The Righteousness of God in Romans 1:17

The MA students in my Romans class are keeping an "Issues Notebook" from Romans. I did a sample entry for them on the phrase, "the righteousness of God" in Romans 1:17. Thought I'd share.
___________________
The Righteousness of God (Romans 1:17)
The phrase, “the righteousness of God,” appears several times in Paul’s letters, not least in Romans (Rom. 1:17; 3:21; cf. 2 Cor. 5:21). It is a key concept that has given rise to a good deal of debate among scholars and was a key factor in the beginning of the Reformation. The position I am taking is that it refers to God’s righteousness, especially his character as someone who longs to save his people and, indeed, the whole world. His righteousness also leads to justice in relation to ungodliness. N. T. Wright captures both dimensions well with the phrase, “covenant justice.”

In the Middle Ages, the expression was understood in reference to the “justice of God.” This interpretation followed easily from the Latin of the verse, which renders the phrase as the iustitia Dei. As Romans 1:18 indicates, this understanding is not entirely wrong. God’s righteousness does imply the visitation of justice on the ungodly. However, the Old Testament uses the phrase much more frequently in relation to God’s propensity to save, not his character in judgment.

Martin Luther noticed another grammatical possibility for the phrase, and in it found the seeds of the Reformation. Elsewhere in Romans, it is clear that justification involves God declaring us right with him on the basis of faith (e.g., Rom. 4:1-8). So Luther concluded that “the righteousness of God” in 1:17 referred to a “righteous status from God,” a declaration of our righteousness by God that does not conform to literal righteousness, but is an “imputed” righteousness. It is a legal fiction. In the eyes of God the judge, we are deemed righteous, even though in reality we are not. Herein we find the basis for Luther’s famous saying, simul iustus et peccator, semper repentans, “at the same time righteous and sinner, if we are always repenting.”

John Wesley of course considered Luther’s theology correct on justification but inadequate when it came to sanctification. God not only imputed righteousness to us on the basis of Christ’s righteousness for Wesley. God actually imparted righteousness to us through the power of the Holy Spirit. However, Wesley agreed with Luther on the interpretation of Romans 1:17, that it referred to a righteous status imputed to us from God at our conversion.

The “genitive of source” interpretation, which understood the phrase “of God” to mean “from God,” prevailed until the mid-twentieth century. Then a closer look at Old Testament precedents for the idea of God’s righteousness, as well as the use of the concept in the newly discovered Dead Sea Scrolls, prompted a re-examination of the phrase. Ernst Käsemann, for example, suggested in a famous article that the “righteousness of God” was God’s power to create salvation. Here is was definitely on the right track, given the way the expression is used in Old Testament passages like Psalm 71:1-2; Isaiah 46:13; 51:6; 54:14; 56:1; 59:15-16; 62:1; 63:1, not to mention Dead Sea Scroll passages like 1QS 11.12 and 1QH 12.37.

What was missing from Käsemann’s approach is that he was still not sensitive to the privileged status of the Jews. N. T. Wright initially tried to capture this distinction with the phrase, “covenant faithfulness.” That is to say, the righteousness of God is his propensity to save, but it is especially directed at his people in faithfulness to his relationship with Israel. So the “righteousness of God” in Romans 1:17 refers, in the first place, to God’s faithful character to reach out to his people with salvation and, indeed, both to the Jew and Gentile who has faith in him.

I am not as convinced as Wright that Paul never blurs into other possible meanings for the phrase "the righteousness of God." Indeed, I would love to write an article titled, "Double Entendres in Romans and Galatians." It is so tempting for me to say that in Romans 3:21, Paul is blurring from what would have been the standard reading of the phrase into what we would now call the Lutheran reading of the phrase.

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.

New Perspective and Works

... One feature of Wright’s interpretation that seems particularly helpful is his recognition of the role that works play for Paul in the ongoing life of someone in Christ. Key texts in this regard are Romans 2:6-10, 12-16 and 2 Corinthians 5:9-10, both of which seem to indicate that God will take into account the deeds of a believer in the judgment. [1] If I read Wright correctly, he believes that those who are truly justified by faith in the present will live, by the power of the Holy Spirit, the sort of life that will result in justification by works in the future. That is to say, "the verdict already announced is indeed a true anticipation of the verdict yet to be announced." [2]

Of course, Paul is less than explicit about any certain connection of this sort between justification by faith in the present and a future justification that takes deeds into account. [3] The best we can do is suppose that Paul would generally, although not certainly, expect the two to correspond. Nevertheless, it is also difficult to deny Wright's conclusion about the role works play for Paul in the final judgment. Romans 2:6 indicates that God will repay each person, both Jew and Gentile, for what they have done. While interpreters have often considered these verses as a sort of hypothetical, 2 Corinthians 5:10 presents the same idea in a context that has no hint of the hypothetical. Paul tells believers in Christ that they will give an account for what they have done while in their bodies.

It is hard for Pauline scholarship to kick against these conditional pricks. Nevertheless, Paul considers even his own place in the resurrection to be contingent on his faithfulness (e.g., Phil. 3:10-11; cf. 1 Cor. 9:24-27). We are not suggesting that Paul really felt insecure about his final salvation any more than most Jews felt insecure about their membership in the people of God. We are simply suggesting that Paul expected those in Christ to produce a life of righteousness, a life of striving for "glory, honor, and immortality" (Rom. 2:7). God would evaluate those in Christ in relation to their works. It would matter, just as it mattered in general to Jews that they act in faithful response to God's covenant with them.

