator, praising him as the Originator and Sustainer of our life. Paul says in Romans 12:1 that it is ‘reasonable’ to worship God, because in so doing we acknowledge the very reason for our existence. Conversely, when we cease to honour him as God and give thanks to him, we do something irrational; our thinking becomes futile and our minds become darkened (1:21), because we are repudiating the very basis of our existence. Denial of God leads to a darkening of the mind. Ingratitude towards God leads to irrationality in our scale of values.

A replacement of truth about God (1:23, 25)

Nature abhors a vacuum. Deny God, and something else will take God’s place. G. K. Chesterton once said, ‘When a man ceases to believe in God, he doesn’t believe in nothing. He believes in anything.’ When people stop worshipping God, they start worshipping nature. ‘They exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling a mortal human being or birds or four-footed animals or reptiles’ (1:23). Doxology (worship of God) is replaced by idolatry (worship of the creature). Denial of God leads to deification of the creature.

What is idolatry? Paul defines idolatry as ‘worshipping and serving the creature rather the Creator’ (1:25). Idolatry is the worship of created things in place of the Creator. It is giving to lesser things a higher place than we give to the supreme Being, the most high God. Idols are not gods. They are God substitutes, lesser things put in God’s place when what is known of God is suppressed and the truth about God is exchanged for a lie.

Paul sees the world’s religions not as a revelation of God but as a replacement of God; not the seeking of God, but the suppressing of God. Today the most widespread view of the origin of the world’s religions is the evolutionary one. Exponents of this view hold that there has been an evolution of religion — from lower to higher, from primitive to advanced, from superstition to theism, from the worship of many spirits (animism) and many gods (polytheism) to the worship of a single supreme God (monotheism).

This view is wrong. The true situation is that there has been a devolution or degeneration of religion. The actual evidence suggests that monotheism came first, and that there has been a fall from this into polytheism and paganism.

Father Wilhelm Schmidt was a Catholic anthropologist from Vienna, Austria. He spent a lifetime researching the world’s primal religions, and published his findings in an enormous work of twelve volumes spanning more than forty years, entitled ‘The Origin of the Idea of God’ (Der Ursprung der Gottesidee, 1912-55).

Schmidt’s research in many cultures demonstrated the prior knowledge of a supreme God and of sacrifice. He concluded that primitive peoples were monotheists, not polytheists. Hundreds of isolated tribes have a memory of a compassionate Creator or Father God, who is no longer worshipped because he is no longer feared or propitiated. Examples are the ‘unknown God’ Paul encountered at Athens (Acts 17:23); Io, the high God in Maori religion; or the supreme God in the Aryan or European nations — known as Dyaus Pitar (‘Divine Father’) in Indo-European, Zeus Pater in Greek, and Jupiter or Deus Pater in Latin. (See Robert Brow, Religion [London, Tyndale Press, 1966], pp. 9-17).

Are you a theist or an idolater?

If someone researched your religion, what would they find? Are you a worshipper of God, or a sophisticated idolater? Are you thankful to God for his goodness? Or have you stopped honouring him as God and become ungrateful?

Where do you stand? On the truth about God that you can see all around you through the things he has made? Or on the step marked ‘Ingratitude’, the first step to idolatry and self-worship?

To stop worshipping God and honouring him as God is the beginning of a downward path that leads to idolatry: it is putting yourself and lesser things in God’s place. This is the story of our materialistic, neo-pagan society.

Search your heart. Do you accept the truth about God? Do you give God his rightful place in your life? Do you give him the worship he deserves as Creator of everything that exists? Or are you an idolater, suppressing the truth, confusing your scale of values, foolishly putting lesser things in place of what is ultimate?

Rob Yule, 4 March 2007
© 2007, Greyfriars Presbyterian Church