Beeson Podcast, Episode #261
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>>Announcer: 

Welcome to the Beeson podcast, coming to you from Beeson Divinity School on the campus of Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama. Now your host, Timothy George. 


>>Timothy George:

Welcome to today's Beeson podcast. I have the privilege today of introducing you to a lecture by our own Dr. Frank Thielman, who is the Presbyterian Professor of Divinity here at Beeson Divinity School and has served in this role almost from the very beginning of our school. He came in 1989 and has been a faithful faculty member, a beloved friend and colleague of all of us here at Beeson across these years. He is a noted New Testament scholar, concentrating primarily on the Pauline epistles. His books include Paul and the Law, The Law and the New Testament. He's written a number of commentaries, including commentaries on Philippians and Ephesians, and he's just concluding a brand new commentary on the book of Romans. He's an ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church in America. He earned his Ph.D. from Duke University.

The lecture we're going to hear was actually given at a plenary session of the Evangelical Theological Society several years ago. There were three plenary speakers that year. One was Dr. N.T. Wright, another one was Dr. Tom Schreiner, and the third one was Dr. Frank Thielman. And they were all dealing with the grand biblical theme of justification by faith.
Dr. Thielman's lecture is entitled, “God's Righteousness as Fairness in Romans, the oldest perspective on Paul.” It's a brilliant lecture. You're going to love it. Notice the clarity with which he speaks, the passion he brings to it, and the ebullience of the gospel that shines through his wonderful lecture given in 2010 at the Evangelical Theological Society. So, we go now to Atlanta where this talk was given and our colleague and friend Dr. Frank Thielman. 


>>Thielman:

Thank you very much Clint. It is a delight and a privilege to be here with you this afternoon. It would be hard to think of a text more important for understanding Paul's concept of justification than the sentence that makes up Romans 1:17. It is part of the pithy, programmatic, two-sentence statement of the letter's theme that contains the letter's first use of righteousness language. Moreover, it connects this language with the gospel, salvation, faith, and life, all terms of critical importance as the argument of the letter unfolds. If we are to understand how justification functions
within Paul's gospel, we need to understand how righteousness language functions in this important verse. 

The interpretation of this language in the critical phrase, “the righteousness of God,” however, is hotly contested. And a variety of explanations for it have been advanced over the 17 centuries of extant commentary on Romans. In what follows, I would like to argue that part of the reason for this volatile interpretive history is that the phrase is polyvalent. Paul intended its meaning to be dense and probably did not think it would be fully understood on a first hearing. I would like to argue further that the most obvious meaning of the phrase to its first hearers, a meaning that Paul probably knew it would have to them, and therefore intended, is a meaning that has often been dismissed in recent interpretive debates as surely incorrect. To put my thesis in a nutshell, “the righteousness of God” has three meanings in Romans 1:17. It not only refers to God's saving activity and to the gift of acquittal from sin before God on the basis of faith, but from the perspective of its first readers and hearers in Rome, dikaiosune theou would have referred most obviously to a property of God's character, that he is fair, even-handed, and equitable in the way he distributes salvation. 

The idea that “the righteousness of God” in Romans 1:17 referred to an aspect of God's character was common in the Middle Ages, particularly the view that it referred to God's strict justice in punishing the guilty and rewarding the virtuous. To Peter Abelard, writing in the 12th century, for example, it meant that God gave, and this is a quotation, “praise to the elect and punishment to the godless.” That's from his commentary on Romans at 1:17. This was the understanding of “the righteousness of God” that had troubled Martin Luther until he realized it made no sense within its own literary context or the theological context of the whole Bible. Within its own immediate context in Romans, Paul explained the justice of God not as his consistent punishment of the sinner and praise of the righteous, but as his salvation of sinners by counting them righteous and giving them life on the basis of faith. The phrase “the righteousness of God,” Luther discovered, worked like other similar biblical phrases and this is a quote from Luther. “It works like the work of God, that is, what God does in us, the power of God with which he makes us strong, the wisdom of God with which he makes us wise.” The righteousness of God then was not a characteristic of God that drove him to punish the sinner, but the gift of God, a gift that God gives to the sinner who has faith. 

