_ • ' Gottes Gerechtigkeit hat einen mehr ursiichlichen, aktiven, die menschliche einen melir sckundaren und receptiven Char- ftkter, jiine ist eine Kraft, dicse ein Zustand' (Duhni on I's 112). t Here ' enter into jndg-ment ' apparently means to appear .as the accuser in a legal process (Wellhausen). The I'salmist does not shrink from the jnd^'nient of God, in which His .lijlf Is operative, luit only from a contro\-ersy with the Aliuijj;iity, like that io -vhich Job so recklessly engaged.
more, the principle of retiibution is in Ps 62" expressly deduced not from the righteousness of God, but from His grace : ' to thee belongeth grace : for thou requitest each man according to his works ' ; here the meaning must be that it is an act of condescending grace on the part of God to take cognizance of the diilerences in haman conduct.
On the other Land, however, these examples do not justify certain extreme theories that have sometimes been built upon them. They do not, e.g., warrant the definition of righteousness as God's fidelity to the Covenant (Kautzsch, Riehm, etc.). No doubt, faithfulness to covenant obliga- tions is a part of the ethical righteousness of J' when once a covenant has been established ; but there is nothing to suggest that the attribute comes into play only with the covenant relation, or tha'. its sphere of exercise is confined to the maintenanca of tlie Covenant with Israel. Again, it is a.; exaggeration to deny that retribution is an ele ment of the Divine righteousness. This has been done by Diestel and Kitschl, who hold that the righteousness of God has a positive reference only to the purpose of salvation, and that retribution has merely an accidental connexion with it in so far as the punishment of the wicked may be neces- sary for the establishing of the righteous. The distinction here attempted to be drawn is illusory. The punishment of sin is directly connected 'w-ith the Divine righteousness in such passages as Is 5'* 1023 2817, Ps 711 506_ 1 K 8^2 etc.; and if this does not more fiequently occur, the reasonable explana- tion is that the matter was too self-evident to require to be insisted on. But the mistake of both these theories, as of others that might be men- tioned, is that they tend to dissociate an OT idea from the historic institutions in which it was incorporated in Hebrew thou^jht, and try to recon- struct it on the unsafe foundation of an abstract definition. The language of the OT is not scho- lastic but practical ; its writers do not analyze and expound ideas, but express in vivid popular speech the spiritual truths by which their religious life was sustained. That the Divine righteousness was mainly conceived by them as a judicial attribute is beyond dispute, and they must be presumed to include under it all that the term would imply if used of a human judge, — the punishment ot the guilty as well as the vindication of the innocent. The prominence which is given to the latter aspect of the notion is certainlj' a fact of the utmost significance for theolo":y, but it involves no de- parture from the analogy of secular justice as administered in ancient Israel. If it be considered that the Psalmists and other writers were accus- tomed to look on a judge as the natural protector and patron of the oppressed, and, further, that they were always confident in the substantial justica of their own cause before God, there need be no difficulty in recognizing the es.sentially judicial character of their conception of the Divine right- eousness, although to tueir minds it presents on the whole the aspect of grace.
Another point may be referred to. The OT does not appear to teach a justification of sinners as such. In Protestant theology, according to Ritsohl, justification is a synthetic judgment of God, expressing, that is, His resolve, for the sake of Jesus Christ, to treat as righteous those who have no righteousness in themselves. Assumin" that to be a correct statement 'of the evangelicd doctrine, we have merely to observe that the OT does not proceed quite so far. It rather leads us to think of justification as an analytic judgment, a ileclaration of righteousness by God in favour of such as are inherently in the right. Those who are justified are, in fact, sinful men, — though
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never, of course, ' wicked ' (D'l'jn), — but still, in the relative sense in which the word is used, they are the 'righteous'; and it is qud righteous, not gud sinners, that they are objects of the justifying decree of God. It is true that in the actual ex- perience of OT believers this order of ideas is generally reversed. The consciousness of being in the right is seldom strong enough to be long main- tained in the absence of the outward marks of God's approval in the shape of temporal good fortune ; the case of .lob is quite exceptional. The external justification, therefore, as a rule comes first in the thought of OT ^mters ; and from it they derive the assurance that they are in- lierently riglilcous before God. And as the with- drawal of outward prosperity is a proof of sin in the righteous, so the act of justilioation is equiva- lent to the pardon of sin ; cf. Job o3'^, where the conversion ol a sinner under the chastening hand of the Almighty is said to be followed by the restoration of his righteousness. Thus the teach- ing of the OT may be said to culminate in the thought of righteousness as a gift of God, an idea appearing most clearly perhaps in Ps 24° 69^, Is 4gi3 515. » 5(ji_ £ij tiigse passages we find the nearest approximation to what we mean by ' im- puted ' righteousness. The idea of the righteous- ness of one person being imputed to another is, it need hardly be said, entirely foreign to the OT.