4. Divine Justice

Athird important atonement motif, prominent in the letters of Paul, is divine justice. We are interested not in Paul’s doctrine of justification by faith, since that concerns not the atonement itself but rather the appropriation of its benefits. We want to inquire rather about the role of divine justice in the act of atonement. Paul’s exposition of the way in which Christ’s death achieves reconciliation with God is suffused with forensic terminology rooted in Jewish notions of law and justice.

In the OT God is addressed with the legal title “Judge” (Gen 18:25) and acts rightly in that capacity. Words deriving from the root sedek (righteousness) occur 523 times in OT. The nominal forms fall mainly into three groups: legal righteousness (123 times), ethical righteousness (114 times), and correctness (26 times). As we shall see, when it is God’s righteousness that is at stake, almost all cases are related some way to legal righteousness within a judicial context. Moreover, God is not only the Judge, He is also the lawgiver. The heart of OT Judaism was the divine Torah (law) that governed all of life and man’s relationship to God. Leon Morris reckons that of the 220 uses of tôrah in the OT only 17 are clearly not about God’s law. Of the 127 occurrences of hōq (statute), 87 are linked with the LORD; huqqah, another word for statute, is similarly linked in 96 out of 104 cases. Mishpāt, which is linked with the LORD about 180 times, is the usual term for “judgment” and in its participial form is used to refer to God as Judge. It may also mean “law.” Even the notion of a covenant (berith) is the notion of a legal contract. It is intriguing how OT writers often prefer legal to any other imagery when they are referring to what God does (e.g., Mic 6:1-2; Isa 3:13; 41:21). The use of legal categories with respect to God in the OT, says Morris, “is frequent, so frequent indeed that it is plain that it corresponds to something deep-seated in Hebrew thinking. Law and the LORD went together.” In fact, it would be difficult to find a religion more wedded to legal categories than OT Judaism.

So the NT is filled with judicial language reflective of its Jewish background. By Morris’ count the NT has ninety-two examples of the noun dikaiosynē (justice or righteousness), thirty-nine of the verb dikaioō (to justify or reckon righteous), ten of the noun dikaiōma (ordinance or sentence of justification), eighty-one of the adjective dikaios (just or righteous), and five of the adverb dikaiōs (justly or righteously).

In a key atonement passage Paul blends cultic and judicial terminology in characterizing Christ’s death:

The NRSV translation alternates between righteousness terminology and justice terminology. One could have used righteousness terminology throughout by adopting Paul’s expression “reckon righteous” from Romans 4:3, 23-24 instead of “justify,” so as to read in verse 24: “They are now reckoned righteous by his grace.” On the other hand, using justice terminology throughout would make clear Paul’s wordplay in verse 26: God is both “just and the justifier.”

There are ten interpretive turning points in this passage:

1. The significance of the preceding passage (Rom 1:18–3:20). As we have already seen in chapter 2, the human predicament described in the opening chapters of Romans is the universality of human sin and mankind’s consequent condemnation before a just God. Jew and Gentile alike are said to stand under the wrath of God. “For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and wickedness of those who by their wickedness suppress the truth” (1:18). Gentiles as well as Jews know the requirements of the law (2:15), “so that every mouth may be silenced, and the whole world may be held accountable to God. For ‘no human being will be justified in his sight’ [Ps 143:2] by deeds prescribed by the law, for through the law comes the knowledge of sin” (3:19-20). Not one of us, as lawbreakers, will be acquitted before the bar of God’s justice; the verdict of “guilty” is pronounced over every human being. Any adequate interpretation of the succeeding passage must find therein Paul’s solution to the problem of man’s condemnation before a just Judge and the attendant dissolution of divine wrath.

2. “But now” (nuni de) (Rom 3:21). The contrast is temporal, not logical, as the remainder of the passage makes clear. God has broken into human history in the person of Jesus Christ, so as to inaugurate a new era, in which justification is now available through faith in Jesus.

3. “Apart from law” (chōris nomou) (Rom 3:21). The NRSV, reflecting the majority view, takes this phrase to modify “has been disclosed,” but it could instead be taken to modify “the righteousness of God.” But that might imply that there was once a righteousness of God through law that was obtainable, which is precisely what Paul wants to rule out. Elsewhere Paul does speak of a righteousness through the law, but this is not a “righteousness from God” but a “righteousness of my own” (Phil 3:6-9). Taking the manifestation of righteousness to be apart from the law is in keeping with the turn of the era signaled by “but now.”

