The Cradle, the Cross, and the Crown (124 page)

The “Righteousness of God” Refers to Righteousness That Is Credited to the Believer by God
Paul exclaimed that “God's righteousness” is being revealed through the gospel (1:17). The presence of this phrase in the programmatic statement of the letter demonstrates the importance of the righteousness of God in this letter. In fact, a number of scholars have suggested that the central focus of this letter is the righteousness of God. A. Schlatter was so convinced of this that he titled his commentary on this letter,
Romans: The Righteousness of God.
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An enormous debate rages over the precise meaning of the phrase “righteousness of God”
(dikaiosynē tou theou).
Grammatically, these are the major options: (1) the righteousness that God produces (subjective genitive); (2) God's own attribute of righteousness (possessive genitive); and (3) the righteousness imputed by God (genitive of source). We briefly examine each of these options below.

The Righteousness That God Produces
An increasing number of scholars sees the righteousness of God as
God's saving activity or power.
Several factors support this interpretation. First, a number of ancient Jewish texts, including several OT passages, use the terms “righteousness” and “salvation” interchangeably. Perhaps the best example is Isa 51:5—8:

My righteousness is near, My salvation appears, and My arms will bring justice to the nations. The coastlands will put their hope in Me, and they will look to My strength. Look up to the heavens, and look at the earth beneath; for the heavens will vanish like smoke, the earth will wear out like a garment, and its inhabitants will die in like manner. But My salvation will last forever, and My righteousness will never be shattered.

Something to Think About: Let God Be True
and Every Man a Liar

I
n the course of world history, many have devised ways of salvation. Virtually all man-made religions have one thing in common: they are based on human self-effort. Among the major religions, Christianity is unique in that, while typically the emphasis is on what a person must do to be saved, Christianity focuses on what one man has done for all humans
—
Jesus Christ
—
and what is now available for all on the basis of simple trust in Christ.

Thus Paul's words ring out in his letter to the Romans:
But now, apart from law, God's righteousness has been revealed
—
attested by the Law and the Prophets
—
that is, God's righteousness through faith in Jesus Christ, to all who believe, since there is no distinction. For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. They are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus (Rom 3:21—24).

In his day, Jesus was asked by religious Jews, “What can we do to perform the works of God?” (John 6:28). This has always been, and will always be, the misguided human quest to please or placate God by human self-effort. But what was Jesus’ response? It was this: “This is the work of God: that you believe in the One He has sent” (John 6:29). Jesus and Paul concurred: faith in Jesus for salvation on the basis of his work on the cross is all that is required.

Glorious gospel! Wonderful news! For if salvation depended on us, we would fail since we could never do enough to overcome our sinful nature or make amends for our sins. Not only did Jesus, the God-man, die a perfect, sin-atoning death, but he lived a perfect, sinless life. In a wonderful exchange, Jesus’ life and death are credited to the account of those who trust Christ: “He made the One who did not know sin to be sin for us, so that we might become the righteousness of God in Him” (2 Cor 5:21).

Listen to Me, you who know righteousness, the people in whose heart is My instruction: do not fear disgrace by men, and do not be shattered by their taunts. For the moth will devour them like a garment, and the worm will eat them like wool. But My righteousness will last forever, and My salvation for all generations.

If Paul used the term “righteousness of God” in keeping with this or similar OT texts, “righteousness” would refer to God's saving activity.
⁸⁴
Second, this interpretation closely associates the terms “righteousness” in 1:17 and “power” in 1:16. Third, God's saving power is a broad category well suited to serve as a summary not only of the first four chap-
ters of Romans but of the contents of the entire letter. It would encompass justification, sanctification, and glorification.