Paul does not clarify the details of great interest from the perspective of later theology. At least on a surface level, his language speaks in synergistic terms. He did not know the future in order to guard himself against accusations of Pelagianism. He did not produce a passage where he explained how justification by faith and judgment that includes consideration of works might fit together. So the disciplined exegete will leave it at that and not try to fit his thought together more than his writings themselves seem to warrant...

[1] Key places where Wright discusses these passages include, “The Law in Romans 2” (1996), now in Pauline Perspectives, 134-51; Justification: God's Plan and Paul's Vision (London: SPCK, 2009), 158-68; and Paul and the Faithfulness of God, 1086-90.

[2] Justification, 198.

[3] I am assuming here that, at least at some points, Paul's justification language is forensic in the sense that word has normally had in Pauline scholarship, contra J. L. Martyn, Galatians (New Haven, CT: Yale University, 2004) and D. A. Campbell, The Deliverance of God.

How to be Saved (4.3)

The race is on to finish Paul 2...
______________
Enveloped in Paul’s thoughts about God’s plan for the Gentiles are some familiar verses. We have heard them in terms of “getting saved,” about “becoming a Christian,” about “getting to heaven.” For example, Romans 10:13 says "Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved," quoting Joel 2:32.  Romans 10:9 features in the “Roman road,” a series of verses from Romans meant to lead a person through the logic of becoming a Christian. On the Roman road, Romans 3:23 first tells us that “all have sinned,” which of course includes me. Then Romans 6:23 tells me that the “wages” for my sin is death. But Romans 5:8 gives me hope—even though I was a sinner, Christ died for me. Finally, we come to our verse from this passage, Romans 10:9: “if you confess with your mouth, ‘Jesus is Lord,’ and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.”

Hopefully the last few chapters have made it clear that, while this way of using these verses is not completely off, it approaches these verses a little differently than Paul did. For Paul, all these statements had to do with the question of whether Gentiles, non-Jews, could escape God’s coming judgment. This is what being saved and salvation means for Paul.  It refers to escaping God’s wrathful judgment on the day when Christ returns to the earth and everyone gives him an account for the deeds they have done on earth—including believers for the things they have done after God forgives their sins (cf. 2 Cor. 5:10). In that sense, no one is literally saved yet because salvation is something that is yet to come, on the Day of Judgment. When we speak of “getting saved,” we are really speaking of our assurance of something that has not yet happened.

So in Paul’s mind, the “all” in “all have sinned” meant "both Jew and Gentile" rather than just Gentiles—all, both, have sinned. And Paul’s arguments about the wages of sin and Christ dying for the ungodly were situated in his mind in a story in which the Jewish Law set the standard for sin and Israel would eventually recognize that Jesus was its messiah. Later Christianity has universalized Paul’s thinking in ways that are not wrong, but are slightly out of context. The Law becomes the universal moral law rather than the Jewish Law. The “all” in “all have sinned” shifts to the individual trying to be justified and ultimately saved, rather than the Gentiles as well as the Jews.

So Romans 10:9 is also situated in a passage where Paul is asking why it is that so many Gentiles are headed for salvation while most Jews were not. Why? Paul says it is because they insisted on doing it their way rather than God’s way.  God's way was to make the world right with him through trust in Jesus, but the Jews by and large wanted to be right with God through keeping the Jewish Law (9:30-33).  They stumbled over God's plan for "righteousness," in this case a right standing before God, through Jesus (9:33).  They tried to establish a right standing before God on their own, rather than what God had in mind (10:3). [1]

Christ is thus the goal of the Law, that to which the Jewish Law points (10:4).  Some traditions take the phrase "Christ is the end of the law" to mean that Christ brings an end to the law.  But it is far more likely that Paul is saying Christ is the goal, the telos of the Law.  As Paul says in Galatians 3:24, the Law was a guardian, a tutor for the Jews to be ready for Christ (NASB).  But now that Christ has come, born under the Law to redeem Jews under the Law (4:4-5), faith has come and neither Jews nor Gentiles need the tutor any more (3:25).  We have "grown up" in the maturity of salvation history now to have the status of sons and daughters who no longer need the Law as our guardian...

[1] The parallelism of 10:3 pushes us to take the phrase, "the righteousness of God" in 10:3 in reference to human righteousness more than God's righteousness as in 1:17.  Of course Paul may intend a double entendre, as he may in Romans 3:21.  Some like N. T. Wright insist that Paul always must mean God's righteousness when he uses the phrase (What Saint Paul Really Said ***), but this approach seems excessively rigid.  Wright and others are correct that the background of the phrase pushes us toward God's righteousness as the default.  But ultimately the immediate literary context must cast the deciding vote.

Reflections on Faith (11)

Previously on Paul. I didn't finish the last section on directing faith toward Jesus but wanted to get on with finishing this chapter on "How Salvation Works." I'll fill in the gaps for publication.

Life Reflections
The standard Protestant application of Paul in Romans is such a well-worn path that it hardly seems necessary to mention it. The typical sermon goes something like the following. No one can earn God's favor. No matter how much good we do, it is not enough. Good deeds cannot make you right with God, cannot get you to heaven. We can only get right with God by faith, by believing in Jesus, by believing that Jesus rose from the dead, by confessing him as our Lord.

Most of this scenario fits with what Paul was actually saying. True, it has lost the context of Paul's original message, where the key point was whether non-Jews could also escape God's wrath and be a part of God's people. It has lost the original flavor of the debate over "works of Law," a debate that heavily centered on things like circumcision and purity rules, the things that most separated Jew and Gentile. Paul also never says that heaven is our eternal destination, and you can make a very strong argument from Paul's writings that he saw a transformed earth as our eternal home. Interestingly, Paul never mentions hell in any of his writings.

