For more info on this book, you can take a peek at its page at pactumbooks.com, my site for Pactum Reformanda Publishing (that I formed back in 2002 to publish Feed My Lambs). I’ll be revamping and updating the Pactum site over the next couple of days – presently, it doesn’t even have a link to the CreateSpace store page, which just went live. (Will correct that shortly.)

“Faith of Christ” is the older translation found in e.g. the King James Version, although the translators probably were just being woodenly literal rather than making a judgment call. Most newer translations make the interpretation for us and just have it “faith in Christ.”

For reasons I won’t get into here, several years ago while studying Romans, I became quite convinced of the subjective genitive position. That is, what is in view in the phrase as such is the pistis (faith or faithfulness) of Christ Himself. This pistis of Christ in turn calls forth our responsive faith – hence the gospel is from faith (i.e. Christ’s) to faith (i.e. ours), according to a literal reading of Romans 1.17.

At any rate, while the exact pistis Christou phrase is not used in this instance, it occurs to me that a comparison of Gal 5.6 and 2.20 appears to lend further support to the subjective genitive. In 5.6, Paul says that what counts is not circumcision, but faith working through love, while in 2.20, he has written that the life he now lives in the flesh he lives by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself up for me. The proper understanding of Paul’s exhortations regarding faith and love in chapter 5 seems to have to do with entering into a participation in Christ. And so just as the faith of Christ worked itself out in the greatest embodiment of love – His self-giving unto death – so the believer’s faith is to be worked out through loving service to others (cf 5.13).

17. Misuse of the Supper is assembling to detriment rather than benefit.

19. “Necessary,” dokimoi: Is Paul accepting the necessity of divisions, or is he using these terms ironically? Elsewhere in the context, dokimos refers to those who are proven covenantally faithful, e.g. v 28; contrast with 9.27, where Paul disciplines himself so that he does not become adokimos. But here he is surely ironic, as v 18 clearly implies that the divisions are a bad thing, and divisions are not necessary for the manifestation of proven faithfulness.

20. When you come together it is not to eat the Lord’s supper – implying that is the stated purpose of assembly. But that purpose is lost in the Corinthian situation, because they are treating it as “their own,” i.e. as an instrument to perpetuate division and class strife.

21. The food imbibed involved each bringing his own supper, thus highlighting the haves and have-nots. Cf the ironic dokimoi reference above. Here, the “approved” becomes the socially-approved and well-off rather than the covenantally faithful.

22. Do you not have houses? I.e. if you’re going to eat your own food and keep it for yourself, then do it in your own house. Or to you despise the church of God, and put to shame those having nothing? Clauses are parallel: to degrade the destitute is despite to God’s Church. Shall I praise you? I do not praise you in this. Again, carrying on the dokimos theme reintroduced in v 19, and related to the putting to shame mentioned in the previous sentence. Those seeking approval through flaunting their wealth and shaming the poor are in fact the ones demonstrating their own shame. (The statement also stands in contrast to the items for which Paul praised them earlier; cf v 2.)

23-25. Over against what the Corinthians are doing, Paul contrasts the institution of the Supper by the Lord.

24. Jesus took bread and broke it, saying this is My body, which is for you. The food was Himself, and thus the food was for sharing with His people. This do as My memorial – in Greek, a parallel to Lev 24.7 LXX, where the frankincense on the bread of the presence will be “for a memorial.” Cf Num 1010: ascension offerings (“burnt offerings”) and peace offerings will be a “memorial” of Israel before God. As with the rainbow sign, where God sees the rainbow and remembers His covenant promise to every living creature on the earth that He would never again destroy the earth with a flood, so here too memorials function to remind God of His covenant with His people and to act in terms of that covenant. This covenant is defined by Christ and His work (“My memorial”).

Thus the phrase usually translated “in remembrance of Me” is not primarily about remembering Christ and is certainly not focused on creating mental pictures of the anguish Christ went through on the cross. The memorial is a memorial before God primarily, but of course it also calls for a reciprocal covenantal response from His people – the covenant involves promise and demand. Thus when God’s people call upon Him to remember His covenant with them, they are implicitly recalling that covenant themselves – for better or worse.