Scholars who see God's righteousness in Paul's writings as God's saving power normally insist that God's righteousness is more than a gift and involves more than the mere imputation of righteousness. Instead, God's saving power actually makes the sinner righteous and transforms and restores the entire fallen cosmos. Käsemann, for example, defined the righteousness of God thus: “It speaks of the God who brings back the fallen world into the sphere of his legitimate claim…, whether in promise or demand, in new creation or forgiveness, or in the making possible of our service, and—what must be no less considered according to Gal 5:5—who sets us in the state of confident hope and, according to Phil 3:12, constantly earthly change.”
⁸⁵
Although this interpretation is attractive, it does not seem to fit Paul's usages in specific contexts as well as the two alternative views do. Some scholars who previously endorsed this view have subsequently abandoned it.
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God's Own Attribute of Righteousness
The identification of the righteousness of God as a
divine attribute
is supported by several considerations. First, the righteousness of God seems to include his divine wrath, since a close connection exists between the righteousness of God in 1:17 and the wrath of God in 1:18. In both verses, a noun with the modifier “of God” serves as the subject of the verb “is revealed.” This parallelism seems intentional. Moreover, the conjunction “for” that begins 1:18 may imply that the expression of God's wrath is an expression of his righteousness.
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Second, the righteousness of God seems to refer to a divine attribute in three places: God's righteousness refers to his divine justice in eschatological judgment (3:5); and God's righteousness is his uprightness and justice, which were called into question by his tolerance of sin in the past but which has now been vindicated through Jesus’ sacrifice (3:25,26).
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The Righteousness Imputed by God to the Believer
The identification of the righteousness of God as
a gift that God imputes to the sinner who believes in Christ
is supported by abundant and persuasive evidence in the letter. First, the phrase “from faith to faith” in 1:17 does not seem to fit with the revelation of God's attribute of righteousness. God's righteousness—particularly his wrath, faithfulness, and truthfulness—is in no sense dependent on human faith. The phrase “from faith to faith” seems to imply that the righteousness of God is being revealed only to those who believe, and this qualification makes
the most sense if “righteousness of God” refers in some way to God's act of declaring sinners righteous on the basis of their faith.

Second, this interpretation best suits the quotation of Hab 2:4 in the next clause of Rom 1:17. Paul's citation of Hab 2:4 clearly confirms or clarifies the statement that the righteousness of God is revealed “from faith to faith.” Paul introduced the OT quotation with an intensive comparative adverb
(kathōs)
that establishes a tight parallel between the first and second halves of v. 17. That tight parallel strongly implies that the noun “righteousness” in v. 17a, the adjective “righteous” in v. 17b (the Hab 2:4 quotation), and the prepositional phrases “from faith” or “by faith” (both are the same phrase in Greek:
ek pisteos)
are used in the same senses. Paul's understanding of Hab 2:4 is clear from his discussion of that text in Gal 3:11. Paul used the text to demonstrate that “no one is justified before God by the law, because ‘the righteous will live by faith.’” In Gal 3:11, the “righteous” is the one who has been justified or declared righteous by God, and “faith” refers to the faith of the believer required to receive justifying righteousness. If Paul used Hab 2:4 in Rom 1:17 in a manner consistent with Gal 3:11, the “righteous” person is the one who has been justified, and “righteousness” is primarily a reference to justifying righteousness.
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Given the observation that “righteousness” and “righteous” are parallel and probably share the same sense, “righteousness” most likely refers to the righteousness God grants the believer.