From that time until the early 20th century, the idea became increasingly dominant that “the righteousness of God” in Romans 1:17 meant God's gift of righteousness to the person who had faith. Although Protestant and Roman Catholic interpreters disagreed on the nature of this gift, by the 19th century both agreed that the phrase referred not to a property of God, but to the gift of God. 

The reasons for this rejection of the “divine property” approach to the phrase are understandable. Commentators who think that the righteousness of God is a gift from God to the believer reasonably point to Paul's quotation of Habakkuk 2:4 in the second part of the sentence. There, the one who is righteous is not God, but the believer. And this implies that when Paul used the phrase “the righteousness of God” in the first part of the sentence, he spoke of a righteousness that comes from God to the believer. In Romans 3:21-24, moreover, Paul explains “the righteousness of God” as “being justified freely by his grace,” a phrase that is itself further explained in Romans 3:26 as God “justifying the one who has faith in Jesus.” Later, in Romans 10, verse three, Paul will contrast Israel's “own righteousness “with the “righteousness of God.” He implies by this that human righteousness needs to be replaced with divine righteousness. And this happens when God gives righteousness to people. In the closely analogous text, Philippians 3:9, Paul uses a close cousin of the phrase to speak explicitly of the righteousness from God, ex seu. Again, the contrast between Paul's own righteousness and the righteousness from God implies that righteousness here is a gift God gives to Paul. The righteousness he has is not his own but comes from God. 
Finally, in 2 Corinthians 5:21, Paul explains God's reconciliation of sinners to himself by saying that God made Christ, who knew no sin, to be sin, and that this meant sinners became the righteousness of God. Elements of this statement are obscure, but it seems to imply that God reconciled sinners to himself by giving righteousness to them. 

The idea that dikaiosune theou referred to an attribute of God, however, received renewed energy in the early and mid-20th century with the thesis that the phrase referred to the saving power of God. Already in 1903, James Hardy Ropes argued in the Journal of Biblical Literature that the proper background for the phrase was the concept of God's righteousness in Isaiah, where it often means the vindicating power of God on behalf of his oppressed and needy people. The closest analogies to Paul's use of the phrase, Ropes pointed out, were such expressions as, “My righteousness is near, my salvation has gone forth” in Isaiah 51:5. By 1932, Charles Harold Dodd, in his popularly written Moffat Bible commentary on Romans, was making this view very widely known. In Germany, two years later, Adolf Schlatter also argued that at 1:17, “the righteousness of God” referred to God's powerful saving activity. Ernst Kasemann adopted a form of this interpretation in a widely hailed lecture on “The righteousness of God in Paul,” delivered and published in 1961. He then placed this idea on a firm scholarly footing in his magisterial commentary on Romans, first published in German in 1973. Although Kasemann’s view that the phrase was a technical term within first century Judaism did not survive, and his view that the phrase refers to God's gift as well as his power is still controversial, his powerful case for the idea that the righteousness of God refers to God's saving activity has been widely accepted. By 1993, Joseph Fitzmyer in his Anchor Bible commentary on Romans could make the following statement: it is “debatable whether the gift idea of dikaiosune theou is suitable anywhere in Romans.”

Here, too, the arguments for reading the phrase this way, at least in Romans 1:17, are strong. As Adolf Schlatter pointed out in his commentary, dikaiosune theou in 1:17 is sandwiched between the syntactically identical phrases, dunamis theou in 1:16 and orge theou in 1:18. And both those phrases refer to something that belongs to God. It only makes sense that dikaiosune theou then, which appears between these other two phrases, also refers to something that belongs to God. In addition, as later interpreters have pointed out, Romans 1:16-17 contains rich echoes of Psalm 98, verses 2 to 3. Here, the righteousness of God is interpreted as God's saving power displayed for His people and with reference to the nations: “The Lord has made known His salvation. He has revealed His righteousness in the sight of the nations. He has remembered His steadfast love and faithfulness to the house of Israel. All the ends of the earth have seen the salvation of our God." That's from the ESV. The language here is so close to Romans 1:16-17 that it is difficult to think it has not exercised some influence over the way Paul formulated the letter's thesis statement. The righteousness of God in Psalm 98 is without doubt something that belongs to God and that God uses for the salvation of Israel and the revelation of himself to the nations. The righteousness of God in Romans 1:17 then is likely to have the same connotations. 