4. “The righteousness of God” (dikaiōsynē theou) (Rom 3:21). This represents the most significant turning point in the interpretation of the passage. Classically, there has been a debate whether the expression dikaiōsynē theou (righteousness or justice of God) refers to an attribute of God Himself or to the righteousness that He reckons to believers. Lutheran theologians were especially insistent on the latter understanding. This is a righteousness that is from God and given to us, not a property inhering in God Himself.

It is clear, I think, that the expression dikaiōsynē theou is multivalent. “The righteousness of God through faith” (v. 22) clearly refers to reckoned righteousness, since God’s attribute is not “through faith” nor is it “for all who believe.” God’s inherent righteousness, like His power or wisdom, is an essential property of God that He has objectively and independently of whether any human beings at all exist, much less have faith in Him. So the righteousness referred to in verse 22 is a righteousness from God that believers possess. But then just as clearly, “he himself is righteous” (v. 26) designates a property God Himself has. Here we do have reference to a property possessed not by believers but by God, akin to His wisdom or power. At least three times in the Pauline corpus, Paul uses dikaiōsynē theou to refer to God’s inherent righteousness (Rom 3:5, 25-26); the remaining seven uses may be taken to refer to the righteousness that humans have as a result of justification (Rom 1:17; 3:21, 22; 10:3 [2x]; 2 Cor 5:21; Phil 3:9). In addition there are in Paul’s letters a couple of dozen occurrences of dikaiōsynē without the genitive modifier theou where the righteousness belongs to human persons now justified.

Recently, a new debate about the expression dikaiōsynē theou has arisen as a result of the so-called new perspective on Paul, some proponents of which construe God’s righteousness to be His covenant faithfulness. This construal is not itself new but goes back to German theologians like Hermann Cremer in the late nineteenth century. Cremer believed that the righteousness of God is not a normative concept but rather a relational concept involving persons. He claims, moreover, that God’s righteousness has only to do with God’s saving activity. He does not deny that God’s salvation of the righteous entails His punishment of the wicked, but he insists that God’s righteousness finds expression only in His saving action. Proponents of the new perspective have followed Cremer in thinking God’s righteousness to be a relational, not a normative, concept and have identified it with God’s being faithful to His covenant people.

The claim here seems to be implausible on its face, for it amounts to nothing less than the claim that teams of English translators, not to mention non-English translators, have for generations actually mistranslated the expression dikaiōsynē theou, since the English word “righteousness” just does not mean “faithfulness.” Proponents of the new perspective would have us believe that the meaning of NT Greek dik- words, under the influence of the LXX, has been fundamentally changed so as to introduce covenantal ideas not present in extrabiblical Greek. The Hebrew word sedek (also, in effect, mistranslated as “righteousness”) is also said not to express a normative concept like “goodness” but rather a relational concept like “faithful to.”

If one reduces God’s righteousness to His covenant faithfulness, this will radically impact one’s understanding of Paul’s atonement doctrine. For then justification is not about God’s reckoning us to be guiltless by the standard of divine justice but about God’s reckoning to us covenant faithfulness, which makes dubious sense and in any case would not avail for salvation. When Paul declares his desire for a righteousness “that comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God based on faith,” he is not longing for faithfulness to the covenant, for he was already “blameless” in that respect and it availed him nothing (Phil 3:6-9).

The implausibility of the new perspective’s reductionism is perhaps best seen by asking what the opposite of righteousness—that is, unrighteousness—is said by Paul to be. It is not unfaithfulness, but wickedness and ungodliness (Rom 1:18) or lawlessness (2 Cor 6:14). Faithlessness is but one of the litany of sins listed by Paul that result in God’s just condemnation (Rom 1:29-31; 2:2). Righteousness is a broad moral property that entails faithfulness, since to break one’s word is wrong, but is not reducible to it. As Mark Seifrid puts it, “All ‘covenant-keeping’ is righteous behavior, but not all righteous behavior is ‘covenant-keeping.’ It is misleading, therefore, to speak of ‘God’s righteousness’ as his ‘covenant-faithfulness.’” Seifrid points out that righteousness language in the OT has primarily to do with God’s role as Judge and Ruler of creation. As such it is normative, having to do with God’s establishing right moral order in the world. It takes on a positive or salvific sense because the biblical writers expect God to intervene to reinstate right order when it is usurped by evil in the world. It takes on a negative or punitive sense because the biblical writers expect reinstatement of right order to involve the punishment of the wicked. As Seifrid so aptly puts it, “Retribution remains on the ‘backside’ of divine acts of righteousness.” So while there are sixty-four instances of God’s saving righteousness in the OT, Seifrid counts as well fifteen cases in which God’s righteousness is conceived in retributive or punitive terms (Exod 9:27; Pss 7:10; 7:12; 11:5-7; 50:6; Isa 1:27; 5:15-16; 10:22; 28:17; Lam 1:18; 2 Chron 12:1-6; Neh 9:33; Dan 9:7; 9:14; 9:16). God’s righteousness comprises both aspects.