Many of us in the church feel quite comfortable with the basic line of thought here. Everyone of us as done wrong at some point, with the result that God's judgment stands over and against us. Jesus absorbed God's anger toward our sin. All we need to do is trust in what God has done for us through Jesus, and we will escape the coming judgment and be saved. God's provision of a way out for us is an indication of just how loving and "righteous" he is.

However, I suspect that this line of thinking no longer makes sense to many Westerners, including many Christians. Certainly any difficulties we might have in making sense of these ideas does not in any way disprove them. Every culture has its blind spots, and we cannot assume that our "common sense" is always going to be a true sense. Nevertheless, God revealed the biblical messages to their original audiences in categories they could understand as well. The result is that we have to consider the culture of the biblical authors not only when looking at their "ethics," what they said about how to live, but also when looking at the categories of their ideas.

For example, what exactly does the picture of an angry God mean to say? Anger is a human emotion that usually has an edge of being out of control and, as we now know, physiologically impairs our ability to think clearly. [1] We can wonder whether a God who is omniscient--and thus for whom there is no difference between "experiential" knowledge and cognitive knowledge--could literally experience anger, which implies changes and movement in thinking and reflection. [2] God knows everything in every detail in every moment. His thoughts cannot move or change differently from moment to moment.

The notion of God's anger must thus a picture that says much more about us than it does about him...

further reflections to come:
1. penal substitution
2. alienation as a picture we strongly identify with
3. God's amazing acts of reconciliation

[1] How God Changes Your Brain ***

[2] The idea that God might learn something on any level by becoming human or dying on the cross implies that he was not truly omniscient beforehand. A God who creates everything out of nothing knows everything, including what it feels like to sin.

Righteousness of God (3)

Previously on Paul.

__________
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. The Roman Catholic Church took it to mean the justice God distributed toward believer and non-believer alike. Luther took it to be a "legal fiction," God considering us righteous even though we are not, a righteousness from God.

But the Jewish background to the idea of the righteousness of God points in another direction. For example, Psalm 98:2 says that "The LORD has made his salvation known and revealed his righteousness to the nations." See how much this verse has in common with Romans 1:17? [1] It mentions God's righteousness and speaks of it being revealed. It also has a sense of this revelation going out to all the nations, just as Paul understood the gospel to be for the Gentiles as well as Jews. [2] The verse does not speak of us becoming righteous, but of God's righteousness as he brings about the salvation of Israel.

This psalm is not the only place where God's "righteousness" and his "salvation" are mentioned parallel to one another. [3] The second half of Isaiah (chaps. 40-66) was of great significance to the earliest Christians, and Paul himself occasionally alludes to these chapters (e.g., Rom. 15:21). These sorts of parallels between God's righteousness and the salvation he is bringing permeate them. The Greek version of Isaiah 51:5 Paul used says, "My righteousness draws near quickly, my salvation will come out like a light. The Gentiles will hope on my right arm." [4]

With such a consistent Old Testament background--also found in some of the Jewish literature of Paul's own day [5]--Paul almost certainly inherited a sense that the expression, "the righteousness of God" referred to God's righteousness as God's propensity to save Israel. Paul of course did not have to stop with what the phrase had meant before him, but it is pretty clear what his starting point was.

So when Paul says that "the righteousness of God is revealed in the gospel" in Romans 1:17, he is talking about God's relationship with his people and in particular God's propensity to save his people, God's "saving righteousness." Righteousness is a relational term in Jewish thought. It is not about some abstract quality God has but about a specific way that God relates to his people and the world. It is a word that can refer to God's justice, as we will see in Romans 1:18, where Paul goes on to talk about the wrath of God toward ungodliness. But in Romans 1:17 Paul is talking about good news, how God has acted through Christ to bring salvation to his people, which now includes not only believing Jews, but believing Gentiles as well.

So Paul starts with the way Jews already thought of the righteousness of God, God's faithfulness to Israel both in judgment and salvation. Then he Christianizes the concept. Now it is only through Christ that this righteousness comes to God's people. And now God's people is not exactly the same as Israel but only includes believing Jews and is extended to include believing Gentiles as well.

And just maybe, Paul exploits the ambiguity of the phrase "the righteousness of God" so that when he gets to Romans 3:21, he not only alludes to God's righteousness. Maybe Luther was not so far off here as we think. When Paul says, "now, apart from law, righteousness of God has been disclosed," [6] maybe he intended the Romans to hear a double meaning, a double entendre. Not only has the righteousness of God" been revealed in a new way through Christ, God's righteousness. But maybe he means his readers also to hear that a "righteousness" is now available for us "of God," that is, "from God."

[1] We should add here to our list of key books on Paul, Richard Hays' celebrated Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul (New Haven, CT: Yale University, 1989). In this book, Hays explores passages in Paul that may "echo" passages from the Old Testament. An echo is something a little weaker than a full blown allusion, where it is clear an author quite intentionally is pointing toward a specific Old Testament (or other) text.

[2] The next verse reads, "He has remembered his love and his faithfulness to the house of Israel; all the ends of the earth have seen the salvation of our God."

[3] Many will know that Hebrew poetry does not rhyme sounds, but ideas. The verses we are discussing here use "synonymous parallelism" where one line is followed by another line that roughly says the same thing.

[4] My translation.