In recent years, the debate over the use of the phrase in Romans 1:17 has taken place primarily in terms of these two options then. The righteousness of God is a gift of God to the one who has faith, or the righteousness of God is God's saving power, and this power becomes effective for the one who has faith. Often, it is said, Paul intended to communicate both of these ideas.

Early in its history, then, the debate left behind the idea that Paul used the phrase to refer to what has been called a “property” of God. The resurrection of the thought that it meant a righteousness of God's own in the 20th century was carefully articulated in terms of the Old Testament and Jewish background of the expression rather than any Greek notion of God's innate character, particularly any characteristic of distributive justice.
Ernst Kasemann, in his commentary on Romans, is particularly eloquent in refuting the idea that any Greek notion of justice or distributive justice can be found in Paul's use of the phrase in 1:17. 

If we're thinking strictly in terms of God's righteousness as God's distributive justice, this may be right, but it is important to keep in mind that although Paul was clearly indebted to the Old Testament for his concept of “the righteousness of God,” and I think he definitely was, how can we think anything else with the Habakkuk 2:4 quotation coming right after the reference? Even though that's true, he was also writing to Christians in Rome, most of whom were probably not literate, but who spoke Greek and Latin and who had varying degrees of knowledge of the Old Testament. It seems improbable that when the apostle wrote to them, he intended them to exclude from their thinking a specifically Greek notion or Roman notion of righteousness. A similar point has been made with respect to Romans generally in the interesting little book on Romans by Peter Oakes called Reading Romans in Pompeii, Paul's Letter at Ground Level. Dr. Oakes reminds interpreters of Romans that the first audience of Paul's letter would have been similar to the artisans, shop owners, freedmen, and slaves in Pompeii in A.D. 79 whose daily lives were tragically interrupted and frozen in time by the volcanic eruption of Mount Vesuvius. These were hardworking, busy people trying to scrabble out a living in a highly class-conscious society and who had been brought together by the gospel across the firm social boundaries that used to divide them. Whatever we may think of Dr. Oakes's specific interpretations of specific text in Romans, it's difficult to see how his overall point can be faulted. Paul is unlikely to have written a letter that he knew would be unintelligible to most of his audience. It is worth asking then how the shop owners and slaves in the house churches of Rome would have heard the phrase “the righteousness of God” in Romans 1:17. This will probably let us know at least part of what Paul intended for them to hear.

We can, I think, come very close to listening to the text with the ears of the first readers of Romans by listening to the first known interpretation of Romans in the commentary of Origen of Caesarea, now made available in English by Thomas P. Scheck. This commentary is an extraordinarily valuable
resource for understanding Romans. It was written in AD 246, and therefore at a time before sweeping changes had taken place, either to the culture of the Roman Empire, in which both Origen and Paul lived, or to the Greek language, which both Origen and Paul spoke. Origen, then, is likely to provide insights into the idiom, both cultural and linguistic, in which Romans was first produced. And this may help us 18 centuries later to understand what Paul intended to communicate to his first readers. It is true that Origen's commentary is only preserved in a few Greek fragments and in Rufinus' 5th century Latin translation, and this has to be taken into account. According to Scheck, Rufinus changed passages in the commentary that he thought were unorthodox, he expressed Origen's thoughts in his own idiomatic 5th century Latin, and he lowered the intellectual level of the whole work. Nevertheless, after a careful comparison of the commentary with Origen's other writings, Scheck concludes in his informative introduction that it is on the whole a reliable guide to Origen's interpretation of Romans. Here are the words of Scheck himself. “It is to Origen's interpretations we are listening in the Commentary, not to Rufinus’s.” 

When Origen is mentioned in discussions of “the righteousness of God” in 1:17, he is almost always credited with having said that the phrase referred to God's “distributive justice,” the view that Martin Luther rejected with good reason when he had his hermeneutical breakthrough reading the letter. Although this is certainly true of Origen's explanation of righteousness language at other places in Romans, it is only true in a positive sense of his comments on God's righteousness in 1:17. In 1:17, Origen takes “the righteousness of God” to refer not to a distribution of rewards and punishments according to works, but to God's impartiality in distributing salvation to everyone who has faith, whatever their ethnic origin or social standing. 