Moreover, although the intention of proponents of the new perspective is to explain God’s “justification” of the Gentiles as His declaring them to be “righteous” (= faithful to the covenant), in fact the new perspective, by reducing God’s righteousness to His covenant faithfulness, does not make sense of God’s relations to Gentiles, since they stand outside the covenant made with Israel. If unrighteousness is unfaithfulness to the covenant, then Gentiles cannot be said to be unrighteous, which Paul has expressly said (Rom 1:18). Nor could a Gentile like Job be said to be righteous, as Yahweh Himself affirms, since he was not faithful to the covenant. In point of fact, no connection between justification and covenant faithfulness seems to exist. Seifrid observes that of the 283 occurrences of “covenant” and the more than 500 occurrences of “righteousness” in the OT, in only 7 instances do the two terms come into any significant semantic contact. One generally does not act righteously or unrighteously with respect to a covenant. Rather, one “keeps,” “remembers,” or “establishes” a covenant, or, conversely, one “breaks,” “transgresses,” or “despises” it. In thinking of righteousness as covenant faithfulness, proponents of the new perspective seem to be guilty of a category mistake.

In any case, the reductionistic interpretation of dikaiōsynē theou as covenant faithfulness has been shown to be lexicographically untenable. Charles Irons’ The Righteousness of God (2015) is the definitive work on this expression and a convincing refutation of the reductionistic interpretation of the new perspective. Irons conducts a thorough examination of righteousness language in the Hebrew OT, the Septuagint, and extrabiblical Jewish writings and concludes:

With respect to the use of sedek in the OT, Irons finds that the word does not have a relational meaning like “faithfulness.” “Almost all instances of ‘the righteousness of God’ can be interpreted as in some way related to legal righteousness within a judicial context in which God is figuratively seated on his throne as the great judge who executes justice by punishing the wicked and vindicating his people.” In the OT “righteousness is a Normbegriff [normative concept], and the norm is God’s own moral law, which is grounded in his unchanging nature as a God of perfect holiness, justice, and truth.” Righteousness in the context of a covenant does entail being faithful to keep one’s promises, but that does not imply that the meaning of “righteousness” is “faithfulness.” Faithfulness is but one manifestation of righteousness.

With respect to extrabiblical Greek no essential differences emerge from OT usage: “The Hebraic/relational theory of righteousness operates with a false contrast between Greek and Hebrew thought. Even extrabiblical Greek recognizes that keeping one’s promises is a subset of ‘righteousness.’ Conversely, Hebraic usage is just as judicially stamped by the concept of iustitia distributiva as extrabiblical Greek, if not more so.”

With respect to the Septuagint, Irons recognizes the importation of Hebrew meanings into NT Greek via the Septuagint but finds no good evidence that dikaiōsynē is a Greek word with a Hebrew meaning (that is, a calque). Moreover, the imported nuances of the term are judicial, not relational. He finds that dikaioō in the NT “may mean (1) to vindicate someone, or (2) to declare someone to be righteous and to treat them [sic] as righteous. . . . For Paul it is a soteriological term that denotes God’s act of forgiving sins and accounting sinners as righteous in his sight.” He comments, “Now it is generally agreed that this new usage came about because of the influence of the Septuagint mediating a Hebraic context and connotation to the word dikaioō. . . . Since the Hebrew verb is used in a positive, judicial sense, that meaning has been introduced into the Greek word among Greek-speaking Jews.” Still, “Paul’s ‘righteousness’ language is largely understandable in terms of standard Greek usage, albeit with some biblical theological content drawn from the LXX (especially Gen 15:6 and Hab 2:4), but without any need for recourse to knowledge of Hebrew usage.”

