2. Concentrated Romans (1:16-17)

I've taught two classes this semester that go through Romans. A couple times I've thought, "I should take all the talking points and put them in a long bulleted list." Here are my main talking points on the key verses of Romans, 1:16-17

1. Romans 1:1-15

Romans 1:16-17

• Arguably the beginning of the letter body of Romans, a section that goes to 15:33
• Key verses of Romans, a general statement that plays itself out in the verses that follow, especially 1:16-11:36.
• "I am not ashamed." Honor-shame language, a reminder that the Mediterranean and biblical worlds were honor-shame rather that guilt oriented worlds. See Bruce Malina, New Testament World.
• "of the gospel." Debate over what the primary referent of the gospel was. N. T. Wright, Scot McKnight argue that the focal good news is that Jesus is Lord, as we see implied in Romans 1:3-4. I would say that all that it entails is also good news, which includes salvation. So our salvation is part of the good news, but not the heart of the good news, which is the fact that Jesus is king. See Scot McKnight, King Jesus Gospel.
• "It is the power of God leading to salvation." I think salvation for Paul is primarily future focused. 5:9 - "we will be saved from wrath." When? On the Day of Judgment. What would it even mean to be saved today or in the past? Saved as in healed? That's Luke's use of the word. Saved as in from the power of Sin? Fits with Paul's theology but not how he uses the word. Paul uses it with a future orientation. Ephesians 2:8 is atypical and may be proleptic even then.
• "to everyone who has faith." Faith for Paul is not primarily used of belief or faithfulness (although see Rom. 3:3). It is about a trust or confidence, perhaps even an allegiance.
• "to the Jew first and also to the Greek." A reminder that the inclusion of the Gentiles stands in the background of all of Romans. Yes, there are implications for individual salvation that Augustine would later focus on. But reading Romans it is significant to remember that Paul's world is a group, collectivist culture (see Malina above). He is discussing the justification of the Gentiles and Jews far more than the justification of individuals.
• "In the gospel the righteousness of God is revealed." Long history of debate over the phrase, "the righteousness of God." The older Roman Catholic view saw it as the "justice of God," God's dispensing of justice. Luther recognized that this was hardly good news. Luther suggested Paul was talking about our legal righteousness--the good news is a righteousness God ascribes to us legally, justification by faith and a righteousness from God. Fine theology, but not the view that comes from our knowledge of the Jewish background in the Psalms and Isaiah, as well as the Dead Sea Scrolls. N. T. Wright suggests, "covenant faithfulness" or "covenant justice." I would define the righteousness of God here as the "propensity of God to save Israel and the world."
• "from faith for faith." Two basic interpretations--"by faith from first to last" or "from God's faithfulness resulting in our faith response." The latter certainly fits Paul's theology and the idea that God's righteousness is in play in this verse.
• "As it is written, 'The person who is righteous by faith will live.'" This seems to anticipate justification by faith, a focus of chapters 3 and 4. "Righteous by faith" means deemed in right standing with God because of our faith in him. Richard Hays' suggestion that Paul read this verse as a prophecy of Jesus is interesting but not compelling.

Sermon Starters: Inspiration--the Gift that Keeps on Giving

I preached this sermon at Mark Wilson's church, Hayward Wesleyan Church yesterday, August 10, 2015. You can listen to the audio of it here (27 minutes). After the service, Mark baptized 12 people in a nearby lake. Man, Wisconsin is idyllic country! It was great to be with Mark and the people of Hayward--lots of great people!

Inspiration: The Gift that Keeps on Giving
Text: Romans 1:8-17
(I paraphrased the key verses of Romans--1:16-17, which I described as a "zipped file" of the whole book of Romans.)

Introduction
I used as one of the themes of the sermon the idea that in Europe, you find that the same stones are reused over and over again over centuries, even millennia, to build the structures needed in each time and place (I referenced York Minister, the ruins of Troy, and the ruins of a priory used in a nearby farm in the countryside outside of Durham).

My gambit is that God uses and reuses the words of Scripture to build the houses that we need at various points in history and, indeed, in our individual lives. The inspiration of Scripture is not just what it meant in the "bubble above Paul's head," but God continues inspiring his people to hear in Scripture what they need to hear to make their way through this world and into eternity.