By the time Origen arrives at the phrase Dikaiosune theou in verse 17, he's been following Paul's argument closely from 1:14 to 1:16 and has noticed that it emphasizes God's fairness, equity, and the impartiality in the way God treats all human beings. Paul is obligated to Greeks and barbarians, to wise and to foolish, to Jew and to Greek. The salvation that the gospel makes available knows no social boundaries, observes Origen. It cuts across such boundaries to treat everyone alike as human beings. Origen moves directly into verse 17 from this line of thought. As Rufinus and Scheck have translated him, Origen explains verse 17 in this way: “The righteousness of God is revealed in the gospel through the fact that with respect to salvation, no one is excluded, whether he should come as a Jew, Greek, or barbarian. For the Savior says equally to all, come to me, all you that labor and are burdened.” The Latin word that stands behind the term “equally” is the adverb aequae. Perhaps Origen's original Greek was the adverb esos. The righteousness of God, then, is God's fairness and impartiality, his unwillingness to exclude anyone from salvation on the basis of his or her social standing. 

Origen seems to have understood “righteousness” here not only in accord with its literary context in Romans 1:14-17, but also in accord with the Greco-Roman cultural context that he shared with Paul. In this context, the word could mean the quality of treating people fairly, at least as established law and custom define fairness. According to the ancient lexicon of Greek terms preserved in the Platonic tradition and apparently also used by Stoic philosophers, dikaiosune is defined this way: “It is the state that distributes to each person according to what is deserved, the state on account of which its possessor chooses what appears to him to be just, the state underlying a law-abiding way of life. Social equality, the state of obedience to the laws.” The phrase “social equality” here represents the Greek expression isotes koinonike. 

But would Paul and his first readers in Rome have understood “the righteousness of God” in this way? Isn't this simply the learned Origen interpreting Paul's description of God in terms of fairness, isotes, one of the four cardinal virtues of Greek philosophy? I believe Origen was not speaking as a philosopher when he said that God's righteousness in Romans 1:17 was his fairness but was instead using the everyday idiom of the Greek-speaking Roman Empire. Evidence for this comes from a surprising source: the coins that people carried in their purses, used to make change in their shops, and stored underneath their floors to be discovered later by archaeologists. 

In John Reumann's substantive Anchor Bible Dictionary article on “Righteousness” in the Greco-Roman world, he says that the image of the goddess Dikaiusune with scales appears on Alexandrian coins of the time of Claudius, and on Roman coins as an attribute of Aequitas; equality, fairness, justice personified. This is a very perceptive and useful comment, but it does need some adjustment, particularly in two directions. First, I've not been able to locate the Alexandrian coins from the time of Claudius to which Reumann and his source, Martin Nielsen, refer. The third century emperor, Claudius II, who interestingly reigned 10 years after Origen wrote his commentary on Romans, produced many surviving coins that depict and label personified Dikaiosune, but there do not appear to be examples of this kind of coin from Paul's contemporary, the 1st century emperor, Claudius I. Second, coinage for which there is clear evidence does not reveal that righteousness becomes on some coins an attribute of personified impartiality. Rather, righteousness and impartiality are represented as the same goddess. In other words, Dikaiosune and aequitas, righteousness and impartiality, seem to be interchangeable concepts on these coins. 

From the early first century BC, Roman rulers began to identify themselves with a personification of various virtues on their coinage. Pompey minted coins identifying himself variously with piety and victory. Julius Caesar added mercy to the list. Coins from the time of Augustus identify him with harmony, fortune, peace, providence, and victory, and during the empire the list of virtues on coins grew. The purpose of this was to instill within the common people who handled these coins the idea that the emperor was himself the embodiment of these virtues, and that people should trust him to administer the affairs of Rome for their welfare. Coins were an ideal tool for this sort of propaganda. The Roman historian MP Charles Worth put it this way: “Coins passed through the hands of the highest and lowest, into the coffers of the rich, and under the country farmer's hearthstone.
They might be stored in imperial Rome itself, or in some hut among the mountains of Lusitania, and upon these coins were placed words and symbols that could be understood by the simplest.”