A final observation, says Irons, puts the matter to rest. When Paul does speak of God’s covenant faithfulness, he does not use dik- words but instead words such as pistis (faith), aletheia (truth), bebaioō (to establish). For example, in Romans 11, where Paul addresses the question of God’s covenant faithfulness, he does not use dikaiōsynē theou. This fact confirms that the translation “the covenant faithfulness of God” is incorrect.

Fortunately, proponents of the new perspective have backed away from the overly simplistic, reductive conception of God’s righteousness. For example, J. D. G. Dunn, in response to his critics, acknowledges that the Hebrew concept of righteousness cannot be reduced to covenant faithfulness or salvation. Righteousness language in the Hebrew Scriptures also involves punitive divine justice, according to which righteousness is “understood as measured by a norm, right order, or that which is morally right,” with the qualification that “the norm is not seen as some abstract ideal . . . , but rather as a norm concretised in relation” between God and creatures. So when we come to Romans, “that God’s righteousness towards the peoples he has created includes wrath and judgment as well as faithfulness and salvation is clearly implicit in the sequences Rom. 1.16–18 and 3.3–6.” Those who deny that dikaiōsynē is a forensic term pay insufficient attention to Rom 4:4-5, “where the forensic background is clear in the allusion to the legal impropriety of a judge ‘justifying the ungodly’ . . . , and where again the thought is entirely of attributing a righteous status to one who is unrighteous.”

5. “Through faith in Jesus Christ” (dia pisteos Iēsou Christou) (Rom 3:22). Although this phrase might be taken to be a subjective genitive meaning “through the faithfulness of Jesus Christ,” it is usually understood as an objective genitive with Christ as the object of faith, as per the NRSV. Paul almost always uses pistis to mean “faith,” and no contextual support exists here for construing it otherwise. The expression “for all who believe” serves to emphasize the universality of the gift of righteousness obtainable through faith. Paul thus prepares the way for his doctrine of justification by faith (Rom 3:27).

6. “Through the redemption” (dia tēs apolytrōseōs) (Rom 3:24). It is odd that Carson leapfrogs the key phrase dikaioumenoi dōrean tē chariti (“justified by his grace as a gift”) (Rom 3:24); but he rightly comments that people’s being justified or set right with God “involves his judicial verdict of pardon. . . . the righteous judge . . . in his grace has pronounced a pardon on those who have faith in Christ, so that their guilt can no longer be cited against them.” We have already seen that dikaioō in Paul’s usage is a soteriological term that denotes God’s act of forgiving sins and accounting sinners as righteous in his sight.

Although “redemption” can mean simply “liberation,” it is frequently connected with the buying back of slaves or prisoners of war from captivity and so involves a ransom price. We have already encountered in chapter 2 the notion of ransoming in the Levitical animal sacrifices, which are said to ransom the lives of those who offer them by means of the shed blood (Lev 17:11). Significantly, Paul proceeds to make the sacrificial context explicit by mentioning the hilastērion “through his blood” (en tō autou haimati) in verse 25. This suggests that in speaking of the redemption that is Christ Jesus, Paul is thinking of the ransoming power of Christ’s blood given as a sacrificial offering to God. Elsewhere Paul says, “you were bought with a price” (1 Cor 6:20; 7:23), and here we see that that price is the blood of Christ, which like the OT sacrifices cleanses us of sin and frees us from its bondage.

7. “Propitiation” (hilastērion) (Rom 3:25). The NRSV translates this word as “sacrifice of atonement” or alternatively, “place of atonement.” C. H. Dodd famously argues that while the hilas- words of the LXX convey the idea of expiation of sin, they do not convey the idea of propitiation of God’s wrath, and so hilastērion does not have here the meaning that the hilaskesthai word group does in extrabiblical literature. Although Carson says that today it is widely recognized that Dodd was wrong “in his central contentions,” Carson tacitly acknowledges that we find quite different meanings of hilastērion in the LXX and in extrabiblical Greek literature, including the literature of Hellenistic Judaism. What is disputed is which is the relevant meaning of hilastērion as used by Paul on this one occasion.

On the one hand, Paul might be using hilastērion with the predominant meaning in extrabiblical literature, including Hellenistic Jewish literature. According to Bailey there are now nine known concrete referents of the term hilastērion in Hellenistic or Greco-Roman sources. These are concrete, inanimate propitiatory offerings to God or the gods, but the term with this meaning can be used metaphorically. Especially noteworthy are the deaths of the Maccabean martyrs, which allayed God’s wrath upon Israel (2 Macc 7:38) and thus served as “a propitiatory offering [hilastērion]” (4 Macc. 17:22 codex S). The Hellenized heroes of 4 Maccabees 17:22 dedicate their lives in death as a hilastērion, much as a Greek hero might dedicate a sacred object as a hilastērion or “propitiatory gift.”