(My sermon was located at the end of a series on "Understanding the Bible" at Mark's church. They had been learning how to read the Bible in context, so I wanted to emphasize that, even though that is the goal, God will meet us where we are at take us from there. We need not be discouraged that we don't know all the things pastors and scholars know about how to interpret the Bible.)

The Example of Romans 1:17
I then transitioned into using Romans 1:17 and the "exquisite stone" of the "righteousness of God" throughout history as an example of the inspiration that keeps on giving and how God meets us where we are as we read Scripture. I proposed that I knew at least four ways to take this concept of the righteousness of God (more, actually), and that all of them had some truth to them.

 And here was a key point. Revelation has never been us coming up to God's level. Revelation (including the Bible) is God coming down to meet us on our level. This is of course what Jesus did when he came to earth and took on human flesh (John 1:14). If we could catch a glimpse of how the Father talks to Jesus and the Holy Spirit in heaven, our heads would explode.

Catholics, Luther, and Wesley
I then talk about how the RCC, Luther, and Wesley understood the righteousness of God, all of which had some truth to them.

• The RCC of Luther's day understood Romans 1:17 to be about the righteous justice of God. Well, there's some truth there. Look at Romans 1:18. "Good news" is often good news against the backdrop of what could have been bad news, and there is potential bad new here--the judgment.
• Luther saw in 1:17 the idea of a legal righteousness from God, God declaring us right with him in the divine court on the basis of Jesus (justification by faith). His theology was correct (see Romans 3), but that's probably not what Paul meant in this specific verse.
• Wesley agreed with Luther on justification by faith and the meaning of 1:17, but he thought something was missing from Luther's theology of righteousness. Luther primarily saw it as a legal verdict, not as real godliness or goodness. Wesley believed God could actually change us to make us Christ-like and loving toward each other (see Romans 8).
• God used the stone of the righteousness of God to build true structures for each of the above, even though none of them probably understood Romans 1:17 in terms of what was in the bubble over Paul's head when God inspired him at the first.

Paul's meaning
Even the stone Paul used in Romans 1:17 did not just fall out of heaven on his head. Paul himself was drawing on an exquisite stone from the Old Testament when he wrote about the righteousness of God. I looked at Psalm 71 and a number of similarities to Romans 1:16-17. I mentioned the later chapters of Isaiah as well where the righteousness of God and his giving of salvation are in parallel (Dead Sea Scrolls too).

I mentioned how parallelism works in Hebrew poetry--say it and say it again. So this prevailing background in the OT suggests that Paul's starting point for thinking about the righteousness of God was the way God wants to save his people. He's not like a professor who wants you to fail. He's not like a cowboy who wants an excuse to shoot you. God wants to save us!

So there is even a rebuilding from the building God made out of the stone in Psalm 71 and the building God makes out of the stone of God's righteousness in Romans 1:16-17. In the psalm, the psalmist is talking about God's faithfulness to him as an individual, just as God will be faithful to us as individuals today.

In Romans, the faithfulness is to all of humanity. As in Adam all died, so in Christ all will be made alive. God's faithfulness is shown in the good news of Jesus in that he has made a way for humanity and the whole creation to be rescued.

Conclusion
I used the story I heard about Virginia Wright at her funeral as the beginning of the conclusion. It was said that she could have a conversation with anyone, both a scholar and a three-year old. It's a great picture of how God can speak to you through Scripture no matter how young or old we are, no matter what our profession, no matter how smart we are. I used the old illustration of the farmer trying to get some chicks into a barn before a storm and thinking if he could just get down to their level and communicate with them.

That, I suggested, is what God does over and over again through Scripture. He takes these same stones, the old ancient stones that God used to build the people of God in the Old and New Testaments, and builds something beautiful in our lives.

Wednesday Reading: Wright's Romans

I didn't get much further in Philo this week, but I did read some more of N. T. Wright's Romans commentary. I'm finding it very readable and very helpful. For my Wednesday post, I thought I'd comment on his section on the key verses of Romans--1:16-17.