In Exodus 2-3 (e.g. 2.24), God remembers Israel and His covenant with her, and delivers His oppressed people; thus the memorial background implies why the Corinthians’ coming together is detrimental rather than beneficial: God’s covenant relationship entails a vindication of the poor and oppressed, and as foretold by the prophets and echoed in Rom 10, those who call on Jesus will not be “put to shame” (cf the putting to shame of those who have nothing in v 22).

25. This cup is the new covenant in My blood. The covenantal overtones of the memorial become explicit and reinforce what Paul has already said and implied. Again backed up with: This do, as often as you drink, as My memorial.

26. For whenever you eat this bread and drink the cup, the death of the Lord you proclaim until He comes. As the “for” indicates, a memorial is a proclamation, a public act. As “My memorial,” this act is a public proclamation of Jesus’ death. In this death, the old creation has died (cf Gal 6.14), so that the Lord’s Supper itself pronounces judgment on the fleshly divisions the Corinthians are perpetuating in their very “celebration” of it.

27. So that whoever eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord unworthily, shall be liable for the body and the blood of the Lord. “Unworthily” is an adverb and refers to manner. It must be understood in context of the dokimos theme. Those eating in a manner which vitiates faithfulness are making themselves liable for the Lord’s death, because they are perpetuating the fleshly order which Christ’s death pronounces judgment upon. They are warring against Christ. This is why Paul says that the Corinthians are not eating the Lord’s Supper. To be sure, they were doing so in some formal sense, but their very manner of conducting it was waging war against the purpose of the death of Christ, of which the Supper is a proclamation and memorial.

28. But let a man prove himself, and thus from the bread let him eat and from the cup let him drink. The usual translation of “examine himself” is not quite to the point. The problem in Corinth was not a lack of self-evaluation. Rather it was that the Corinthians were abusing the covenant. The term used here is dokimazeto, and thus related to the recurring dok- theme of 9.27 and the sarcastic/ironic usage of 11.19. The sense is not “examine, and then eat;” the term is houtos, “in this way” and stands in contrast to the “unworthy manner” of eating referenced in the previous verse. Thus the point is that eating and drinking must be done on the memorial’s own terms and according to its own covenantal purposes. At issue is not the ability to engage in a certain level of self-aware reflection (as the anti-paedocommunion argument assumes); at issue is whether or not the Supper is being treated as the Lord’s memorial or as some “talismanic” act of the old creation or perhaps worse, as a transparent instrument for oppressing and shaming the poor.

29. The foregoing observations are underscored by the follow-through: For the one eating and drinking, judgment to himself eats and drinks [if he is] not discerning the body. “The body” here is the Church; the omission of “and blood” is intentional. In 10.16-17, Paul passes from the usage of “body” to refer to Christ’s own (physical resurrected) body to a usage referring to the Church (“participation in the body of Christ… we who are many are one body”), he does likewise here. In context, the Corinthians (or more particularly the wealthy and “approved” in the world’s terms) are dividing the body rather than discerning it. To discern the body entails accepting and embracing what Paul has said concerning it in 10.16-17: those who eat together are one body (cf Gal 3.28). Christ died to fashion for Himself one body, and to have divisions in the assembly, at the very memorial table, is a despite, not only to the poor but to Christ who died to include them in His new creation body. This opposition to Christ’s purposes is an invitation to judgment.

30. On account of this many among you are weak and ill and a number [even] sleep.

31. Now if we would judge ourselves, we would not be judged. Paul employs the middle voice of the verb used in v 29. Here we come a bit closer to the notion of self-examination so commonly linked to v 28, but even here the point is not about introspection, but engaging in a self-judgment that first of all evaluates one’s covenantal conduct at the table; i.e. the Corinthians should be judging their own practice of shaming Christ’s people, and this self-judgment will prevent them from being judged as in v 30.