[5] The Dead Sea Scrolls, for example, think of God's righteousness in similar terms. For example, "if I stumble, the mercies of God shall be my salvation always; and if I fall in the sin of the flesh, in the justice of God... will my judgment be... he will judge me in the justice of his truth, and in his plentiful goodness always atone for my sins; in his justice he will cleanse me from the uncleanness of the human being" (1QS11.12). Translation from Florentino G. Martínez and Eibert J. C. Tigchelar, The Dead Sea Scrolls: Study Edition, vol. 1 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997) 99.

[6] My translation.

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.

The Righteousness of God (3:21-26)

Working on another small writing assignment. When what I had in mind as the first section hit 500 words (a little less than half the allotted words) I realized I can't use any of the below. Oh well, here it is for you, whoever you are... :-)
_____
Introduction
Romans 3:21-26 is the very heart of Romans. These six, extremely thick theological verses present in a nutshell both the problem Paul discusses in the first three chapters (1:18-3:20), as well the solution he discusses to the end of Romans 4. The problem is that “all have sinned” (3:23). We thus should expect the wrath of God to come on us when he soon judges the world (1:18). However, God has graciously provided a solution: first, he offered Jesus as a kind of “sacrifice of atonement” for our sins (3:25); second, he asks for our faith in the risen Christ as our sovereign Lord. God will consider us righteous if we only trust in what he has done for us through Messiah Jesus.

The Righteousness of God
One of the disadvantages of reading the Bible in English is that you sometimes miss aspects of the text that you cannot really see in English. For example, some variation on the root for "righteous" appears seven times in Romans 3:21-26, even though the NIV only uses the word righteousness (dikaiosyne) twice (3:21-22). What you cannot see in English is that the word justified (dikaioo) comes from the same root (3:24, 26), as does the word just in 3:26 (dikaios). Even more interestingly, the word for justice in 3:25 and 26 is the very same word the NIV translates as righteousness in 3:21-22.

The NIV was of course translated right before a new era in the study of Paul exploded, leading to a great deal of clarity on exactly what Paul was saying in these verses. For one, it is now generally realized that the phrase, "the righteousness of God" almost certainly would have immediately made any first century Jewish audience think of God's righteousness, the fact that God is a God who always comes through, who always keeps his promises. His character is well known, as is his love for his people. He brings justice for sure, but he also is a God of great mercy and salvation.

The "righteousness of God" that is revealed apart from the Jewish Law (3:21) is thus in part God showing a new way he is walking with the world in justice and mercy--a way that by-passes the Jewish Law. This new way involves God's offering of Jesus as an atoning sacrifice (3:25), whose blood provides redemption for our sins. It is understandable that the NIV focuses on the justice side of God's righteousness in 3:25 and 26, because Christ's offering demonstrates that God is in fact a just God. Even if God could have simply let us off the hook for our sins by divine command, his offering of Christ as a sacrifice certainly demonstrates that he stands for justice as well as mercy.

However, it is also possible that Paul had a double meaning in mind when he used the phrase "the righteousness of God" here, in fact that he was also thinking of something like the way Luther and Wesley took Romans 3:21. They took Paul to be speaking of a new way for us humans to become righteous that did not involve us keeping the law. Paul almost certainly was first thinking of God's righteousness, but he does go on to speak of our righteousness, that is, a way for us to be considered righteous or innocent in God's eyes. Even though we have sinned, we can be "justified freely" (3:26) because of God's gracious mercy he is offering through Jesus.

Paul thus has two "righteousnesses" in view in this passage, the righteousness of God himself, demonstrated in both his mercy and justice. The second is the righteous status ("not guilty," "innocent") he confers on us through Jesus Christ.

Answers: Paul's Theology in Romans 1-8

I gave my Romans and Galatians class a take home test whose questions I posted a while back. I thought I'd post my answers to those questions today. There's some stuff here I'd like to publish, so as is always implied, © Ken Schenck on the parts that aren't common positions.

1. What is the gospel?
The gospel, the good news, is that God has enthroned Jesus as the Christ, the Son of God, the Lord of the cosmos. Jesus was qualified to be cosmic king because he was descended from David and then God raised him from the dead.

2. Ethnic make-up of the audience of Romans?
There are only three reasons to suggest that the audience might have a significant Jewish component: 1) the Jewish names in Romans 16, 2) the Jewish interlocutor of 2:17, and 3) common sense, the likelihood that early Christian communities might have been mixed.

Aside from chapter 16, however, whose destination is questioned, the actual text of Romans pushes us toward an overwhelmingly Gentile audience. 1:13 implies that the audience is Gentile, and the discussion of 9-11 speaks about the Jews as other than both Paul and the audience. The interlocutor of 2:17 is an imaginary one and could even include Gentiles who were particularly "conservative" on matters of law.

3. Why did Paul write Romans?
First, Paul planned to visit Rome soon. Romans thus was meant to introduce himself to the Romans in preparation for his coming visit.

Second, he was visiting them hopefully on his way to Spain. He preferred not to minister in locations where the gospel was already established. The church at Rome was already founded, so he hoped to use Rome as a launching pad for a mission to Spain and no doubt hoped to have the material support of the Roman church as he went.

Thirdly, part of his introduction involved fending off possible rumors about him the Romans might have heard. In particular, it was rumored that he advocated sin because of his emphasis on grace (e.g., 3:8) and probably that he disdained his Jewish heritage. Romans is thus, more than anything, a defense of his understanding of the gospel.