Personified Aequitas is readily identifiable on Roman coinage as a woman
holding a balance in her outstretched right hand. She already appears on coins from the time of the Roman Republic identified with the gens Caecilia, a family that produced a number of high officials, including Aediles, in charge of the administration of various economic policies of the empire.
On this coinage, she appears with her trademark balance and two other symbols. She holds a cornucopia, or horn of plenty, and is seated on a sella curulis, or chair of state. The purpose of the cornucopia is to make reference to the grain supply, the supply of food. There can be little doubt about what all this means. The coin proclaims that the Roman official in charge of the distribution of grain conducted his office with complete equity. No partiality affected his decisions about the distribution of food, and he gave to everyone their fair share. I should say the coin depicted here is from a later period than the period I'm describing, the first century BC. I couldn't locate any images of coins from that period, but they do exist in collections of ancient coinage. 

It is important to observe that the symbol did not communicate something negative, that people were justly punished or rewarded according to their deserts, but something entirely positive, life-sustaining grain was distributed equally to all with no partiality. We can already see that Origen's understanding of the righteousness of God in Romans 1:17 is not off the mark from the perspective of Roman culture. Just as food came equally to all through the benevolent and conscientious execution of the office of the Aedile, or at least that's what the Romans wanted people to think, so God makes salvation available to everyone without prejudice in Origen's interpretation of Romans 117. 

Aequitas also appeared without a label on coins minted in Asia Minor from the time of Tiberius, and she is clearly labeled Aequitas by AD 69 on a coin from Rome during the brief rule of Vitellius. She was not confused with Iustitia or personified justice, at least until the late second century when Iustitia began occasionally to adopt some of the characteristics of Aequitas. It is precisely the image of Aequitas, the woman holding an outstretched balance that begins to appear in the third Egyptian year of Nero's reign, AD 56 to 57, within a year of the time that Paul wrote Romans in AD 55, on coins minted in Alexandria. Nero's right-facing bust appears on one side, and the modestly dressed young woman with outstretched balance appears on the other side. Now, however, the woman is clearly labeled in large Greek letters, Dikaiosune. You can see part of Dikaiosune here on the image on the right, you can't read the final syllables. On this image, you can see just barely the first part of the word, dikaosune, to the left of Aequitas' face
and then just barely the rest of the word on the right. In this particular image, which is a little bit blurry because it comes from a 19th century collection of coins and a 19th century photograph actually of this coin, which is somewhere in the British Museum, you can see the word dikaiosune quite clearly.

Now here is a definition of dikaiosune that is about as clear as we could hope for, a visual representation of what the common people who handled these coins in the mid-first century thought the word meant. They identified her not so much with Iustitia, justice, as with Aequitas, not so much with justice, then, as with equity. In light of the association of this coinage with the Egyptian grain supply, it seems likely that Nero wanted these coins to communicate to his subjects that he would distribute grain from Alexandria with equity. But even if he meant something else, that his economic policies generally were equitable or that the coin was actually worth what it was valued or that he was the embodiment of fairness and impartiality, the general meaning of the term dikaiosune on the coin is not in doubt. The level scales on the balance that the goddess holds tell the story. There is no partiality with her. This impartiality or fairness could no doubt be conceived negatively in terms of the impartial distribution of punishment to lawbreakers, but it could certainly also be understood positively as the equal distribution of a blessing, a life-sustaining blessing such as food. 

Alexandria was allowed to circulate its own coinage during Paul's time, and so we should not think of coins labeled Dikaiosune as circulating widely outside of Egypt, although it's difficult not to think that some of them made it across the Mediterranean to Rome. But these coins do provide, in any case,
evidence of what the term dikaiosune would have meant to many Greek speakers in the eastern Mediterranean region at exactly the time when Paul was composing Romans. It seems likely that they would have associated the righteousness of God with, among other things, his impartiality and fairness, and that Origen's interpretation of the phrase in this way in Romans 1:17 is accurate as far as it goes. 