32. But when we are judged by the Lord, we are disciplined, in order that with the world we may not be condemned. Even the judgment of v 30 is not a final judgment; it is the Lord’s discipline aimed at bringing the sinners to repentance. Thus although the liability mentioned in v 27 is startling and serious, even so Christ employs temporal judgments in order to recover His people for Himself. Yet we should not look at this as a promise that temporal judgment automatically negates eternal condemnation, since Paul says that it is a discipline-in-order-that. That is, the destiny of such unfaithfulness genuinely is condemnation with the world, and discipline is a corrective aimed to avoid that “proper” outcome. Those who harden themselves against that discipline thus have no hope offered to them here.

33. Therefore, my brothers, in gathering together to eat, welcome one another. Given the context, the term probably means welcome, or receive, rather than the more usual “wait for,” unless underlying this is that the rich and self-sufficient were eating before the poor and slaves (who worked or worked longer) could arrive. But even that does not seem satisfactory, as Paul has said they were eating their own food rather than sharing. Thus it seems more likely that he is making a call to share if they are going to make a meal of this.

34. If anyone is hungry, in his home let him eat, so that you do not gather together for judgment. Probably implying that if someone is so hungry that he cannot be satisfied with the shared meal, the assembly is not the place for it.

Remember that in Galatians, Paul speaks of Torah as one of the stoicheia (“elements”) of the kosmos, parallel to idolatry etc. Thus I don’t think it is a stretch to say that the judgment on Jerusalem signifies a wider judgment.

But it is utterly wrong to think that wider judgment was simply accomplished en toto in AD 70. To the contrary, what we learn from Galatians about the stoicheia points in a very different direction. Torah stands alongside idolatry and other “elements” of the world (see e.g. Gal 4.8-10).

And while it is true that AD 70 started a chain of events that abolished idolatry in a lot of places… it didn’t end it. It destroyed Jerusalem… but it didn’t destroy all the other kosmos-cities that resist the rule of the Son.

There was a definitive judgment on the stoicheia in AD 70. Well, there was a definitive judgment on the stoicheia at the cross and resurrection too… but the stoicheia of the old kosmos still remain. The new heavens and new earth which we may enjoy today (for those in Christ, there is a new creation, 2 Cor 5.17) is a tiny earnest/down payment, and is only enjoyed in the midst of the old heavens and old earth. (Cf Rom 8 in context: we’ve been redeemed, but we still await the redemption of the body.)

And therefore, to take AD 70 as the be-all and end-all is to miss the whole point. AD 70 is a real and truly significant event in salvation history. But it is a very small part for a much larger whole that even to this day has not come. The full coming of the new covenant is not completed until all the enemies have been put down – including the last enemy, Death (1 Cor 15.26).

AD 70 is a marker that points directly to the final judgment and consummation.

I was sort of commissioned to write this piece back in 2004, but the book in which it was to appear fell on hard times and was not published. I later had a contract with another publisher to have it released on its own, but it fell victim to cutbacks. Knowing that I do not have present resources to publish in paperback as I did with Feed My Lambs, I decided on my first ebook-only (PDF) release.

You can get more information and learn how to purchase by going to my Pactum Reformanda Publishing web site.

Now, of course, God does lay requirements upon man, and God does grant forgiveness of sins apart from works. But the Bible’s use of the terms “gospel” and “law,” particularly in Paul’s writings, where Protestant discussion on these subjects tends to centre around, is very different from these definitions.

Paul always uses nomos (“law”) to refer to Torah, whether in the sense of “the Mosaic covenant” (by far his most frequent usage) or in the more general sense of “the five books of Moses.” In the second sense, his focus is on Torah as Scripture, as e.g. the Genesis narratives concerning Abraham are referred to as nomos in Galatians 4.24 and, given the immediately following context, likely in Romans 3.31 as well.

Similarly – and not surprisingly, given the content of the books we call Gospels – the term “gospel” is a very concrete term with definite historical connections (after all, it means “good news“). While free forgiveness of sins has always been God’s way of dealing with sinners, the term “gospel” is tied to God’s concrete and dateable historical actions related to what some scholars call “the Christ event,” with Christ’s death and resurrection at the center (see e.g. 1 Cor 15.1-4).

I have become increasingly convinced of the importance of abandoning the abstract usage of these terms, not because the general theological point is wrong; it is not. God saved us, out of His own sovereign mercy, not because of works of righteousness which we have done (Titus 3.5). But the problem with using the specific terms law and gospel in the way that we do means that inevitably those “synthetic” meanings get read into all the biblical texts where the terms appear. And that is not a good thing.