One of the reasons I wrote a New Testament series for Wesleyan Publishing House is because the the pulpit often lags about twenty to thirty years behind current trends in interpretation (the mission field even more). You often hear from the pulpit things people were saying decades ago about the Bible. For example, I still hear regularly from pastors all over word fallacies that were very popular back in the Kittel generation of the 1960s and 70s.

I wrote the second volume of my three Paul books especially to bring the church up to speed on where the interpretation of Romans has moved in these last twenty to thirty years. It turns out, contemporary scholarship is very friendly to Wesleyan-Arminian thinking...

Wright doesn't go into a lot of detail in his short section on Romans 1:16-17 but he does touch on some features that reflect the best understanding of scholarship on Romans at this time (built on the best of the scholarship of the past--scholarship may change, but I would argue there can be a cumulative dimension rather than simply a bouncing around):

• The gospel, in the first place, is the good news that Jesus is king and all that his enthronement entails. Salvation is thus part of the good news but it is not the focus of the good news. Jesus is the focus, not me.
• The "righteousness of God" is a concept with a history. In particular, if you look at the overlap between Psalm 71:1-2 and Romans 1:16-17, a strong case can be made that God's righteousness is his propensity to save his people (and the world). (in this verse at least, not a righteousness ascribed to us from God, as the NIV1984 translated it--the NIV2011 has fixed it)
• "From faith to faith" is a cryptic shorthand. It is too cryptic I think to say for sure what Paul was thinking, but I am very sympathetic to Wright and Dunn's sense that it is a shorthand for "starting with God's faithfulness and ending in our faith in response." 

The Righteousness of God (2)

Previously on Paul.

...Romans 1:17 says that the "righteousness of God" is revealed in the gospel about Jesus the king. In this expression alone we can trace the birth of Protestantism out of Roman Catholicism, as well as some of the disagreements among later Protestants. Up until the 1500s, almost everyone in the Western world defined themselves as Christian, and the only church in the West that existed was the Roman Catholic Church. [1]

Enter on the scene a German monk named Martin Luther in 1517. It was this year that Luther publically questioned some of the practices of the church of that day. But this moment in history was preceded by some personal breakthroughs that Luther experienced. One of them had to do with his understanding of Romans 1:17 and the phrase, "the righteousness of God."

At that time, Latin was the language of both the scholar and the church, and the Catholic church read the Scriptures in Latin. The vast uneducated majority of Christians thus did not hear the Bible read in their own languages. In Latin, the phrase "the righteousness of God" is "iustitia Dei." You can see that the first word looks a lot like the English word "justice."

And this is exactly how the Church took the word. The gospel reveals the justice of God. Now this is a possible meaning of the word for "righteousness" (dikaiosyne). [2] And it is true that God is just. But most interpreters prior to Luther took the verse to be about God distributing His justice both on believer and non-believer. Luther, who had a heightened sense of his own moral imperfection, found this verse troubling. At the time he believed in purgatory, a place where we burn off our remaining sinfulness and imperfection at death. The prospect of the "justice of God" thus was not good news to him.

His breakthrough was the realization that he could also take the phrase "the righteousness of God" as a reference to a "righteousness from God," that is, as a reference to God declaring us as righteous. Luther's theology of "justification" was born, for him the act of God declaring us righteous or innocent in the divine court. For Luther, we humans will never be acceptable to God in terms of our own goodness or morality. We come to God as sinners and we remain sinners even after we come to Christ. One of his most famous statements is that we are "at the same time righteous and a sinner, as long as we are always repenting." [3]

Some of Luther's thinking here seems true of Paul while other parts do not. For example, you will search long and hard to find any expectation or justification for sinning as a Christian in Paul's letters (cf., for example, Rom. 6:1-2, 12, 15). In the next chapter, we will see how Romans 7 is often, yet quite mistakenly, taken as a Christian's inability to stop sinning. Paul's position on this issue is not even close to ambiguous. Paul expects Christians to live righteous lives and those who do not are in serious danger of not being saved in the end.

Luther was correct, however, in the way he understood Paul's language about how a person comes to be right with God in the first place. Paul taught that a person becomes right with God, that is, is "justified," on the basis of faith--one's trust in what God has done through Jesus the Christ, Jesus the king (Rom. 3:28). We will talk a little more about the role of faith in Paul's theology in the next section. For now, it is enough to say that such faith for Paul was first and foremost centered on God the Father and what He had done through Jesus. However, God had accomplished these things through raising Jesus from the dead and by establishing Jesus as Lord of the cosmos. Therefore, Paul could also speak of our faith being directed toward Jesus, as well as on God the Father.

