The righteousness of God

The God who is right

In the Old Testament, righteousness, tsedaqah (צְדָקָה) and its partner word tsedeq, means what fits a true standard, and especially faithfulness within a relationship or a promise. God is himself that standard. Moses sang of him as "righteous and upright" (Deuteronomy 32:4), and Abraham, pleading for Sodom, asked, "Will not the Judge of all the earth do what is right?" (Genesis 18:25). God's righteousness shows in judgment that does not wink at evil.

Yet in the Old Testament God's righteousness is also his saving action. "The LORD has proclaimed His salvation and revealed His righteousness to the nations" (Psalm 98:2). In Isaiah righteousness and salvation arrive together: "I am bringing My righteousness near; it is not far away, and My salvation will not be delayed" (Isaiah 46:13). The righteous God keeps his word and puts the wronged in the right.

Revealed in the gospel

Paul sums up his gospel in these terms:

For the gospel reveals the righteousness of God that comes by faith from start to finish, just as it is written: "The righteous will live by faith."

Romans 1:17

No one can stand before God in a righteousness of their own. "But now, apart from the law, the righteousness of God has been revealed" (Romans 3:21), and it "comes through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe" (Romans 3:22). God set forth Christ as an atoning sacrifice "so as to be just and to justify the one who has faith in Jesus" (Romans 3:26): at the cross his justice and his mercy meet. So Paul longed to be found in Christ, "not having my own righteousness from the law," but "the righteousness from God on the basis of faith" (Philippians 3:9). Receiving it is justification; Christ's righteousness counted as ours is imputation.

John Wesley held both senses together. The phrase, he wrote, "sometimes means God's eternal, essential righteousness, which includes both justice and mercy, and is eminently shown in condemning sin, and yet justifying the sinner" Wesley. But when Paul treats of justification, Wesley added, it means the righteousness of faith, called God's "because God found out and prepared, reveals and gives, approves and crowns it" Wesley.

How the phrase has been read

Martin Luther recalled that he had hated the phrase, taking it to mean only the justice by which God punishes sinners, until he saw in Romans 1:17 the righteousness by which a merciful God justifies us through faith; afterwards he found that Augustine had read it in much the same way Luther's 1545 preface. The story is told in the lesson Luther: the theology of the cross and justification.

The Reformation churches read the righteousness of God in Romans 1:17 and 3:21-22 chiefly as the righteousness God gives and reckons to the believer. The Catholic Church, also following Augustine, understands it as the righteousness by which God makes us righteous rather than that by which he is righteous himself; the Council of Trent taught that this righteousness is poured into us by grace and renews the inner person Council of Trent, Decree on Justification. Since the twentieth century many biblical scholars have read the phrase first of all as God's own saving action and his faithfulness to his covenant. Among evangelicals, scholars linked with the ‘new perspective on Paul’ stress this reading, while others answer that it does not displace the gift of a righteous standing before God. Many interpreters, like Wesley, see the two senses meeting at the cross.