the righteousness of God in Romans 9 & 10
A while back, I had a few posts on the Biblical Horizons blog discussing Romans 3. Much of the focus was upon the phrase, “the righteousness of God.” One thing I noted is that in the overwhelming majority of passages Paul cites in Romans 3, something is said about Yahweh’s righteousness. Given the fact that Romans 3 is by far the tightest cluster of the phrase “the righteousness of God” (dikaiosune theou), this can hardly be accidental.
Now, I think that what this means is that Paul doesn’t invent the meaning of the term. Throughout the Old Testament, wherever the divine righteousness is referred to, it has to do with God’s verity, His faithfulness. Usually, this centers upon promises of salvation, although the flip side of judgment of those who would harm His faithful ones is bound up with that.
This explains why in Romans 3.1-8, Paul (1) speaks about the oracles of God – and given 1.2, his central view is on the prophetic Word concerning God’s Son; and (2) veers between language of faithfulness, righteousness, and truth. In Hebrew, we are looking at ‘emunah, which captures all of these. God’s righteousness is His faithfulness, trustworthiness, verity with His commitments.
I guess you could say, then, that I am one of those people who takes the term to mean something like “covenant faithfulness.”
With regard to Romans 9-10, I recently heard a preacher object to this reading of the phrase, on the basis of Romans 10.3: “for being ignorant of the rightousness of God, and seeking to establish their own [righteousness], they [i.e. Israel] have not submitted themselves to the righteousness of God.” The objection went something like this: Israelites knew that God would keep His promises, therefore they did not reject the righteousness of God in that sense.
But this confuses the actual righteousness of God with a doctrine of the righteousness of God.
Paul’s point in Romans 3 is to show that Christ is the righteousness of God. (Note that I did not say that Christ’s lawkeeping is the righteousness of God.) God’s righteousness is embodied in His Son, and in particular in His self-giving death. That is why Israel’s unrighteousness serves to display the righteousness of God (3.5), for in their very act of rejecting and crucifying the Son, God’s righteousness was being realized, carried out. (Romans 3.1-8 is thus not a general statement about generic sinfulness; nor is 3.9ff, for that matter. It is a programmatic statement of Israel’s fall which Paul refers to again and again, and makes explicit in 9.32-33: Christ is Israel’s stumbling stone, not generic failure to keep the law.)
This is confirmed by Paul’s choice of the word hupotasso: “they did not obey the righteousness of God.” If, as is widely thought, “the righteousness of God” refers to something “imputed,” Paul’s wording is rather strange. Would he really say that Israel failed to obey the imputed righteousness of Christ, or even submit to the imputed righteousness of Christ?
But when we see that Christ is the righteousness of God, everything starts to come together. For “the righteousness ek pisteos” (from faith/faithfulness) says, don’t ask who will ascend into heaven, i.e. in order to bring Christ down, or who will descend into the deep, i.e. to bring Christ up from the dead (10.6-7). We see first of all that faith’s concern is Christ Himself. But then, what is the word of faith: “if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved” (10.9).
The significance of the resurrection has already been established by Paul in chapters 4-8, and I won’t speak of that in detail here. Suffice to say that Abrahamic faith is in the God who raises the dead, and 4.25 indicates that Christ was raised “because of our justification.” Since Adam, the great mark of the old creation is death, and therefore salvation is resurrection.
But what I want to stress here is the central confession, “Jesus is Lord.” It is this Jesus who is the stumbling stone who is God’s righteousness, who is Lord – i.e. the One to be obeyed, submitted to. Israel has not obeyed God’s righteousness – they have not recognized Jesus as their true Lord, but rather have stumbled over Him, and therefore the salvation (resurrection) found in Christ is lost to them.
But what does it mean that Israel sought to establish their own righteousness? Does this mean that, rather than accepting the imputed active obedience of Christ, they were attempting to keep the law perfectly for themselves?
Well, not exactly. To be sure, there is a strong note of something human-centred in their efforts, although it is not necessarily quite the Pelagian picture we may assume. Dale Allison has shown that one of the key themes of the most rigorous religious communities of first century Judaism, such as the Pharisees and Essenes, was that they were eager to keep Torah faithfully, as a means to an end, viz, so that God would send His Messiah. Keeping Torah faithfully did not mean “sinlessly,” but it did mean carefully, including making use of the means of reconciliation when appropriate (sin offerings, guilt offerings etc). The understanding was that the arrival of the Age to Come was dependent upon faithfulness on the part of the people.
There are all sorts of ways we could look at that, and I can’t get into them here. If you prefer to think this must have been an effort to earn the arrival of the Age to Come, you can think that way if you like; I don’t particularly think either biblical or extrabiblical evidence supports it. But it may surprise you to learn that the New Testament itself ties the consummation’s arrival to the holiness and godliness of believers, who are not only awaiting but also hastening the coming of “the day of God” (2 Peter 3.11-12).
But the important thing for our purposes is that Paul denies that the righteousness of God can be had through the law. (And just for those who aren’t aware of things I’ve detailed elsewhere, nomos in Paul almost always refers to the Mosaic covenant in that precise role, although occasionally he will play on words and use nomos to refer to the Mosaic books as Scripture, as e.g. the wordplay in Gal 4.24.)