The Two Faces of Faithfulness

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Paul, the “apostle to the pagans,” never abandoned his Jewish roots. If the pagan world was to be summoned to worship the one true God and to be grafted upon God’s people, it was because the God of Israel had fulfilled his ancient promises.

In his letter to the Romans, Paul argues that God’s promises to Israel had come true in Jesus, the Messiah. His key expression for this is “the righteousness of God.”

“Righteous” and its cognates are tricky. They translate the same Greek word group as “just” and “justify”; these terms evoke biblical passages, not least of all Isaiah 40–55, concerning the faithfulness of Israel’s God to the covenant. This “covenant faithfulness” is the reason why God will rescue Israel and so bless the whole world. “God’s righteousness,” with this meaning, resonates through postbiblical Jewish literature, as in the Dead Sea Scrolls. God’s rescue of Israel will be the great revelation in action of his “righteousness,” his tsedakah, his covenant faithfulness.

The phrase is already metaphorical. “Righteousness” is a law-court term, applicable both to the judge and to the party who wins the case. When the judge in a biblical law court is “righteous,” he upholds the law; he is impartial; he punishes the wicked; he supports the defenseless. When the plaintiff or defendant is “righteous,” he or she has won the case. (Because one assumes that the right person has won, the word “righteous” acquires the connotation of “morally virtuous,” but that isn’t its basic meaning. It means simply that the court has found in one’s favor.)

In the Bible and in Paul’s day, Jews used this law-court metaphor to describe their plight and seek God’s help. Israel was coming into court, as it were, to seek justice from the righteous judge against her pagan oppressors. She longed for her God to act, to vindicate her. This action would demonstrate his covenant faithfulness and her covenant membership. But, granted that many Jews had abandoned God’s law, how could God be true both to the covenant and to his duty to deal with wickedness? How could he be impartial? Books like 4 Ezra, written a generation after Paul, wrestled with this question. Paul believed he had seen the answer in the Messiah, Jesus of Nazareth.

That is the core meaning of Romans 3:21–4:25. At stake here is not simply “how sinners get saved,” but how God is faithful to his covenant. The passage is not an arbitrary “proof from scripture” of “justification by faith.” It expounds a set of biblical passages, notably Genesis 15 (God’s covenant with Abraham), which demonstrate that God has now done, in Jesus, what God promised to Abraham. In Paul’s words (Romans 3:21–22), “God’s righteousness is displayed apart from the Torah [though Torah and prophets alike bear witness to it]: God’s covenant faithfulness, through the faithfulness of Jesus the Messiah, for all who have faith.” The death and resurrection of Jesus, Paul believed, were the revelation in action of God’s covenant faithfulness, doing for Israel and the world what neither could do for itself.

In the dense passage that follows (Romans 3:23–31), Paul spells out what he means. In the events concerning Jesus, the one God has been true to his promises; he has done so impartially; he has dealt properly with sin, providing the appropriate atonement; and he has rescued the helpless, those who, like the widow and orphan in the biblical law court, cast themselves on his mercy. As a result, God is “righteous,” “faithful to the covenant” and at the same time declares that those who believe in Jesus are, in this covenantal and law-court sense, “just.” They are members of the covenant, no matter who their parents were.

Paul must then face the question, Why did so many within ethnic Israel ignore the long-awaited event when it arrived? Romans 9–11 offers his answer. At the heart of that complex passage he declares, with autobiographical overtones, that his fellow Jews “have a zeal for God; but it is not according to knowledge. For, being ignorant of God’s righteousness, and seeking to establish their own righteousness, they did not submit to God’s righteousness. For the Messiah is the end of the law, so that all who have faith may be justified” (Romans 10:2–4).

This passage sums up Romans 9:6–29. There Paul argues from scripture that God always intended to fulfill his purposes through Israel’s being narrowed down to a point, in order that the whole world might be saved. Israel, Paul claims, had resisted this, thinking to establish a covenant status limited to itself. The Messiah, however, was the narrow point, the focus of Israel. In Jesus’ messianic death and resurrection, Israel’s God had brought the history of Israel to its true goal, so that now the way would be open for all—Jew and gentile alike—to belong to God’s covenant people. Their badge of membership would be neither ethnic origin nor accomplishment of Torah, but faith (described in Romans 10:9 as belief that Jesus is “Lord” and that God 047raised him from the dead).

We can now understand one of Paul’s best-known summary statements of his theology. In Romans 1:16–17 he declares that he is “not ashamed of the gospel; for it is God’s power for salvation to all who believe, the Jew first and also the Greek. For God’s righteousness is revealed in it, from faith to faith, as it is written, ‘The righteous shall live by faith.’” When Paul announces to the world that Jesus is its rightful Lord, he is unveiling the decisive act of the one God, who has done for Israel and the world what he always said he would do. His faithfulness and the answering faithfulness of his worldwide people together fulfill the prophetic promises. Did we suppose that the living God was always boringly predictable?

Paul, the “apostle to the pagans,” never abandoned his Jewish roots. If the pagan world was to be summoned to worship the one true God and to be grafted upon God’s people, it was because the God of Israel had fulfilled his ancient promises. In his letter to the Romans, Paul argues that God’s promises to Israel had come true in Jesus, the Messiah. His key expression for this is “the righteousness of God.” “Righteous” and its cognates are tricky. They translate the same Greek word group as “just” and “justify”; these terms evoke biblical passages, not least of […]