In Romans 1–3 Paul has expounded at some length on God’s wrath, so that it would be natural for him then to say, “But God has put forward Christ as a propitiatory offering,” thereby completing his argument. Greco-Roman hilastēria were publicly displayed, as was the crucified Christ, but it would be extraordinary to say that God has publicly displayed the mercy seat hidden in the Holy of Holies. The objection that it makes no sense for Paul to say that God gives Christ as a gift to Himself is undercut by the fact that that is exactly the way in which the Levitical sacrifices were conceived (Lev 17:11)! God gave the people the blood on the altar to ransom their lives. So He could give Christ as a means or instrument of propitiation.

On the other hand, Paul might be using hilastērion as the LXX most often does, to refer to the kappōret, or top of the ark of the covenant, where the blood of the Yom Kippur sacrifice was sprinkled or, more widely, to altar faces where sacrificial blood was smeared (Ezek 43:14, 17, 20; Amos 9:1). We have already seen how Paul’s use of dikaioō reflects the Septuagintal usage in contrast to that of extrabiblical Greek, and so it may be here. On this interpretation Christ is said to be the place where atonement is made for sin. God does do something extraordinary in displaying Christ as the mercy seat.

Carson does not opt for the extrabiblical meaning. Rather, observing that the only other NT occurrence of hilastērion (Heb 9:5) certainly refers to the kappōret, or mercy seat, as do twenty-one of the twenty-seven occurrences in the LXX, Carson believes that Paul is presenting Jesus as the ultimate mercy seat, the ultimate place of atonement, and so derivatively as the ultimate sacrifice. Such a view is entirely consistent with Morris’ claim that when one looks at the contexts in which hilaskōmai is used in the LXX, one frequently finds a reference to divine anger. “Again and again we find that, however the word is translated, there is the thought of the divine wrath in the context.” Carson would see propitiation as part of the derivative connotations of Paul’s use of hilastērion.

Douglas Moo claims that the Pentateuchal hilastērion “means ‘propitiation,’ but it refers to the cover of the ark,” and that Paul’s use of hilastērion similarly “‘refers to’ the atonement cover of the ark and ‘means’ sacrifice of atonement.” Moo would illustrate the difference between meaning and reference by words like “Waterloo” and “Watergate.” The term “Waterloo” may refer to the historic battle in 1815 but often means a decisive defeat. Similarly, “Watergate” may refer to an office building but also mean a political cover-up. Moo cautions, “To insist that a word can only function in one way or the other is to miss the flexibility of language both to ‘refer’ and to ‘mean.’”

While I think that Moo is onto something important here, nonetheless, not being a linguistic philosopher, he misexpresses his point by appealing to the distinction between meaning and reference. The distinction between meaning and reference, as originally explained by Gottlob Frege, involved expressions like “the morning star” and “the evening star,” for example, which have different meanings but the same referent, namely, Venus. The referent is what the speaker is talking about, even if linguistic expressions with different meanings are used to pick out the referent. Obviously, that is not the relevant distinction to be made concerning hilastērion. If anything, Moo gets things backward: the LXX meaning of the Greek word hilastērion is “mercy seat” or “place of atonement,” but Paul allegedly uses it to refer to propitiation. In fact, however, the distinction between meaning and reference is not the relevant distinction here. Rather, the distinction to be drawn in this case is between literal meaning and figurative meaning. For example, the literal meaning of “There’s a bee in her bonnet” has to do with an insect in someone’s hat, but the figurative meaning is that she is angry or irritable. Although in this example the statement may be literally false while figuratively true, on other occasions a statement may be true whether interpreted literally or figuratively, as “No man is an island.” So with respect to Moo’s examples, words like “Waterloo” and “Watergate” have become metaphors for expressing things far beyond what is conveyed by their literal meaning.

Now if Paul is describing Jesus as the mercy seat, then he is obviously using hilastērion metaphorically, and so the question arises as to the meaning of the metaphor. Taken metaphorically rather than literally, the expression could convey a rich variety of connotations associated with sacrifice and atonement, so that the sort of dichotomistic reading forced by literal meanings becomes inappropriate, and the force of propitiation can be present. Intriguingly, Philo explains the biblical use of the term as “a symbol, in a theological sense, of the merciful power of God and, in the human sense, of a mind which is merciful to itself.” Paul could similarly use the word metaphorically to carry a range of connotations.