Unfortunately, in English we cannot see that the word "to justify" (dikaioō) is closely related to the word for "righteousness" (dikaiosynē). To justify is thus to "declare righteous." Luther rightly understood this word to be a legal term. [4] God pronounces us "not guilty." God declares us innocent in the divine court. He "justifies" us.

But Luther was only right about the moment of our initial faith in what God has done through Christ. The real trial, the actual moment of God's assessment that really counts, is at the judgment. Paul tells the believers at Corinth in 2 Corinthians 5:10 that they "must all appear before the judgment seat of the Christ so that each might give an account for the things he or she did with their body." He also says something similar in Romans 2 where he says that on the Day of Wrath and the revelation of the righteous judgment of God, God will pay each person according to the works they have done (2:5-6). Contrary to Luther, we might first be justified with God on the basis of our faith, but we will not be finally justified if our actions did not conform to God's righteous expectation from that point to our final time of judgment. [5]

Most scholars would also recognize today that while Luther's sense of "initial justification" was mostly accurate to Paul, his sense of what the phrase "the righteousness of God" meant in Romans 1:17 was probably wrong...

[1] In the east, of course, most Christians were Orthodox from the year 1054 on, when the Eastern and Western churches formally split from each other.

[2] In fact, most translations translate dikaiosyne as justice in Romans 3:26.

[3] simul iustus et peccator, semper repentans.

[4] Luther's understanding on justification had a major impact on John Wesley. Wesley's understanding of justification is basically that of Luther. It is on the question of sanctification after justification that they differed drastically.

[5] Certainly in Paul's earlier writings like 1 Thessalonians and 1 Corinthians, this judgment would seem to take place at the time of Christ's return and the resurrection. Most would say this timing continued throughout all Paul's writings. Some have argued, however, that 2 Corinthians sees this judgment taking place right after death and that Paul's sense of the immediacy of reward shifted a little during his time at Ephesus.

The Righteousness of God (1)

The last bread crumb on this trail was posted as "The Bottom Line." I am not happy with it, but I'll get discouraged if I don't move on. I vent a little in the notes below. I'll take it out before publication but it is an expression of my frustration at those who practice theological interpretation while pretending to do historical-cultural interpretation.

The Righteousness of God
The key verses of Romans are 1:16-17: "I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God leading to salvation for all who have faith, both to Jew first and to Greek, for the righteousness of God is being revealed in it, starting with faith and ending with faith, just as it is written, 'But the one who is righteous on the basis of faith will live.'" This highly compact statement of Paul encapsulates the key ideas Paul is about to argue in the first four chapters of Romans. It sets down key words and phrases, like "gospel," "salvation," "faith," and the "righteousness of God."

The gospel for Paul is the "good news." He starts off the letter by mentioning that God set him apart as an apostle commissioned to spread this good news (1:1-2). What is the good news? It is the good news "concerning God's Son" (1:3). The good news is that God has enthroned Jesus as the Messiah, the promised king. God has appointed him "Son of God in power" by raising Jesus from the dead (1:4). And part of the good news is all that goes along with Jesus ruling--including salvation! [1]

In Paul's understanding, Son of God meant that Jesus was God's appointed king of the universe. [2] For Paul, when God raised Jesus from the dead and seated him down at his right hand in the highest heaven (e.g., Acts 13:33), God was enthroning him as "Son of God in power" on the throne of the universe. "Son of God" is kingship language, meaning that God has delegated to Jesus the task of judging and ruling the nations.