It's important to say that what the first century emperors and the average Roman shopkeeper of AD 55 understood as fairness and equity or impartiality did not amount to social equality in modern terms. Dealing justly with people was instead a matter of treating them according to the worth that custom and law assigned to them. It was thought to be perfectly just, for example, to imprison the slave of someone who had defaulted on a debt in the place of the debtor himself. Origen, however, has correctly picked up the Pauline idea that Paul uses the word to speak of the equality of every human being in the sight of God. God treats all alike, disregarding the barriers between them that human society has imposed. That is why Paul can do the unthinkable from the perspective of Roman social consciousness and equate the cultured Greek with the barbarian and the learned with the unschooled in God's eyes. The really radical idea that emerges when Romans 1:17 is read in terms of Romans 1:14-16 is not that God is righteous, but that his righteousness cuts across all social boundaries and puts everyone in the same social class. All human beings are created by God, are rebellious against God, and are the proper object of evangelization by God through Paul, his apostle.

Origen was a careful enough interpreter, moreover, to realize that God's righteousness in this phrase was not simply a matter of God punishing people equally for their sin. At least in this verse, he recognized what Luther, Dodge, Schlatter, Kasemann, and Stuhlmacher have recognized, that God's righteousness is in some sense his saving power. The equity and fairness of God here then is not equity in meeting out justice, but in saving everyone who believes, no matter what their social group. 

If this is correct, then it is appropriate to speak with new perspective scholars of the social dimension of justification. One of the New Perspective's earliest voices, Marcus Barth, back in 1968, had already interpreted Paul's rebuke of Peter in Galatians 2:15 to 21, to mean, and this is a quotation from Barth’s seminal article, “No Jew will be justified without the justification of Gentiles because there is no justification which does not involve God's impartial judgment of Jews and Gentiles.” As Tom Wright has emphasized, moreover, Paul received this perspective from the storyline of the Bible itself, which begins with Adam, continues with a promise to Abraham that God would bless all the families of the earth through him, and is fulfilled in the incorporation of Gentiles into the people of God through Israel's Messiah. In his Romans commentary, Tom has also helpfully shown how Paul redefines Roman ideas of justice in biblical terms.

Paul explains justification, then, in terms that imply the equality of all human beings before God in God's fair, impartial offer of salvation to human beings from every social group. This approach makes sense when we set Romans both within its first century Greco-Roman context and when we think in terms of biblical theology. 

Does this mean, however, that the other readings of the phrase canvassed earlier and seemingly quite plausible are in error? It seems to me likely that instead, all three readings are implied by Paul's use of the phrase. “The righteousness of God” means that God is impartial in saving people from many different social groups. It also means that God gives righteousness to those who do not have it, and in this way, counts them righteous and gives them life. It means, in addition, that God is actively and powerfully saving those who believe the gospel. 

Two problems with this dense reading of the phrase immediately come to mind. First, and most serious, is the objection that this reading imagines Paul to be using righteousness language in two different ways within a single sentence. How can Paul use the noun “righteousness” in the first clause to mean fairness but then use the adjective “righteous” in the second clause to mean something like “acquitted” or “in the right?” Is such a shift in meaning likely? Romans 3:26 hints that it is. There too, Paul uses righteousness language repeatedly within a single verse, and within the space of a few words, he uses the language in two different ways. Paul says that God put Christ forward as a sacrifice of atonement in his forbearance as a proof
of his righteousness in the present time in order that he might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus. Here Paul uses the noun “righteousness” (dikaiosune) and the adjective “just” (dikaios) to refer to the character of God, but then immediately uses the verb “justify” (dikaio) to refer to an activity by which God gives righteousness to the believer. 