Paul was a Hellenistic Jew, and he might have expected that his Gentile Roman readers would have understood hilastērion in the customary Greco-Roman sense. Bailey thinks that any confusion concerning the term, whether it should be understood to allude to the mercy seat or a Hellenistic votive offering, could have been cleared up by Paul’s letter carrier, in this case Phoebe (Rom 16:1-2), whom Longenecker calls “the first commentator” on the letter to the Romans:

By borrowing an image from the Day of Atonement rituals, Paul would also convey to his hearers the OT notion of an atoning blood sacrifice. Thomas Hiecke comments that already in the OT “by means of abstraction, the ritual itself turns into a metaphor,” thus building “the basis and starting point for multiple transformations and further abstractions as well as metaphorical charging in Judaism . . . and Christianity (Rom 3:25: Christ as hilasterion—expiation or sacrifice of atonement, etc.).” Propitiation would also be one of the many connotations of the metaphor.

8. “In his blood” (en tō autou haimati) (Rom 3:25). This phrase probably modifies hilastērion and serves to construe Christ’s death as a sacrificial offering for sin akin to the Yom Kippur sacrifices, the blood of which was sprinkled on the altar. In so construing Christ’s death, Paul agrees with the author of Hebrews that Christ has superseded the Levitical sacrifices and, in effect, put an end to them because of the final efficacy of his atoning death. The Temple with its hilastērion is now obsolete and seen to be merely provisional, a temporary arrangement set up until God’s ultimate sacrificial offering should be set forth. Indeed, like the author of Hebrews, Paul will go on to imply that these OT sacrifices were not really effectual at all in expiating sins, which were not finally dealt with until Christ’s atoning sacrifice. The demands of God’s justice were not really satisfied by the elaborate sacrificial system; rather, God in His forbearance just overlooked the sins of previous generations until He set forth Christ as a hilastērion. Christ having been offered, the demands of God’s justice are forever satisfied, even with respect to future sins, so that no further satisfaction need be made.

9. “To demonstrate etc.” (eis endeiksin ktl.) (Rom 3:25b-26). Having said that God put Christ forward as a sacrifice of atonement, Paul claims that God did this in order to show His righteousness, since in His forbearance (anochē) He had passed over the sins of previous generations, the point being, presumably, that God’s failure to punish previous sins called into question that aspect of His righteousness that is His retributive justice. But now through Christ’s sacrificial death, God’s justice has been vindicated. How so? Paul does not say. But the almost inescapable implication is that these sins have now received their due; no longer can they be considered overlooked or unpunished. Like the Servant of Isaiah 53, Christ has borne the punishment instead. Punitive justice, God’s justice, has been discharged in Christ, thereby vindicating God’s righteousness.

It is uncontroversial that Paul is asserting here that God has graciously not given sinners of previous generations their just desert. Earlier Paul had spoken of God’s “forbearance” (anochē) toward the unrighteous, explaining that “God’s kindness is meant to lead you to repentance” (2:4), thereby implying that God had graciously stayed His just judgment (cf. Acts 17:30). Proponents of the new perspective on Paul have, however, challenged the interpretation that God has now vindicated His justice though Christ’s sacrificial death. Rather, Paul is saying that God demonstrates His covenant faithfulness by forgiving or simply overlooking former sins.

The new perspective interpretation is, however, implausible. In the first place, it depends on taking God’s righteousness to be His faithfulness to His covenant, which notion has been exploded by Irons’ work, as we have seen. Moreover, the interpretation of dia tēn paresin as “by passing over” depends on taking dia + the accusative to mean “by” rather than “because of,” which is an extremely rare usage lacking any contextual justification. Finally, the interpretation makes dubious sense. It seems a non sequitur to say that because God had overlooked previous sins, He now puts forth Christ as a sacrificial offering as a demonstration of His faithfulness. If the sins have been simply overlooked, there is just no rationale for a sacrificial offering. It is very hard to see what Christ’s death actually atones for or accomplishes.