Third, in several other contexts in Romans, the “righteousness of God” clearly refers to righteousness imputed by God. Although “the righteousness of God” in 3:25—26 refers to righteousness as a divine attribute, only a few verses earlier in 3:21—22 it refers to righteousness as a divine gift. In 10:3 Paul contrasted the righteousness of God with “their own righteousness,” the personal righteousness the Jews attempted to achieve through obedience to the law (9:30—31). In this context, the “righteousness of God” is most likely the righteousness that God imputes to the believer.
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Finally, this interpretation is confirmed by those occasions in the letter where Paul more clearly defined the relationship between God and “righteousness.” Throughout Romans 4, Paul defined “justification”
(dikaiod)
as the act by which a sinner's faith is considered to be or counted as righteousness. The verb used to describe this new gracious evaluation of the believing sinner is
logizomai
, a mathematical and accounting term that generally referred to crediting (when used positively) or charging (when used negatively) a person's account. Paul's quotations of Gen 15:6 and Ps 32:2 show that he borrowed this terminology from the OT. What is more, the expression may have been especially appropriate in Paul's context because of a popular rabbinic view of divine judgment that portrayed God as an omniscient accountant who maintained an enormous accounting book in which he carefully recorded a person's sins on the debit side of the ledger and his good works on the credit side. On judgment day the great accountant would audit each person's account, determine the person's final credit score, and either sentence the sinner to punishment or reward his righteousness
(m. Avot
3:15-16). Paul used the accounting terminology of the rabbis to promote a very different view of divine judgment in which a person's faith in Jesus Christ was credited to his or her account, and this credit resulted in God's evaluation of the sinner as righteous.
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In justification, God refused to charge (the negative sense of
logizomai)
sin to the debit side of the believer's ledger (4:8). He counted (the positive sense of
logizomai)
faith as righteousness on the credit side
(4:6).
Thus, in the accounting analogy, the believer was considered to be perfectly righteous on the basis of Christ's sacrificial death.
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Thus God credits a sinner's faith to his account as righteousness.
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Since God is always the stated or implied agent who credits righteousness, Paul may very well have conceived of the “righteousness of God” as the righteousness that God credits in particular contexts rather than the righteousness that God possesses or produces.
⁹⁴
Paul explicitly identified righteousness as a “gift”
(dōrea)
in 5:17, and this is also implied by the use of verbal and adverbial forms in 3:24 (see 4:4).

The evidence for both views, that the “righteousness of God” is God's attribute of righteousness, including his faithfulness and justice and that the the term refers to the righteousness God credits to the believer, is so strong that neither view should be dismissed lightly. In fact, the evidence for both views is so compelling that one must either broaden one's interpretation of the phrase “righteousness of God” to refer to both God's attribute of
righteousness and the righteousness credited by God in each context or acknowledge that Paul's use of the phrase throughout the letter is variegated, referring in some contexts to divine righteousness and in other contexts to righteousness imputed or credited by God.

An increasing number of commentators have adopted the first view. This is to a certain extent justified by Paul's statement in 3:26 that through Jesus’ sacrificial death God “would be righteous and declare righteous the one who has faith in Jesus.”
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On the other hand, to claim that the genitive “of God” expresses source and possession simultaneously is so grammatically awkward and so unlike Paul's normal usage of similar constructions that it is not likely to have been Paul's intent.
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Most likely, Paul used the phrase “the righteousness of God” or “his [God's] righteousness” in the sense of a divine attribute in 3:5,25—26. But “the righteousness of God” means the righteousness that God credits to the believer in 1:17; 3:21—22; 10:3 (twice) and is roughly equivalent to the phrase “the righteousness from God”
(tēn ek theou dikaosynē)
in Phil 3:9.
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Justification Is a Legal Term That Refers to the Verdict Delivered by the Heavenly Judge
Throughout history, scholars have often debated whether the verb “to justify”
(dikaioō)
means “to declare righteous” or “make righteous.” In the past, Protestant scholars have generally argued that “to justify” is a term drawn from the law court that refers to a pronouncement of innocence or acquittal by the heavenly judge. Roman Catholic scholars have traditionally argued that “to justify” means “to make righteous” and refers to the moral transformation of the sinner. Today many Roman Catholics blend the two concepts and insist that justification includes both a legal pronouncement and an actual transformation.
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Certainly Paul viewed the salvation of believers as including both an acquittal before God and moral transformation. Romans 5—8 thoroughly discusses the transformation of the believer through his union with Christ in his death and resurrection, the activity of the Holy Spirit, and the still future final redemption of the body.