Paul opens his letter to the Romans with a careful philosophical argument for the universal moral accountability of humanity. His audience includes both Gentile philosophers and Jewish Torah-keepers. He aims at both: nobody is innocent of the truth, because the truth has been visible in creation since the beginning. The chapter sets up the gospel by establishing that everyone needs it.

From the writers we read together

Nancy Pearcey

philosopher of culture and worldview

Pearcey's argument is that the modern Western mind has not failed to find God; it has been trained not to look. The whole apparatus of the immanent frame — school curricula, news framing, default assumptions about science — is calibrated to make God's invisible attributes invisible.

Romans 1 is severe but not despairing. The truth is still there, in the things that have been made. The work of Christian witness, then, is not first to argue. It is to lift the weight people are using to press the truth down. Sometimes a single conversation, a single verse, a single beautiful evening can release what has been suppressed for years.