Salvation is about being saved in the coming judgment of God. The idea of being saved involves being saved from something. We often say we are saved from our sins, but this expression is a shorthand for being saved from the consequences of our sins. After all, it is not like our sins are following us trying to get us. No, when Paul and other New Testament authors talk about salvation, they are primarily referring to escaping God's wrath on judgment day, also called the Day of the Lord. [3]

The word faith (pistis) and its verb form, "believe" (pisteuo), wander between a sense of trust to a sense of faithfulness and of course to a sense of belief. While these English translations are all different (trust, faithfulness, belief), they are all nuances of the same Greek word. When Paul talks about the "faith of God" (Rom. 3:3), he obviously means the faithfulness of God. When Paul talks about our faith, he can mean things like our belief that God raised Jesus from the dead (e.g., Rom. 4:24) or he can mean our full commitment to and trust in the fact that Jesus is our Lord (e.g., Rom. 10:9). In the next section of this chapter, we will talk about whether Paul also mentions on a few occasions the faithfulness of Jesus Christ.

But this section is about the righteousness of God...

[1] N. T. Wright does an excellent job of focusing the good news of the gospel on the fact that Jesus is king (e.g., What Saint Paul Really Said, ***). But he is also quite dogmatic and rigid that this good news is not salvation. One gets the feeling that something more is going on in his mind than just what Paul meant by the word gospel. With Wright, one sometimes gets the feeling that his Reformed Anglican theology is secretly hiding below the surface, steering some of his more emphatic and idiosyncratic points. He looks to be doing historical-cultural interpretation before your eyes, but the direction of his pen is often directed as much by his covert theological impulses.

[2] If we are to get into Paul's head on these sorts of things, we have to forget for a minute some of what we know as Christians from God's continued revelation these last two thousand years. On the one hand, it would be foolish for us to reinvent the wheel. God helped the Christians of the first five centuries to unpack and unfold the significance of Jesus, asking questions that went way beyond anything on the minds of the first Christians. How exactly does Jesus' humanity and his divinity fit together, for example? The answers to which God led Christianity are the common Christian understandings of the Trinity and the dual nature of Christ. It would be silly--not to mention dangerous--to try to rehash these questions all over again.

But the legitimacy, probably even primacy of these Christian readings do not change the fact that what was going on in Paul's head when he wrote words like "appointed Son of God in power" had their first meaning in what words meant in Paul's day. For example, at the time of Paul, "Son of God" was an expressoin that could be used of any of the kings of the Old Testament and language of "bowing the knee" (worship) was appropriate to them. The royal verses Paul and other New Testament authors apply to Jesus were applied to Old Testament, human kings as well.

So 2 Samuel 7:14 was originally about Solomon and implied that he was God's representative, a human representative of God's authority on the throne of Israel. When Hebrews 1:5 quoted this verse, its author may not have been thinking quite as much about Jesus' divinity as we do when we read it. We know Jesus is fully God, begotten of God the Father from eternity past. But it is not at all clear that God had led the New Testament authors to figure quite this much out at that time. Christians came to these understandings through the continued direction of the Holy Spirit as they reflected further on the words of Scripture.

It is thus with mixed feelings that we read studies like Richard Bauckham's Jesus and the God of Israel. Bauckham's studies are a strange mixture of good theological readings of New Testament texts like Hebrews 1 and yet he cannot seem to free himself from the impulse to find these meanings by way of classical historical-cultural interpretive method. The result is brilliant and ingenious interpretation that, again, may very well be more steered by Bauckham's theological tendencies than by his surface level interpretation.

[2] Ephesians 2:8, which says, "we have been saved," is quite unusual for Paul's writings. As we will see later in this book, Ephesians is not typical of Paul's writings in the varied imagery it uses. For this reason, John McRay's Paul: His Life and Teaching is well-intentioned but probably misguided to use Ephesians as the launching point for summarizing Paul's theology.

Tom Wright: Justification 7.1

This is the first part of my review of the seventh chapter of N. T. Wright's, Justification: God's Plan and Paul's Vision, Wright's response to John Piper's book, The Future of Justification. I'm sorry to say that I grow weary, so I will give you some gasps and then collapse on the finish line.

Chapters reviewed thus far:

Chapter 1: What's it all about and why does it matter
Chapter 2: Rules of engagement
Chapter 3: First Century Judaism
Chapter 4: Justification: Definitions and Puzzles
Chapter 5: Exegesis of Galatians
Chapter 6: Interlude: Philippians, Corinthians, Ephesians

And now we begin the 70 some page finale, "Romans." The first of my final gasps is on Wright's treatment of 1:16-17 (pp. 153-58)--"I am not ashamed of the gospel... in it the righteousness of God is revealed."