Lastly, Paul has apparently heard that the kinds of issues between "weak" and "strong" that he addressed at Corinth were also in play at Rome. Romans 14-15 in particular address these issues directly, 12-13 indirectly, and the theology of Romans 1-11 indirectly.

4. What does Paul mean by the "righteousness of God" in Romans?
The Jewish background of the phrase in Psalm 143, Isaiah 40-66, and the Dead Sea Scroll hymns suggests that the first meaning this phrase would have had for a Jew is that propensity of God to act in love toward His people, Israel, and to save them. For Paul this love clearly extends to the Gentiles as well, so that the phrase, God's "saving righteousness" is very appropriate to the sense of Romans 1:17.

For Paul, the phrase also has connotations of God being just, a slightly different sense that we find in 3:26. God has passed over sins, but he has offered Christ as an atoning sacrifice. He is thus "just" at the same time that he justifies the ungodly.

In a couple places, however, Paul seems to build on the semantic flexibility of the phrase "the righteousness of God" to double entendre (3:21) or explicitly blur to (10:3) a sense of the righteousness that comes from God in justification, a pronouncement of innocence in court, acceptibility by God.

5. What is salvation for Paul?
Salvation for Paul most literally refers to escaping God's wrath on the Day of the Lord. On the one hand, the wrath of God is something already intrinsic to him "giving over" idolaters to sexual immorality and such. There is judgment intrinsic to their actions.

Yet Paul also looks to a Day of Judgment at the point of Christ's return. Salvation relates most directly in his regular usage to being rescued from that wrath (5:9). We must all appear before the judgment seat of God (2:5; 14:10).

When Paul speaks of being saved in the present tense in Romans, therefore, he is either speaking proleptically of something certain enough to speak of it as accomplished, gnomically of general truths, or using a futuristic present. Only Ephesians seems to use salvation language with more of a genuine past tense (2:8), and we would argue that it reflects more the wording of a secretary or heir than Paul's own natural vocabulary, style, and specific thought patterns.

6. What is faith for Paul? What is its content? Whom is it directed toward?
Paul can use the word faith with most of the flexibility of meaning the word had at the time. He can use it to mean faithfulness (3:3). He can use it with a primary emphasis on belief (10:8).

Most of the time Paul uses it, he uses the connotation of trust or confidence in the God who raised Jesus from the dead (4:25) or in Jesus' Lordship and all that it accomplishes (9:33; 10:11). Presumably faith in this latter case involves commitment and investment in Jesus as Lord, surrender to his Lordship.

The belief content of faith is thus primarily that God raised Jesus from the dead and thus that Jesus is Lord.

7. What does the expression εκ πιστεως mean for Paul?
This phrase is drawn from Habakkuk 2:4 and can be taken as a shorthand reference to Paul's understanding of that verse. The expression, "justification by faith" is an apt summary of Paul's understanding, provided that we correctly understand what Paul might mean by that phrase.

First, it is clear from 9:32-33 that Paul understands the phrase more in relation to human faith rather than Christ's faithfulness. Human faith leads to justification as opposed to Jewish or human "works." We trust in what God has done in Christ and God declares us justified, not guilty, our sins not reckoned because of our faith in the God who has raised Jesus from the dead and enthroned him as cosmic Lord. Most of the time Paul uses the expression, we believe he refers to human faith.

However, since we believe that Romans 3:22 refers to the faithfulness of Jesus, his obedient act to the point of death, it seems more likely than not that the first sense of "from the faith of Jesus" in 3:26 is Jesus' faith rather than human faith. The context thus implies a double reference in this verse--a reference to the faith Jesus had and to the faith we must have. 2 Corinthians 4:13 reflects this same common story of faith between Jesus and us, leading to resurrection.

8. What is the role of works in final justification?
Romans 2:5-10 speak of the Day of Wrath when God will render to each person according to his or her works. This is possibly the same event as Romans 14:10 where Paul indicates we will all stand before the judgment seat of God and 2 Corinthians 5:10. In 2 Corinthians, Paul speaks of giving an account for things done in the body.

The idea that even Christians will be judged for their earthly deeds is found several places in Paul. Thus in 1 Corinthians 3:13-15 Paul speaks of the Day disclosing a Christian's works, including some judgment by fire for individuals who will nonetheless be ultimately saved. Paul also indicates that certain notorious sinful types of individual will not inherit the kingdom of God (1 Cor. 6:9-10).

I think we should thus factor in repentance and forgiveness for the time in between "initial" justification, Paul's primary concern in Romans, and ultimate or "final" justification on the Day of Wrath. The works for which a believer might be judged on the Day are thus sinful and carnal deeds toward which a person shows no repentance (e.g., 2:4).

9. What is the role of repentance in justification?
Paul makes no explicit connection between repentance and justification. However, it does show up in a couple instances where Paul is addressing the process of reconciliation with God. It is the goodness of God that allows the sinful to repent (2:4). We suspect that Paul would fully affirm the importance of repentance as a prior requirement for justification, even though it is not a category that plays a major role in his explicit and probably conscious thought.

As an aside, my hunch is that Paul is not saying in 2:4 that God causes repentance but rather that God allows for it.

10. What does Paul mean when he says that all have sinned?
While I believe Paul would affirm that all individuals have sinned, 3:23 primarily indicates that both Jews and Gentiles have sinned. So all have sinned--both Jew and Gentile. The Jews as well as the Gentiles stand under the wrath of God.