What follows is a lightly modified version of a private post I made on this subject. I have tried to clean up the style slightly, as well as eliminate points that were really germane only to a narrower discussion. To aid clarity, I have also added a couple of brief statements that distill thoughts I had made in the more extended discussion.  I trust making this public will prove somewhat helpful in terms of clarifying the importance of the fight for biblical language.

Nobody in my sphere denies that one’s acceptance with God is not dependent upon anything they do, but rather God’s love in Christ. Not only do we not deny it, I doubt that anyone of us are the slightest bit unclear on it either.

That is not at all the point of my tirades regarding the terminology of law and gospel. My point is that by using the terms “law” and “gospel” to give this assurance (and ubiquitously, as people prone to use the terms generally do), the possibility of reading the texts correctly is effectively destroyed. And that does far more harm than anyone can imagine.

Now, taking Galatians as a sort of example. If we go to what Paul is actually talking about, where will we derive application? Is it really such a big deal that we skip the circumcision issue and jump right to “the heart of the matter”?

It’s all well and good to say that we don’t face the circumcision issue in our churches. But just because we need to make an extra step in application doesn’t mean that understanding the text properly to begin with is unimportant. To the contrary, the applications that would be much closer to the heart of the issue are completely lost because certain preachers think that all those Pauline texts are harangues about law and gospel, defined in their traditional Protestant terms.

There are all sorts of issues much closer to the surface application than dealing with some supposed merit theology that dwells in every man’s Pelagian heart. Frankly, paedocommunion and “close communion” are a lot more relevant to Galatians than is merit theology. Does paedocommunion have to do with assurance? Absolutely, but it’s a lot more practical and on the ground than the gospel-law treatment ever makes possible.

The whole matter of Jew and Gentile, which Paul broadens out explicitly into barbarian, Scythian etc – these are the immediate implications of the gospel, and if the churches had been preaching what Paul actually says rather than hammering on a pet doctrine, racism could never have taken hold anywhere.

Then too the use of “gospel” and “law” with a different, extrabiblical meaning and then reading that meaning into Scripture not only buries the native and should-be obvious applications. People express concern about the fine distinctions which systematic theology makes. Some of those distinctions are valid. Fine. But I worry about the distinctions that Scripture itself makes, distinctions which become not merely unaccented but unallowable because systematic theology’s forcible takeover of the key terms cannot allow the texts like James to say what they actually do say. They do not allow the texts like Galatians 5.4 to say what they actually do say. They do not allow the texts like Galatians 6.7-9 to say what they actually do say. Ad infinitum.

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. There are all sorts of implications that hardly anyone has even begun to think about. How does it affect the church that while the NT is all about Israel, it wouldn’t make a difference to most preaching if Jesus were born in Quebec?

I preach free grace clearly and quite consistently as well. I have no problem with that. But I will not bow to this confusion that has been wrought by distorting the biblical terminology. It has done more damage than we can possibly know.

Frankly, I increasingly think the ubiquitous law-gospel thing is a crutch. I wonder if where it’s preached most strongly is in fact where it least needs to be preached – where folks are much more prone to feel secure when they ought not, because they believe “the right thing” about justification.

In his new book Deep Exegesis, Peter Leithart warns about treating the actual words of Scripture as “husk” which we can safely discard as long as we have what’s really important, the “meaning.” (And all too often, “meaning” is boiled down even further, so that it is not even merely a summary of the text, but a systematic statement of the supposed “doctrine” we are to take from the text.)

If we actually understand the text, we can revisit in every generation and every situation and come back with a fitting application. But if we boil all the meat off and say it’s all about free grace in the abstract, we will lose any particular witness (or at least, the most biblically-relevant) on the ground to what the gospel is about.

The battles in the early church over the law were not about theological theorems. Every last one of them were battles over practical issues of
fellowship and exclusion, and if we learned those lessons, church life would be much different than it is in conservative Reformed-dom. The exclusivism of conservative Reformed and Lutheran churches bears eloquent witness to the fact that their law-gospel construct is a monumental hindrance to actually living by the letters that Paul really wrote.