Basically, Wright supposes that if the Latin had not translated the key word righteousness with iustitia and if that had not gone into the categories of Roman thought... then "nobody would ever have supposed that the 'righteousness' in question in Romans 1.17 was anything other than God's own 'righteousness', unveiled, as in a great apocalypse, before the watching world" (154).

And if this thought had not been detached from its Jewish moorings, "nobody would have supposed that 'God's righteousness' was anything other than his faithfulness to the covenant, to Israel, and beyond that again to the whole of creation" (154).

Then Wright takes this thought and gives us a foreshadowing of the rest of the chapter, which is the playing out of his interpretation of this verse. Apart from the melodrama, I agree that the "righteousness of God" refers to His propensity to be faithful in justice and in relationship with His people and His creation. I think Wright might be okay with that last sentence of mine. But he would load the words with more meaning than I do.

This is my first dying gasp.

Explanatory Notes: Romans 1:16-17

1:16 For I am not ashamed of the gospel...
This verse marks the transition out of the thanksgiving section and into the body of the letter of Romans proper. Romans 1:16-17 constitute the basic thesis of Romans, a general statement that is played out especially in the first eleven chapters. The conjunction "for" marks the transition in section. Paul is ready to preach to those at Rome. Why? Because the gospel holds the possibility of salvation for them.

The ancient world was an "honor-shame" culture, rather than a "guilt" culture such as most of the Western world today. Westerners tend to be individualists. We formulate our identities and our sense of self as individual entities. We "have it our way" at restaurants, who oblige us by holding the pickle or holding the lettuce. "Special orders don't upset us."

We date, sometimes for very long periods of time, because as highly differentiated individuals, it can take a while to figure out if we are going to be compatible with someone else for the rest of our lives. We also feel comparatively free to break up with our spouses if it doesn't work for us as individuals. We each decide as individuals what we believe, and we value the person who is true to their beliefs, even when everyone else disagrees.

We are introspective. We can look deep inside ourselves to ask why we feel the way we do and why we acted the way we did. We feel guilt--a sense of whether we have acted according to our individual values.

On the other hand, we do not feel shame, which is a devaluation of ourselves because we have not acted according to the values of the groups to which we belong. The biblical worlds were group cultures, not individualistic cultures like the Western world. Marriages could be arranged before a person was even born because a person's identity was largely fixed at birth. You were born male or female into a family with a certain status that belonged to a particular people group.

Unlike the modern, Western world, where we prize the tale of the "self-made man" or the "rags to riches" story, it was generally expected that a person would be born and die with the same basic status in life. If your father was a carpenter, the expectation was that you would likely be one too. Your identity was embedded in the groups to which you were born into and thus belonged.

Shame in this context is thus the sense that one has not lived up to the values of the groups that constitute your identity. When Paul says he is not ashamed of the gospel, he no doubt alludes to the fact that many Jews--one of the major groups that constituted his natural identity--would have seen the gospel as discordant with Jewish values. After all, "cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree" (Gal. 3:*).

But Paul's value system and identity-defining group has changed. He is not ashamed of the gospel because in the conflict of his identity, the fact that he is "in Christ" has won out.

He is not ashamed of the gospel. We have already seen in 1:3 that this particular good news is "concerning His Son." It is the good news that Jesus is the Lord, Jesus is the promised king through whom God will bring His reign back to the earth.

... for it is the power of God for salvation, to the Jew first and also to the Greek.
The good news entails the possibility of salvation. Salvation for Paul is primarily future oriented. It is about escaping the coming wrath of God on the Day of Judgment. Paul can speak of being saved in the present tense. Ephesians 2:8 even speaks of being saved in the past tense.

But Paul does not use salvation language literally in reference to something we escape now. There are things that he believes we escape now, like the power of Sin. But he does not use salvation language in this way. The power of the gospel for salvation is the power of Jesus Christ to rescue us from the coming visitation of God's judgment on the world.

This salvation came first to the Jews. Jesus came into the world as a child of Israel and the Messiah is of the Jews (Rom. 10:*). But essential for Paul's understanding of the gospel is that the Jew is not thereby one bit more worthy of God's salvation, even if they have a special place of honor in that kingdom. The gospel is also to the Greek, who here represents the entirety of the Gentiles, non-Jews.