The dense three-layered reading of righteousness in Romans 1:17 also encounters a second problem. Is it likely that Paul would utter a phrase as simple as “the righteousness of God” and intend for it to have three meanings? In a recent essay in New Testament Studies, Professor F. Gerald Downing has argued persuasively that ancient writers and speakers thought of themselves as communicating certain ideas that were then described with a number of different words and figures. The words themselves were intended to suggest to hearers and readers a wide variety of shared experiences but were not used in a very precise way. Individual words were used in a broad rather than a narrow sense, and both authors and their audiences expected that these words would have more than one connotation. I think a pretty good example of this is the definition of dikaiosune that we saw a few minutes ago in that ancient dictionary from the Platonic and Stoic tradition. You may have noticed that none of the meanings were numbered but instead, the word was given, dikaiosune, and then you had a description of that word using a number of different phrases and terms. Downing says that's really the way people thought about written language in antiquity. Precision came in the use of many sorts of utterances to communicate the idea the speaker or writer had in mind. Here are Downing's own words: “The pragmatics of ancient discourse was discursive. The pragmatics of ancient rhetoric,” he says, “was discursive.” It shows no sign of normally relying, let alone normally insisting on fine distinctions of meaning. If that is correct, and if 1:16 to 17 constitutes the thesis sentence of Romans, then we should not expect Paul to use the phrase “dikaiosune theou” with one precise meaning here. Like a masterpiece painted to be viewed in various surroundings, it has a richness that allows Paul to highlight one aspect in some contexts and another aspect in other contexts in order to contribute to the total idea that he's trying to communicate when he defines the gospel. The surrounding literary context, then, will define which aspect of the expression's total range of associations Paul wants to communicate.

We have already seen that he does this with respect to the two fairly standard interpretations of the phrase in Romans 1:17. Equally reasonable cases can be made for understanding the phrase to refer to a gift that God gives and to God's own active saving power. These readings are equally reasonable because both are so strongly supported by the surrounding
context. Does the surrounding context also support the idea that Paul uses the phrase to refer to God's fairness? We have already seen that this understanding of the phrase makes good sense within the immediately preceding context with its emphasis on the gospel's salvation of Greeks, barbarians, Jews, wise, and unlearned. A straightforward reading of the material preceding the phrase led Origen to explain the righteousness of God as God's equity. Paul's subsequent argument, however, also supports this interpretation of the phrase. The unrighteousness of human beings described in 1:18 to 32 contrasts with the reasonableness and fairness of the punishment that God meets out to them on the basis of “just decrees” that are easily perceived through observation and common sense, according to chapter one. In chapter two, verses four to six, we learn that God will pour out his wrath on the final day only after rendering a just judgment, tempered by forbearance, kindness, and patience, and yet fairly applied to each person according to his or her deeds. In 2:13, God does this without taking the privileges of ethnicity or education into account. His justice then will be perfect, according to chapter 3, verses 4 to 5. Everyone else might lie, but God is just and true. Every use of righteousness language from 1:18 to 3:5 brings out the fairness of God in the sense of His impartiality. It would be very odd, then, if the phrase, “the righteousness of God” in 1:17, did not include this element within it.

Defining the righteousness of God in Romans 1:17 by the subsequent use of righteousness language in 1:18 to 3:5, however, also introduces a further significant problem. In 1:17, the righteousness of God was displayed in God's willingness to make salvation available to every social group impartially and equally on the basis of faith. In 1:18 to 3:5, however, Paul uses righteousness language to show the impartiality of God in judging all people, whether Jew or Greek, impartially, according to their works. It is not the hearers of the law who are righteous in God's sight, but the doers of the law will be justified. Faith is never mentioned in Romans 2. And now God's righteousness is displayed not in saving people from various ethnic and social groups, but in alternately justifying or condemning people impartially on the basis of their works without regard to their ethnic or social status. “There will be affliction and distress on the life of every human being who works at what is evil, the Jew first and also the Greek. But glory and honor and peace to everyone who does what is good, the Jew first and also the Greek, for there is no partiality with God." 

