하나님의 진노는 현재적인가

God's Wrath Now? - An Exegetical Reconsideration

Paul's reference to the revelation of God's wrath in Romans 1:18 is typically interpreted as denoting a present manifestation of God's wrath, with the verb taken to be present progressive rather than futuristic. For this, scholars normally appeal to the present tense of the verb ἀποκαλύπτεται and the close parallelism between v. 17 and v. 18. Together with this, the following description of moral depravity is also taken to be the evidence for the reality of God's wrath. This paper attempts to expose various exegetical problems this 'present' interpretation creates and thereby demonstrate that the futuristic construal of the verse is the best way to go. The major problems discussed in this study are 1) the spuriousness of appealing to the present tense of the verb; 2) the problem of interpreting v. 18 in the light of an already biased understanding of v. 17, especially in relation to the tense of the righteousness language in Romans; 3) the problems of taking God's action of "handing over"and the necessary "reward/punishment"as concrete manifestations of God's wrath. The paper then offers a critique of various attempts to relating the present and future aspects of God's wrath, showing the exegetical and logical problems those construals create within the immediate context and in Paul's theology as a whole. All these problems, so concludes the paper, simply disappear when one takes the revelation of God's wrath as referring to God's final judgment, thereby confirming the conclusion reached by H. J. Eckstein some twenty five years ago.