1:17 For in it [the gospel], the righteousness of God is revealed...
The interpretation of the phrase "the righteousness of God" in recent times has a long and complicated history. The story starts with the Roman Catholic understanding of the phrase in the late Middle Ages, namely, as a reference to the justice of God as he distributes it to the world. The Latin Vulgate rendered the phrase as the iustitia Dei, and it was thus all to easy to understand the verse to say that the "justice" of God was revealed in the gospel, just as the next verse talks about the wrath of God being revealed from heaven against all ungodliness.

Martin Luther recognized another possible way to take the phrase, namely, in reference to a righteousness from God, which is the way some translations have actually rendered the phrase (e.g., the New International Version). Does not Paul champion justification through faith in Romans, dikaioo being the verb "to justify" and dikaiosyne being the noun "righteousness"? Should we not then understand the "righteousness of God" to be none other than the righteousness God assigns to us on the basis of our faith rather than our works?

For Luther such righteousness was an "imputed" righteousness, for we are truly sinners. It is a legal fiction in which God considers us legally innocent even though we are in truth guilty. Some later (e.g., John Wesley) would argue that such righteousness is not only imputed but truly imparted through the Holy Spirit as well so that we can truly become blameless ethically as we walk in the Spirit.

However, the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in the late 1940's triggered a re-examination of the phrase in the light of its Jewish background, and Romans scholarship has returned to the conclusion that whatever the phrase, "the righteousness of God" might mean exactly, it refers primarily at least in this verse to an aspect of God or His action rather than to justification in relation to humanity. Ernst Käsemann took "the righteousness of God" to mean something like the "justifying of God," which for him was God's action to set the whole cosmos right, to justify it.

If we read the phrase against the backdrop of the Old Testament and contemporary Jewish literature of the day, we end up seeing it as a reference to God's righteousness, which in the later part of Isaiah (40-66) appears regularly in parallel with the salvation of God. Isaiah thus tempts us to understand the phrase as God's propensity to save, especially His people, but now also the whole world. One scholar translates the phrase well when he thinks of it as God's "saving righteousness."

Recent days have seen a return to reading Jesus and Paul in their Jewish contexts. The result is an appropriate recognition of Israel as the starting point for understanding how Paul conceptualized the people of God. However, it is perhaps unwise to think of God's righteousness as His covenant faithfulness to Israel, with some highly developed theology of the Gentiles inclusion in Israel. It is not that we cannot find statements in Paul to support these elements of a reconstructed Pauline theology. It is only that those scholars who advocate this reconstruction probably have made a tidier system out of Paul's thought than Paul himself and thus they run the risk of skewing some of Paul's comments by their system.

... from faith [leading] to faith, as it is written, "The righteous person on the basis of faith will live."
The expression "from faith to faith" is variously interpreted. Given a similar grammatical expression in 2 Corinthians *, some have taken it something like "completely by faith" or as the NIV translates it "by faith from first to last." However, with the shift back to understanding the "righteousness of God" in terms of God's righteousness, perhaps most scholars see the phrase as a reference to a movement from God's faith, His righteous faithfulness, to the human response of faith. A smaller group of scholars sees the progression here from Jesus' faithfulness to our faith.

Paul then quotes Habakkuk 2:4, which is a foundational verse for him. We should understand Paul to be alluding to this verse every time he uses the expression, "from faith," or as we have translated it here, "on the basis of faith." The phrase is thus a shorthand way of referring to Paul's understanding of this verse, namely, as teaching that it is the person who is righteous on the basis of his or her faith who will live, who will be resurrected.

Some scholars further see in this verse an allusion to Jesus' faith, taking the phrase "the Righteous One" as a reference to the Messiah and thus a prophecy of Jesus' resurrection on the basis of his faith. This is certainly possible, although it is difficult to know on the basis of this verse alone. We would argue that Paul sees the justification of both humanity and Jesus as being on the basis of faith, drawing on 2 Corinthians 4:13 as a key to this underlying pattern of thought in Paul. Thus it is both the faith of Jesus and the faith of believers that has justified, Jesus with true innocence and believers because they are in the faith of the Son of God (Gal. 2:20).