In my opinion, Paul uses the words sin and transgression in much the same way, although Sin can take on cosmic proportions for him that the word transgression does not. Transgression tends more toward concrete actions, while sin can become more abstract. The basic meaning he primarily has in mind is to violate God's law (5:13; 7:7-8). Paul, however, seems to focus on those aspects of the Jewish Law that a believer will keep after the Spirit of Christ indwells him or her.

He does not, however, seem to define sin as the violation of some absolute perfection, such as to "miss the mark." Nor does he have in mind unintentionally violating a law that one knows. We now know the commandments (as opposed to those between Adam and Moses) and in this context Paul never speaks of sinning without knowing one is sinning. We should probably steer away from the word unintentional, however, because Romans 7 speaks of a person who does not intend to sin but is overpowered by Sin's power over their flesh.

11. What does it mean to lack the glory of God?
The glory of God is what God intended humanity to have at creation (Ps. 8) but that all currently lack because of sin (Rom. 3:23). Christ's atonement and our justification on the basis of his and our faith gives us hope to attain to such glory on the Day of Salvation.

Romans 8 gives us some hints of what such glorification might entail. It involves, for example, the redemption of our bodies (8:18, 23). It relates directly to the Spirit we have inside as a downpayment (8:23; 2 Cor. 5:5). And presumably, it has a lot to do with the resurrection body of 1 Corinthians 15.

12. What does it mean to be justified for Paul?
To be justified is to be found innocent, not guilty, reckoned as righteous (4:6) by God. This is despite the fact that all have sinned (3:23-24) and takes place by way of the atonement God has provided through Christ (3:25). Justification so credited when first confessing faith in Jesus as Lord does not guarantee the ultimate trial verdict on the Day of Judgment.

13. What does Paul mean by the "faith of Jesus Christ"?
The expression that appears in Romans 3:22 and Galatians 2:16 may at least initially refer to the faithfulness of Jesus to the point of death. Romans 5:19 seems to parallel this sense closely. The fact that Paul does not explain the expression may imply that it was a well known expression in early Christian Judaism as a shorthand reference to the faithful death of Jesus.

However, Paul tends to build on the ambiguity of the expression in moving toward human faith in his later discussions (see #7) above.

14. What does Paul mean by "works of Law"?
In Galatians 2 it seems fairly clear that Paul primarily has in view elements of the Mosaic Law such as circumcision and food laws when he denies that "works of Law" can result in justification. The expression now found in the Dead Sea Scroll document, "Some of the Works of the Law" corroborates a primary connotation of the phrase in reference to those elements of Law keeping that fueled intra-Jewish debate.

However, Paul's use of the phrase is not limited to those elements of the Jewish Law that separated Jew from Gentile. Paul always has the Jewish Law in view no doubt when he uses the phrase. The question is which parts he most focuses on at any one time. In Romans he tends to speak more generally of "works of Law" in reference to how well one keeps any part.

Paul's point is simply that being right with God is always a matter of His grace. Everyone has some violation of Law for which they need God's forgiveness. The real point of controversy between Paul and his opponents does not seem to be this point, but rather on what basis God dispenses it. God does not dispense His grace because of how well one keeps the Law but on the basis of confession of Jesus' Lordship and all that it entails.

15. What is the nature of atonement in Romans?
Atonement is sacrificial in nature in Romans. God offered Jesus as an atoning sacrifice by means of his blood. The Greek word ιλαστηριον is notoriously controversial (3:25). It surely involves a vindication that God is just (3:26) and a cleansing for sin as well. The fact that the word always refers to the physical cover of the ark of the covenant in the Jewish Scriptures surely implies that Paul has it in view here. God has made Jesus to be the Day of Atonement altar where our atonement is effected.

The logic of atonement remains difficult for us, the way in which the ancients understood animal or human blood to substitute for the offenses of others. But the result was reconciliation between the person or group and the offended god or gods. In the Christian sense, it has to do with reconciliation between an alienated humanity and God by way of the blood of Jesus. Redemption is another image used for the freedom of the offender from their guiltiness by the "payment" of Christ.

16. What is the nature of boasting in Romans?
The principal boasting Paul has in mind is the boasting that a Jew might make in being acceptable before God simply because of being a Jew and knowing the Law (2:17). Boasting in works (3:27) thus still primarily refers to the kind of boasting a Jew might make for keeping the Law. Gentile believers similarly have no basis to boast in relation to the Jews either (11:18). What Christians can boast in is the hope of the glory of God (5:2).

17. What is the role of grace in justification?
Justification is entirely by grace. No one merits or earns God's favor (4:4-5), and death results in a kind of justification for all (5:7). But God has now graciously and mercifully enabled justification for the living on the basis of their faith in what He has done through Jesus Christ and in the Lordship he has bestowed on him.

Grace here is God's patronage toward us in doling out forgiveness. Such grace does not come without expectations, however, and one should not think that such grace is unconditional or will continue indefinitely regardless of how one behaves toward the Spirit of grace.

18. What is the role of Adam in Paul's theology?
Adam for Paul brought Sin and death into the world (5:12-14). Since Adam, all humanity and the creation are under the power of Sin. All humans die, and the creation decays (8:20). Because of the power of Sin, we all sin like Adam although we do not inherit his sin.

But just as we have borne the image of the earthly man Adam we will bear the image of the heavenly man Jesus (1 Cor. 15:49). As in Adam all die, so all in Christ will be made alive (1 Cor. 15:22).

19. What is the role of sin in the life of the believer?
Paul makes no allowances for sin in the life of the believer in Romans, although it seems very likely that he assumes it does happen sometimes. It does not have to (1 Cor. 10:13), but he is not making some absolute argument in these chapters. He is not arguing that a Christian will never sin. What he is arguing is that sin must not reign in a believer's life (6:12) and that sin should not typify a Christian's life. Sin should be atypical of a believer, not typical.

