5 The Righteousness of God

The sociological aspects of this crystallisation of the emerging evangelical movements within Germany and Switzerland around the concept of justification are imperfectly understood. 6 A process of reflection, negotiation and reception within the various evangelical groupings, stimulated in part by a shared hostility towards Catholicism, appears to have led to an early diversity on the nature and scope of justification (including the question of justifying righteousness) gradually being displaced by a confessional culture which affirmed a fundamental theological unity on this identity-giving and identity-sustaining issue.

Yet while the most significant Catholic response to the Reformation – the sixth session of the Council of Trent and its ‘ Decree on Justification’ – initially echoed this shift in emphasis and vocabulary, the Catholic tradition gradually reverted to more traditional ways of speaking and thinking about the transformation of the human situation through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. The highly influential and authoritative Catechism of the Catholic Church (1992), for example, acknowledges the due place of justification, while making full use of other Pauline metaphors in its discussion of human salvation.

Alongside this new emphasis on the notion of justification in the early sixteenth century, we must note a significant bifurcation within the western theological tradition which also emerged at this time. As we shall see, until the sixteenth century, the western theological tradition understood justification primarily as a ‘ making righteous’ through the impartation of an inherent righteousness to a believer. Although some early Protestant writers retained this understanding of ‘ justification’ , Protestantism as a whole coalesced around the notion of justification as a forensic or judicial event in which the believer is ‘ reckoned as righteous’ or ‘ accounted righteous’ , tending to conceptualise the process of becoming righteous as ‘ regeneration’ or ‘ sanctification’ .

The history of the doctrine of justification primarily concerns the western, Latin-based theological tradition. The Orthodox emphasis upon the incarnation of the Son of God leading to humanity’ s participation in the divine being is generally expressed in the concept of deification ( theosis or theopoiesis ) rather than justification. 7 This is not to suggest that Orthodoxy neglected the Pauline image of justification in its theological reflections, nor that the western church overlooked the New Testament’ s hints at believers somehow sharing in the divine nature. Indeed, recent scholarship has indicated how the notion of theosis plays a hitherto unnoticed – and possibly even suppressed – role in Protestant writers of the sixteenth century and beyond, such as Luther, Calvin and Jonathan Edwards. 8 It is becoming clear that an explanation is required for the rise in prominence, even predominance, of the vocabulary and associated conceptualities of justification during the Reformation era.

As the Reformation and its attendant authority figures slowly receded into the past, the difficulties associated with this way of speaking became increasingly apparent. From the late nineteenth century onwards, growing doubts were expressed as to whether the New Testament, including the Pauline epistles, placed anything even approaching such an emphasis upon the concept of justification. 9 Influential New Testament scholars such as William Wrede and Albert Schweitzer argued that the origins of the concept were polemical, relating to the early tensions between Christianity and Judaism. Wrede insisted that the heart of Paul’ s thought actually lay in the concept of redemption. 10 For Schweitzer, the real focus of Paul’ s positive thought lay in the mystical idea of ‘ being in Christ’ , not in this ‘ lateral crater (Nebenkrater )’ . 11 These ideas were developed further later in the twentieth century within the ‘ New Perspective’ on Paul. With the publication of W. D. Davies’ s Paul and Rabbinic Judaism (1948), a new challenge to the predominant western reading of Paul emerged. ‘ The gospel for Paul was not the annulling of Judaism, but its completion, and as such it took up into itself the essential genius of Judaism.’ 12 The emergence of this ‘ new perspective’ on Paul was given a decisive new impetus in 1977 with the publication of E. P. Sanders’ s Paul and Palestinian Judaism . Sanders argued that Second Temple Judaism was consistently and thoroughly a religion of grace, thus challenging the plausibility of many traditional Protestant formulations of the doctrine of justification, especially those grounded in Luther’ s antithesis of law and gospel. 13

The rise to prominence of this new paradigm generated significant research questions, such as the way in which key biblical phrases – for example, the ‘ works of the law’ – were interpreted in the pre-Reformation traditions. Did earlier Christian writers understand such works as general human achievements, or as more specifically cultic actions or obligations? This debate created an increased awareness of the need to confirm what early Christian writers understood by this phrase, rather than assimilating it to prevailing assumptions. Second-century writers, for example, tended to understand the ‘ works of the law’ to refer to issues such as circumcision, the observation of the Sabbath, and regulations concerning food and sacrifices. 14 So when Augustine speaks of ‘ works of the law by which nobody is justified (legis opera quibus homo non justificatur )’ , 15 it is clearly important to identify whether he is referring to a generic ethos of human achievement or a more specific conformance to Jewish cultic norms.

Concerns such as these inform the detailed historical analysis set out in this volume, in that they highlight the importance of ensuring that these questions are engaged and answered as part of the historical analysis which lies at its heart. New theological generations tend to ask new questions, and probe the Christian tradition for answers. Yet before turning to the detailed historical analysis of the development of the Christian doctrine of justification, we need to consider at least something of its conceptual and semantic background of the concepts of righteousness in the culture of the Ancient Near East in general, and the history of Israel in particular. We therefore turn to consider these fundamental elements of the Christian understanding of justification, and how they shaped the western theological tradition at this point.