“For,” Paul adds, “Christ is the telos of the law.” Actually, he says more than that, but we need to sort out several things, so let’s deal with telos first.

So, what does telos mean? Its field of meaning revolves around the idea of “end,” but there are nuances. It can of course simply mean “end.” (E.g. Mt 10.22, “The one who endures to the end will be saved; Mt 24.6: “The end is not yet.”) This is the most common usage in the Gospels; and it appears frequently in Paul.

Telos can also mean something like “fulfillment.” In the garden, Jesus says that the things written about Him being numbered with the transgressors now have their telos (Lk 22.37). This usage shades into the more general idea of goal.

In Romans 6.21-22, the telos of lawless deeds is death, whereas the telos of sanctification is eternal life. Telos is here the fitting outcome, the native destination.

In 1 Cor 10.11, Paul refers to believers as those upon whom the telos of the ages has come. Generally, this seems to mean something like: the ages have culminated in the gospel.

As can be seen, along with others, Paul has a usage that essentially means goal. Given the metaphors of pursuit, overtaking, and stumbling that Paul has been using in the context, we have good reason to think that is what Paul has in mind here. What is in view is in some sense “the goal of the law.”

Now we must try to establish the overall structure of the verse, and here the terrain is a lot tougher. In English, a great deal of meaning and grammatical relationship is determined by simple word order. In Greek, however, word order plays a different role. It can define phrases, but there are also conventional placements (prepositions are almost always the second word in a grammatical unit) and placement for emphasis (the first word is frequently being highlighted). Relationships are determined by prepositions and by factors such as declensions, gender, and number.

In Greek, Romans 10.4 reads: telos gar nomou Christos eis dikaiosunen panti to pisteuonti.

A horribly wooden “literal” English rendering would be something like: Goal for of the law Christ unto righteousness to all who believe.

Telos appears first, and seems to be receiving emphasis. The genitive nomou (“of [the] law”) clearly modifies telos: “goal of the law.”

“Christ” is also nominative and therefore is in an “is” relationship with telos: Christ is the goal of the law.

Now things get tricky.

What is eis dikaiosunen doing? What does it modify?

The most likely candidates appear to be telos and Christos, although nomou is also technically possible, and wouldn’t be unexpected, given 9.31: Israel pursued “a law of righteousness.” That connection here would lead to something like: “Christ is the goal of the-law-unto-righteousness for those who believe.” I don’t really think that works with Paul’s point in 9.30ff.

I don’t really think “Christ is the goal-unto-righteousness of the law” makes any real sense at all. Perhaps one of my readers can discern order in that, but I’m not seeing it.

(I made the choice for goal already above, due to contextual indicators. I’m ready to admit that if we take telos as end, it makes perfect sense with eis dikaiosunen modifying nomou. “Christ is the end of the law for righteousness.” On this reading, the advent of Christ spells the end of the law as the definer of righteousness, which fits well enough with my understanding of Paul that I wouldn’t object to it. I’m just not convinced that’s exactly what Paul is saying.)

So then, if telos is understood in the sense of goal, then eis dikaiosunen surely modifies “Christ.” We’ll start off with the generic “unto” for eis to begin: “For Christ-unto-righteousness is the goal of the law.” Now we’re getting somewhere; granted the roughness of eis, this is a statement that actually makes some sense. But let’s explore the preposition further.

Eis generally carries ideas of direction or purpose. In the former role, it frequently gets translated as into or unto. But this role generally requires some sort of verb of motion; here, the verb is the implicit stative “is.” Technically, this could still have a sort of local sense, depending on the noun, but “in righteousness” doesn’t make much sense here.

Consequently, eis here has an idea of purpose. In this role, it is frequently rendered simply as for, which would give us “Christ-for-righteousness is the goal of the law.” Which is a pretty decent rendering, and we could stop there. We now have the preposition translated the way the versions usually render it (“for”), but we’ve clarified what it’s modifying.

“For” is of course quite general, and the precise role of eis is left somewhat indeterminate by that rendering. But it seems to me that the context provides a sufficient guide for us here. Christ serves as righteousness (for all who believe), and this is the goal of the law.