By contrast, the traditional interpretation makes the rationale of Christ’s death perspicuous: it atones for those previous sins that did not receive their just desert and were not effectually expiated. Since God’s righteousness comprises retributive justice as one of its elements, Christ’s atoning death proves God’s righteousness. By offering a final, decisive sacrifice of atonement that truly expiates sins, God is shown to be both just and the justifier of him who has faith in Jesus (v. 26), a wordplay that makes sense only on the traditional interpretation.

10. Significance of the succeeding passages (Rom 3:27–31; 4:1ff). Paul proceeds to explain what it means that God justifies him who has faith in Jesus (v. 26). Justification entails the forgiveness of sins:

The Levitical system of sacrificial offerings in the Tabernacle and Temple, offerings that Paul took to prefigure Christ’s own death as the ultimate sacrificial offering, aimed, as we have seen, not merely at the cleansing of consecrated objects from impurity but more fundamentally at the expiation of the sins of the people and their forgiveness. Again and again the promise is given, “the priest shall make atonement on your behalf for the sin that you have committed, and you shall be forgiven” (Lev 4:35; cf. 4:20, 26, 31; 5:10, 13, 16, 18; etc.). Christ’s atoning death is truly expiatory. In short, in Christ “we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins” (Col 1:14; cf. Eph 1:7).

It is noteworthy that the object of divine forgiveness is said by Paul to be sins, not just sinners. Not only are people forgiven for their sins, but their sins are forgiven. This fact makes it evident that divine forgiveness is not (merely) a change of attitude on God’s part toward sinners. The word aphiēmi carries the connotation of nullifying or canceling and can be used of the remission of debts. Paul says that God will “take away” (aphaireō) sins (Rom 11:27). Divine forgiveness has as its effect not (merely) God’s laying aside feelings of anger or indignation (or what have you, according to one’s favorite analysis of forgiveness), but rather the removal of the liability to punishment that attends sin. As a result of divine forgiveness, a person who formerly deserved punishment now no longer does so. Because of the forgiveness that is to be found in Christ, those who are united with him through faith are no longer held accountable for their sins. “There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus” (Rom 8:1). It is evident, then, that divine forgiveness is much more akin to legal pardon than to forgiveness as typically understood.

This is not to say that divine forgiveness is just a legal pardon issued to those who have faith in Christ. For a pardon might be issued by an official who is personally indifferent or even hostile to the condemned (cf. Pontius Pilate’s exercise of executive clemency in pardoning Barabbas [Mark 15:6-15]). As we have seen, God’s wrath is also put away by Christ’s atoning death. God’s pardon is motivated by compassion for sinners, and ongoing wrath directed against a justified believer is inconceivable. Legal pardon does not, then, exhaust divine forgiveness; nevertheless, it does lie at its heart in taking away our liability to punishment.

Those who have faith in Christ are not merely pardoned and forgiven, however. According to Paul, the righteousness of God is credited to all who believe in Jesus. Recalling the case of Abraham, to whom God reckoned righteousness apart from works of the law, Paul says, “Now the words, ‘it was reckoned to him,’ were written not for his sake alone, but for ours also. It will be reckoned to us who believe in him who raised Jesus our Lord from the dead, who was handed over to death for our trespasses and was raised for our justification” (Rom 4:23-25). Notice that the gift of righteousness is accorded by means of “reckoning” (logizomai), in the sense in which a merchant would settle accounts. Here, however, the context is not commercial but legal. The relevant legal category is imputation. The now-justified believer does not have righteousness infused into him so that he suddenly becomes a virtuous person, exemplifying selflessness, compassion, veracity, fidelity, and so on. Rather, he is accorded a new legal status. He moves from a state of legal condemnation before God to a state of fully meeting the law’s requirements: “that the just requirement (dikaiōma) of the law might be fulfilled in us” (Rom 8:4).

Although it is sometimes said that justification involves merely acquittal and not a positive ascription of righteousness, nothing in the text warrants so diluting the righteousness of God that is reckoned to believers. Even a stone can be said to be not guilty, and justified believers are certainly more righteous than a stone. Biblically, the righteousness of God is, as we have seen, a rich property, not a bare absence of guilt. Prima facie God’s righteousness in its full moral rectitude is reckoned to believers. That the righteousness reckoned by God to believers is a rich, positive property is evident in Paul’s rapturous words to the Philippians:

The righteousness that Paul here extols, next to which everything else is like dung, could not possibly be equated with a mere absence of guilt. It is, in fact, the same property that God Himself exemplifies that is imputed to us. No wonder Paul is in rapture! That God’s righteousness is imputed to us seems clearly expressed in 2 Cor 5:21b: “that in him we might become the righteousness of God.” There is no exegetical warrant for diluting this statement or trying to explain it away: in Christ our legal status is that we are righteous, as God is righteous.

