Here is an important quotation from
Wisdom 14:12–21 pertaining to this
:
For the idea of making idols was the beginning of fornication, and the invention of them was the corruption of life...
15 For a father, consumed with grief at an untimely bereavement, made an image of his child, who had been suddenly taken from him; he now honored as a god what was once a dead human being, and handed on to his dependents secret rites and initiations. 16 Then the ungodly custom, grown strong with time, was kept as a law, and at the command of monarchs carved images were worshiped. 17 When people could not honor monarchs in their presence, since they lived at a distance, they imagined their appearance far away, and made a visible image of the king whom they honored, so that by their zeal they might flatter the absent one as though present.
18 Then the ambition of the artisan impelled even those who did not know the king to intensify their worship. 19 For he, perhaps wishing to please his ruler, skillfully forced the likeness to take more beautiful form, 20 and the multitude, attracted by the charm of his work, now regarded as an object of worship the one whom shortly before they had honored as a human being. 21 And this became a hidden trap for humankind, because people, in bondage to misfortune or to royal authority, bestowed on objects of stone or wood the name that ought not to be shared...
23 For whether they kill children in their initiations, or celebrate secret mysteries, or hold frenzied revels with strange customs...
Understood in context, Romans is not arguing in favour of a "
God who gets angry at atheists for "denying the truth" and turns them into the most wicked people", nor is Paul even referring specifically to atheists or even all idol-worshipping pagans, even less declaring that divine judgement is coming to condemn them all. Indeed, if you read just a little later into the epistle, you will find that Paul explicitly praises non-believing Gentiles who adhere to their God-given conscience as earnestly as possible (comparing them positively with Jews, and presumably Christians, who know the revealed law of God yet do not live in accordance with it) and opines that their sincerity may lead God to excuse their idolatry/rejection of the Judaeo-Christian God on Judgement Day:
"When Gentiles who have not the [revealed] law [of God] do by nature what the law requires, they are a law to themselves, even though they do not have the law. They show that what the law requires is written on their hearts, while their conscience also bears witness and their conflicting thoughts accuse or perhaps excuse them on that day when, according to my Gospel, God judges the secrets of men by Christ Jesus." (Rom 2:14-16)
In
Wisdom we likewise find that the learned Jewish author accounted "
nature-worship" as being the least culpable variety of idolatry. Human beings, misled by the beauty and power of created things, considered them to be gods (Wisdom 6-7). The author, therefore, partly excuses such idolatry as arising from a sincere, if ultimately misplaced, search for the true Creator of the cosmos:
Wisdom 13
13 For all people who were ignorant of God...were unable from the good things that are seen to know the one who exists, nor did they recognize the artisan while paying heed to his works; 2 but they supposed that either fire or wind or swift air, or the circle of the stars, or turbulent water, or the luminaries of heaven were the gods that rule the world. 3 If through delight in the beauty of these things people assumed them to be gods, let them know how much better than these is their Lord, for the author of beauty created them.
5 For from the greatness and beauty of created things comes a corresponding perception of their Creator. 6 Yet these people are little to be blamed, for perhaps they go astray while seeking God and desiring to find him.
This concession is explicitly tied in both Wisdom and Romans to the all-embracing nature of the divine love, which extends - in an inclusive fashion and without deference - to all living beings:
Wisdom of Solomon 11:21-26; 12:1-2
23 But you are merciful to all, for you can do all things, and you overlook people’s sins, so that they may repent. 24 For you love all things that exist, and detest none of the things that you have made, for you would not have made anything if you had hated it. 25 How would anything have endured if you had not willed it? Or how would anything not called forth by you have been preserved? 26 You spare all things, for they are yours, O Lord, you who love the living.
12 For your immortal spirit is in all things. 2 Therefore you correct little by little those who trespass, and you remind and warn them of the things through which they sin, so that they may be freed from wickedness and put their trust in you, O Lord.
No, rather the passages you refer to
@idav in your discussion with
@Shadow Wolf and the entire letter itself is written as a subversive treatise designed to undermine, subtly and without incurring the punitive action of the Roman state, the intellectual foundations of the Roman "
imperial cult" which elevated a mere human being to divine status (a priest-king) and mandated his worship as a living god.
The author of
Wisdom argues that this cult, justifying absolutist rule in the form of a supremely all-powerful God-Emperor, arose from imperial misappropriation of "mystery cults" where practitioners engaged in all manner of sordid and debased behaviour that originally arose from human beings becoming inconsolable at the untimely death of their children and then fashioning idols of stone, which they then worshipped and passed on to others in the form of secretive rites.
He explains how the monarchs who “
lived far off ” and the subjects who “
flatter the absent one as though present” (14:17), recognised the efficacy for bolstering royal power offered by these popularly revered idols, and the way in which re-fashioning them in the form of the imperial image would induce awe and, consequently, honor from the imperial subjects - solidifying Roman control.
By contrast to this, the religion proclaimed by Paul taught that God had become incarnated solely and uniquely in the son of a Jewish carpenter who had been executed as a condemned criminal - a man at the lowest level of the social ladder; a pauper riding about on a donkey without any political power. He alone was the true "Caesar", the "Lord", "the King of Kings". And Paul understood himself to be the messenger of this "kingdom" to the Gentile, Roman world.
This belief made it impossible to "deify" political rulers and the state in the way that ancient polytheistic peoples had with their priest-kings. The real and only Son of God, in the Christian mindset, hadn't had any earthly power at all. Ideologically, the political order was to be stripped of religious trappings or sacral underpinnings.
As the scholar in the aforementioned study notes:
In one of the most powerful moves within the fresh perspective I am proposing, Paul’s treatment of the cross [is described] as the means of the defeat of the powers. As everyone in the Roman world knew well, the cross already had a clear symbolic meaning; it meant that Caesar ruled the world, with cruel death as his ultimate, and regular, weapon.[22] For Paul, throughout his writings, the cross is far more than simply the means whereby individual sins are forgiven, though of course it is that as well. It is the means whereby the powers are defeated and overthrown (1 Cor. 2:6-8; Col. 2:13-15). The resurrection demonstrates that the true God has a power utterly superior to that of Caesar. The cross is thus to be seen, with deep and rich paradox, as the secret power of this true God, the power of self-giving love which (as Jesus said it would) subverts the power of the tyrant (Mk. 10:35-45).