With this, Paul has completed his vindication of the law which he commenced in chapter 7. To be sure, his vindication is not a “this is why you should live under the law” sort of vindication. For Paul, the believer is not under Torah (6.14).

Yet Paul does wish to vindicate the law, and he has set himself a hard task. For he himself has identified Torah as one of the constitutive elements (stoicheia) of the world, the old creation, in Galatians 4, and in Romans 5 he has shown how Torah has increased the trespass. So Paul vindicates Torah in two stages. In Romans 7, he vindicates it by saying that its norms are in fact holy, spiritual, just, good. In other words, he assigns it to an expired age, but not because it was wrongheaded or bad. And now here, Paul vindicates Torah by saying that its telos lay beyond itself. It did not exist for itself, but as a running path whose goal was Christ.

To put it another way, the stumbling stone was actually the finish line.

I think now we can understand why Paul says that Israel pursued a law of righteousness, but did not succeed in reaching the law. It is because Torah itself had Christ Himself as the righteousness of God as its goal. And because Israel pursued Torah’s righteousness as if by works, they upset the order of the things.

The righteousness of God is His own action in Christ, and this is the goal of the law. When Israel focuses upon the law to trigger the Age to Come, they in effect confuse themselves with God; they are trying to do what He alone can do. They must submit to His own righteousness. They belong to “this present age,” an age which Paul has characterized as death. Their only hope is resurrection; their only hope is in the God who raises the dead and calls the things which are not as though they are, and so they become; their only hope is in the righteousness of God.

Gentiles were not pursuing (dioko) righteousness. But nonetheless, they overtook it. They caught up to something (faith-righteousness) they were not chasing (9.30).

Israel, on the other hand, were pursuing. Well, they were pursuing nomon dikaiosunes – the law of righteousness. And the result was that they did not reach (phthano) the law (9.31).

As we can recognize, Paul is expressing a paradox. The chasers did not catch; the non-chasers caught. The Gentiles weren’t chasing anything, and they got the right thing. Israel wasn’t quite chasing the right thing, and they didn’t even get the thing they were chasing.

The paradox is more than that the non-chasers caught and the chasers didn’t. The paradox is also that Paul says that Israel did not reach the law. For few observers would have had that thought. The law, after all, was Israel’s possession. And it won’t do simply to say that Paul means they didn’t keep the law perfectly, for the simple reason that the law never said they had to, and in any case, Paul never hints at anything like that being in his mind.

But the real reason Paul says this is that, as so often, he is anticipating himself; he will complete the thought much more fully in 10.4.

For now, Paul asks why Israel did not reach their goal (the law of righteousness). “Because not from faith, but as if from works” (9.32a). (The Byzantine text adds nomou, “of law,” but that doesn’t alter the sense.) Now, there’s an elliptical statement that takes us from paradox to conundrum and back again. What would one expect from law but works? Of course, if you pursue law, you’re doing so by works, no?

But again, Paul is leaving us hanging for 10.4.

“(For) they stumbled at the stumbling stone; just as it is written, ‘Behold, I set in Zion a stone of stumbling and a rock of offense, and whoever believes upon Him shall not be put to shame’” (9.32b-33).

Here Paul kind of leaves us wondering which came first, the chicken or the egg. Did they pursue the law of righteousness as if by works because they stumbled at the stumbling stone? Or did they stumble at the stumbling stone because they were pursuing the law of righteousness as if by works?

Yes.

Whatever else may be said, some things are very clear. First of all, Christ is a scandal to a “law of righteousness as if by works.” Second, the conflict is not between one impersonal set of doctrines versus another. It is a conflict between the offensive Christ (who is God’s righteousness) and the “law of righteousness as if by works.”

Paul now goes on to say that his heart’s desire and prayer is Israel’s salvation. They indeed have zeal for God, but “not according to knowledge” (10.1-2). Which reference to knowledge brings us back to the ignorance mentioned in 10.3, where we began our previous post: they are “ignorant of the righteousness of God.” Not of course that they plain don’t know about it, but that they have stumbled over it, or shall we say Him.

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.)