How can God be the fair and equitable God of Romans 1:18 to 3:20 and yet simply give people salvation and declare them righteous on the basis of faith, as Romans 1:16 to 17 implies? For the first time since Romans 1:17 and 3:5, Paul uses in Romans 3:21 to 26 the expression “the righteousness of God,” and, here, too, one explanation for the phrase will not suffice. In 3:21 to 26, the righteousness of God is certainly active in justifying those who have faith in Jesus Christ. And so, it is a powerful activity of God, as Dodd and the Tübingen trio of Schlatter, Kasemann, and Stuhlmacher have maintained. It is also, however, a gift of God to the one who has faith since Paul says explicitly that those who believe are justified apart from works, which in the context means in spite of their sin. It is fair to conclude that those who are justified in this context can be described as “just” not because of any righteousness in themselves but because God has given them the gift of righteousness. Their righteousness is the righteousness of God in the sense that it comes from God to them. But the righteousness of God in this passage is also the righteous character of God displayed in His fairness to humanity generally across all social boundaries. Paul explains why he can say that the righteousness of God is revealed apart from the law and to all who believe with the statement, "for there is no distinction,” in 3:22. All have sinned, and all are freely justified by God's grace through the redeeming work of Christ Jesus. God will justify both circumcised and uncircumcised in the same way, Paul says in 3:30, he will do this by faith. 

If God is truly impartial, however, he cannot be impartial in one area, but not in another. He cannot give salvation to people without regard to their ethnicity but then turn a blind eye to the unrighteousness and ungodliness of a select group of believers. As chapter 2 is clarified, God must impartially render to everyone what they deserve on the basis of their works. The way Paul speaks of the righteousness of God in 3:21 to 26 shows that he thinks God's gracious justification of all who believe threatens the impartiality of God. It was necessary for God to give proof of his righteousness, according to 3:25, and in 3:26, the purpose for the proof he offered was that he might be at the same time both just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus. The question that motivates Paul to explain how God proves his righteousness is this: how can a God who is fair and impartial justify those whose unrighteous actions clearly show them to be unrighteous? 

The answer to this question lies, of course, in the atoning nature of Christ's death. The blood of Christ Jesus, shed as a sacrifice, atoned for the sins of the wicked and permitted their justification. The death of Christ allows the three understandings of the righteousness of God that come together in 1:17 to hang together logically. God proclaims the good news of salvation through his Apostle Paul to everyone, regardless of their social standing, because he is a righteous God who treats all human beings with equity. He exercises his saving power on their behalf because he is a righteous God who vindicates his people. And his people are worth vindicating not because they are righteous in themselves, but because their sins have been removed through the atoning death of Christ. This is close to Tom Schreiner's summary of how the righteousness of God functions in Romans 1:18 to 3:26. And these are Tom's words: “All human beings have sinned and therefore stand before the divine judge as condemned. Nevertheless, because of the cross of Christ, God both saves and judges at the cross. In other words, both the saving righteousness of God by which He declares sinners to be in the right in His sight and the judging work of God by which He pours out His wrath on Christ meet in the cross of Christ.”

The phrase “the righteousness of God” in Romans 1:17 then is polyvalent. When Paul dictated it to Tertius, he intended to explain its meaning in several different but compatible ways. It refers to the gift of righteousness that comes from God to the one who believes the gospel. It refers to the powerful activity of God so prominent in Isaiah in the Psalms by which God saves his people from wicked oppressors. It also refers however to the fairness and equity of God as origin the first extent interpreter of Romans maintained. As the surrounding context of Romans 1:17 shows, God is fair because he makes the good news of salvation by faith available to everyone without regard to their social standing. He is fair because he condemns everyone who is wicked and also does so without regard to their social standing.

Most importantly, and most central to the gospel, God is fair when he covers with the atoning death of Christ the gap between the reality of pervasive human wickedness and the declaration that his people are righteous. This last element of God's fairness is the essence of the Gospel because it not only shows God's fairness, but His grace and love. God would have remained perfectly righteous had He simply condemned everyone, the Jew first and also the Greek. Greeks had knowingly and irrationally turned their backs on their creator to worship his creation instead, according to Romans 1. And Jews had broken the covenant they entered with God at Sinai, according to Romans 2. At great cost to himself, however, God offered salvation to these wicked human beings and did this in such a way that he remained righteous. The death of Christ allowed him to remain just at the same time that he became the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus. 

Post-medieval interpreters of Paul are right when they emphasize that the righteousness of God in Romans 1:17 refers to the righteousness that he gives to those who believe, and when they say it refers to God's saving activity. The earliest extant commentator on Romans, Origen, is also correct, however, when he claims that the righteousness of God is the fairness of God in bringing salvation to all kinds of people, regardless of their social standing or their ethnic origins. Thank you very much. 


>>Announcer:

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