Here of course he is talking about doing wrong when you know to do the good (e.g., 7:19). He is not talking about never "missing the mark." Paul consistently in this section says that while we used to be enslaved to sin (6:17) we now walk in newness of life (6:5). We fulfill the righteous requirement of the Law through the power of the Spirit (8:4).

Paul knows nothing about Christ fulfilling the Law for us, only of us dying to the Law by participating in Christ's death. Paul knows nothing of some legal fiction of righteousness that continues to cover our actions after we have first been justified by our faith in the Lordship of Jesus the Christ.

20. What does flesh signify for Paul?
Flesh is that aspect of our human bodies that is susceptible to the power of Sin. There is a dualistic element to Paul's thought here. The physical world is not evil, but it is weak in relation to the power of Sin. Apart from the power of the Spirit our flesh will overcome any intent of our mind to keep the Law. Apart from the Spirit, we will not be able to do the good we want to do. The body and the flesh thus relate to the world where Sin is empowered. Spirit and the mind pertain much more to the heavenly realm, although our minds perhaps can also be affected by Sin (12:2).

In Paul, the flesh thus becomes shorthand for a person under the power of Sin, so much so that those who are "in the flesh" are unable to please God (8:8). To be "in the Spirit" is thus for a person to be empowered in relation to the weakness of the body in this world where Sin and Satan hold sway.

21. What is the Law in Paul's thinking and how does it function?
Paul can use the word Law in a number of ways. Clearly the Jewish Law, the Mosaic Law, the legislation of the Pentateuch, is the base camp for Paul's references to the Law. When he says that Gentiles are freed from the Law or are not under Law (e.g., 1 Cor. 9:20) he both means that they are not required to keep the Jewish particulars of the Law and that our (initial) justification is not on the basis of the Law.

The Jewish Law in this respect functioned 1) to tell me the commandment of God that I must not violate and 2) pointed out my helplessness to keep that Law because of the power of Sin over my flesh. Paul here has subtly blurred into a focus on those parts of the Law that remain in force for a believer, what later Christians (but not Paul) would call the "moral" law. Paul affirms in Romans 8 that Christians can fulfill this righteous requirement (8:4; cf. 3:31). Romans 13:8-10 suggests that it basically amounts to loving one's neighbor.

But Paul uses the word Law in other ways as well. It can refer to the first five books of the Old Testament, the Pentateuch. He can use it to mean a "rule" (3:27). The fact that he does not signal any of these sorts of shifts significantly confuses his meaning.

22. What is the role of the Spirit in the believer and in the Church?
As mentioned under #20, the Spirit finally empowers the person wanting to do good, to do good. The person is empowered to love as God gives life to our mortal bodies (8:11). A person who does not have the Spirit of Christ, on the other hand, is not his (8:9). The Spirit is thus the most essential ingredient in salvation.

The Spirit is an earnest of our inheritance, both a downpayment of our glorified bodies and a guarantee (5:5). The Spirit of sonship indicates our adoption as sons of God (8:14-17). The Spirit sanctifies us, purifies us and possesses us as God's property (1 Cor. 6:11).

Friday Review: Chapter 11 of Piper's Future of Justification 13

And so we reach the final chapter of the main part of John Piper's book, The Future of Justification: A Response to N. T. Wright. Don't get your hopes up too much--there's still a conclusion and 6 appendices to go :-)

Chapter 11 is titled, "That in Him We Might Become the Righteousness of God." In other words, Piper is going to address Tom Wright's interpretation of 2 Corinthians 5:21 in this chapter:

1. 2 Corinthians 5:21
"The one who had not known sin, [God] made [to become] sin for us, so that we ourselves might become the righteousness of God in him."

This verse is potentially a great test case in the pre-understanding that we all bring to texts. My reaction to Wright's interpretation was pretty much the same as Piper's when I first came across it. Isn't the meaning of this verse obvious?

Christ goes from righteous to sinful (putatively).
We go from sinful to righteous (putatively).

Morna Hooker wrote a famous article in New Testament Studies called "Interchange in Christ" on this verse.

But Wright argues the following in What Saint Paul Really Said. The phrase "the righteousness of God" is a phrase with a history. Any Jew that heard it would immediately have thought of God's faithfulness to His covenant with Israel. Accordingly, Wright understands the verse to say this:

Christ atones for our sin as a sin offering...
which demonstrates God's righteousness, His faithfulness to redeem Israel...
where Christ is understood to be the embodiment of Israel...
and believers are all in Christ.

Now I would agree that "covenant faithfulness" probably is not the most apt description of the righteousness of God here (as I mentioned in an earlier post). I noted that in Paul: A Fresh Perspective Wright uses the phrase "covenant justice," which is no doubt ambiguous but better in some respects.

But I eventually came around to agree largely with Wright, minus his more idiosyncratic points. I take the train of thought to be:

Christ atones for our sin as a sin offering...
which demonstrates God's righteousness,
which is not only his justice but also His propensity to redeem and save not only Israel but all humanity.

I agree with two out of Wright's three arguments for this interpretation of the phrase "the righteousness of God" here (set out by Piper on p. 175):

a. Wright holds that the phrase "the righteousness of God" is a technical term meaning "covenant faithfulness."

I agree with this statement with the tweak I mention above. I already have presented the argument that this phrase had a known definition in Paul's day in my review of chapter 3.