The reflex of the imputation of Christ’s righteousness to believers is the imputation of their sins to Christ. We have already seen in chapter 3 that NT authors, including Paul, identified Christ with the suffering Servant of Isaiah 53, who “bore the sins of many” (Isa 53:12), a phrase employing a customary Semitic idiom for being held liable to or enduring punishment. Isaiah 53 does not make clear whether the Servant merely endured the punishment that was the just desert of the people or whether he was imputed their guilt and liability to punishment. One could administer vicarious punishment to a person who did not deserve it, to whom no guilt or liability to punishment was imputed. Such a person’s legal status would be the same as that of any person who was innocent of a crime. But if sins are imputed to the penal substitute, then that person’s legal status is the same as that of a person convicted and condemned for the crimes. He may be personally virtuous and without fault, but he is reckoned to be legally guilty and liable to punishment. Is there any reason to think that in Paul’s view Christ was not merely punished for people’s sins but that people’s sins were imputed to Christ? I think there is.

First, in Galatians 3:10-14 Paul makes the shocking affirmation that Christ actually became accursed of God on our behalf:

People who look to works of the law for their justification are said to be accursed. This is the severest of language. Earlier in the letter Paul had called down God’s curse on those false apostles who were preaching a counterfeit gospel (Gal 1:8-9). Those who rely on the law are now said to be similarly accursed. That is because they are lawbreakers and so cannot fulfill its requirements. This is the same desperate situation that Paul describes in the early chapters of his letter to the Roman church. And as in Romans, Christ is here said to have redeemed us from this accursed state. But how? By becoming a curse for us. Though he was not a lawbreaker, he became accursed on our behalf. It is hard to understand this in any other way than the imputation to Christ of our sins and consequent condemnation before the righteous Judge. He accepts as his own our legal status of condemned criminals and then endures our punishment to liberate us from such a state of condemnation.

Second, in 2 Corinthians 5:21a Paul says that God made Christ to be sin on our behalf: “For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin.” Though Christ was not merely personally virtuous but even sinless, God made him to become sin for our sake. How else can this startling statement be plausibly understood than as the affirmation that God imputed our sins to Christ, so that despite his perfect goodness, he was legally guilty before God for our wrongdoing? There is no exegetical warrant for trying to dilute the force of this statement by taking it to mean that God made Christ to become a sin offering for our sake. For Paul does not use the phrase peri hamartias, and the evident parallelism between verses 21a and b militates strongly against any interpretation that breaks the parallelism. Notice, too, that in verse 19 Paul says that in Christ God did not count (logizomai) our trespasses against us. Our sins are not imputed to us; rather, they are imputed to Christ. Any plausible interpretation must make sense of the contrast between verses 19 and 21, as well as the parallelism of verses 21a and b.

So I think that there are good grounds to see the imputation of our sins to Christ and of his righteousness to us as an entailment of Paul’s doctrine of the atonement.

Forensic terminology pervades both the OT and NT, especially Paul’s epistles. God’s righteousness is both an ethical and legal normative concept, a rich property of God Himself indicating His moral rectitude. Before Him, as before a supreme and righteous Judge, every human being finds himself justly condemned due to his violation of God’s laws. By Christ’s atoning death, God has made possible our pardon, so that we may escape condemnation and punishment. God legally imputed our sins to Christ, and he vicariously bore the just desert of those sins. Divine justice satisfied, God offers us the gift of His righteousness, that is to say, the imputation to us of that same property that He essentially exemplifies. Those who place their faith in Christ receive God’s pardon and the imputation of a new legal status of righteousness in the place of condemnation.

These legal motifs are blended with an array of motifs drawn from other spheres such as the Levitical cult. Christ’s death is seen as a sacrificial offering to God that ransoms us from sin’s bondage. Our sins are expiated by Christ’s death, and God is propitiated. Through faith in Christ we are not merely pardoned but forgiven, as God’s wrath is dissolved. These motifs supplement or express in other categories the truths that are legally expressed. Sacrifice is analogous to vicarious punishment; expiation is the analogue of divine pardon; propitiation of the satisfaction of divine justice; redemption of our undeserved change of legal status. Obviously, we have here rich materials for a substantive doctrine of the atonement.