I might say that I am open to the possibility that Paul intended some sort of a double entendre here and in Romans. Since I think there was a default dictionary entry for this phrase in Paul's dictionary, I come out with Wright as far as the primary meaning of the phrase.

But it is certainly conceivable, given that human righteousness is also a major feature of Paul's argument, that Paul meant the reader to see a double entendre somewhat along traditional lines.

By the way, one critique of Piper's position--that this verse is about the imputation of Christ's righteousness, a balanced exchange--is that the verse does not speak of the righteousness of Christ. It does not say, God made Christ who had not sinned to be sinful so that we might take on the righteousness of Christ. Rather, God offers Christ as a sin offering (cf. Rom. 3:25) so that we might become God's righteousness. You see how Piper has not seen the correlation correctly.

Piper rightly questions the role of the phrase "in him" then--"so that we might become the righteousness of God in him." May I not chastise Piper too much for his read of this verse for it is compact, poetic, and very ambiguous from where we sit today. I believe, however, that if we will look at this clause grammatically, we will see what Paul is saying:

The heart of the clause, subject and verb is "we might become."

"The righteousness of God" is a predicate nominative with a modifying word.

Now, "in him" is a prepositional phrase that is functioning adverbially, that is, it tells us something about the verb "might become." It does not modify "righteousness"--we do not become the righteousness in him. Rather in him we become the righteousness of God.

In other words, Paul is telling us where we come to demonstrate the righteousness of God, namely, when we are "in Christ."

After I have said that about 2 Corinthians 5:21, there are other verses that do seem to imply that it is the fact that I am "in Christ" that I can be justified. It is not a "real transference of righteousness" in the manner of Piper's understanding of imputation, but it is a putative reckoning of me as righteous in Christ.

Let me hold off on such verses for a few moments.

b. A second argument Wright offers for his understanding of 2 Corinthians 5:21 is that this understanding fits the train of thought in 2 Corinthians 5.

This fact pushed me over to Wright's side. If we think back to Romans 1:16-17 where Paul uses the phrase righteousness of God, there Paul says that "I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God leading to salvation for everyone who has faith... For in it the righteousness of God is revealed..."

In other words, the aspect of God's righteousness that Paul highlights the most in Romans is His propensity to save not only His people but in fact all humanity. Now, what is 2 Corinthians 5 about:

"That God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself, not counting [humanity's] transgressions to them and having placed the message of reconciliation among us" (2 Cor. 5:19).

Then I came to agree with Wright. This passage really is about God's righteousness as it is properly understood against the backdrop of Isaiah and the Dead Sea Scrolls.

c. Wright's third point is that if 5:21 is about humans becoming righteous, then the idea just pops up out of nowhere. Here I think Piper is right to suggest that the idea is not foreign to the train of thought (e.g., 5:15). In fact, I have already mentioned that I am open to overtones of these ideas latent in the verse, even if it is not the primary sense.

2. Romans 5:18-19 and Galatians 2:20
I mentioned above that there are other verses that do indicate that we are considered righteous because we are "in Christ" and in his "faithfulness" in particular. This is slightly different than Piper's argument, for a real and absolute transfer of Christ's righteousness is essential to his system.

But he does correctly produce Scriptures that support the idea that we are incorporated into Christ's faithfulness and obedience.

He mentions Romans 5:18-19, for example:

Therefore then, as through the one transgression all came under condemnation, so also through the one righteous act all come to justification and life. For just as through the disobedience of one person many were designated sinners, so also through the obedience of one [person] many will be designated righteous.

To open up another can of worms, 5:19 here is so similar to Richard Hays understanding of Romans 3:22 that it was a major factor in my finally accepting his understanding of "the faith of Christ" in that verse:

"even God's righteousness [demonstrated] through the faithfulness of Jesus Messiah toward all who have faith."

Notice the parallel:

5:19--Jesus' obedience leads to many being pronounced righteous.
3:22--Jesus' faithfulness leads to believers being justified (=pronounced righteous).

A better verse, and of course one Piper would not agree supports his own general trajectory for obvious reasons, is Galatians 2:20 in Haysian translation:

"I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live but Christ lives in me. And what I now live in flesh, I live in the faithfulness of the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me."

3. Philippians 3:9
I will close this review with a brief consideration of Philippians 3:9. This verse is somewhat ambiguous on its own:

"...so that I might gain Christ and be found in him, not having my own righteousness based on the law but [a righteousness] through the faith of Christ, the righteousness from God based on faith."

Let me give it my interpretive understanding:

...not having my own righteousness based on keeping the Jewish law but a righteousness that has come through the faithfulness of Christ, a righteousness God has declared based on my faith.

As I interpret it--and I recognize that it is ambiguous and that Paul might simply be saying the same thing twice--there is first a reference to Christ's faith and then one to Paul's:

my righteousness through faith of Christ
my righteousness from God through my faith

Yes indeed, this righteousness I have is really Christ's righteousness, a righteousness that is reckoned to me because I am in Christ.

4. Conclusion
While I disagree with Piper on many of his specific interpretations here, I'm not sure I am that far from him on the question of Christ's righteousness counting as my own. I think the main difference is that he is very concerned to see this as a real and total transfer.

I'm not 100% sure I even know what a real transfer means. What I think it means for Piper is that God must have absolute, mathematical justice and cannot accept us without total mathematical righteousness. So Christ must take every drop of punishment we should have and we must have every drop of his perfect righteousness.

This is where the difference is. Piper is driven by theological concerns of which Paul knows nothing.