of the Spirit. . , , . t, ,■ ,,
We have, indeed, no exact equivalent in English * Quoted in S. Schechter's Some Aspects ofltabbinic Theolony.
London, U109. p. 202 f. ,<>« ii 97s
t Arabia Desertn. 2 vols., London, ISSS, u. 2ra ! Cf. the splendid description of J.««to(ri.v7) n Job -!»".«»
social justice and goodness. The mere fact that .ipns often
came to he rendered by iKt^^oa^i'ri in later Judajsiu 8how.s
that «.«a.o<r^.i as a social virtue was tar removed from our
modern associations of • righteousness.
s In Tit :i.v7 God saves us in sheer pity, ' not for anything we
had done iv 6c«a.oaun),' and justilles us {the only reference to
justification in the Pastorals) by His grace.
372
RIGHTEOUSNESS
RIGHTEOUSNESS
for wliat StKaioaDvri meant to a Greek or to a primi- tive Cliristian, especially if he hail been born in Judaism. 'Righteousness' is too formal and ab- stract in its associations for a modern mind ; ' justice,' a^ain, is too narrow and, like ' integrity ' and ' morality,' it is insutticiently charged with religious feehng. The technical Pauline content of the term especially spills over when it is emptied into any of these modern words. They occasionally reproduce the sense of the Greek word in non-technical passages, but even in its restricted sense of political virtue, as applied to the man who obeys the law or who is a good citizen of the State, the term had impressed Aristotle, four centuries earlier, with its variety of meaning (Niv. Eth. V. i. 7),* and when it passed into the vocabu- lary of Judaism and of early Christianity its range became still wider, stretching from ' justice ' across a broad field of meaning to ' piety ' or ' goodness.' It may sound like a confession of defeat to say that we cannot reproduce the word precisely in English. But it is something gained, at any rate, to realize that the conception, even in St. Paul, is not stereotyped, and that the Apostle uses it in more senses than one. Much of the investigation into the Pauline usage has been vitiated by the assumption that the term invariably represented a single, well-dehned idea in the writer's mind. St. Paul was not the slave of words, even of a great religious word like SiKaioavv-q. If his arguments on righteousness are sometimes puzzling, it is rather because he overtaxed this term and its family ; he forced them to serve a variety of purposes, some of which were not obviously relevant to their original object and contemporary employment.
Like Jesus, though more often, he uses 'right- eousness' for the religious ideal, the relation to God in wliich all devout persons seek to stand. Thus, in Ro o/w-32 i,g writes : ' Gentiles who never aimed at righteousness have attained it — that is, righteousness by faith ; whereas Israel who did aim at the law of righteousness {i.e. at some code or rule which would lead to righteousness] has failed to reach that law. And why ? Simply because Israel has relied not on faith but on what they could do.' Similarly in the next section (10^""): 'They would not surrender to the right- eousness of God {i.e. to the righteousness which alone God will have and give], because they were ignorant of his righteousness [their zeal was not according to knowledge, v.^] and therefore essayed to set up a righteousness of their own. Now Christ is an end to law, so as to let every believer (em- phatic, as opposed to the man who relies on what he can do in the matter of obedience to law) liave righteousness. Moses writes of law-righteousness : anyone who can perform it shall live by it.t But here is what faith-righteousness says : Confess with .your mouth that Jesus is Lord, believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, J and you will be saved ; for with his heart man believes and is justified, with his mouth he con- fesses and is saved. No one who believes in him, the Scripture says, will ever be disappointed.'
These passages bring out two features of St. Paul's conception : (I) the contrast between God's
* He regrards hKatorrvvri as (ff ) complete virtue, in the general sense of obedience to law, and (b) as a special part of virtue, viz. fairness or equity.
t The original implies that this is quite possible (Lv 185 ; cf. Bar 4if- ; ' this is the book of the commandments of God, and the law that endureth for ever ; all they that hold it fast are to live, but such as leave it shall die '), but the present writer trans- lates as above in order to suggest St. Paul's meaning, viz. that it had been proved impossible.
t This cardinal note of saving faith, viz. belief in Jesus as the Risen Lord, was what St. Paul found already adumbrated in the faith of Abraham (Ro 41'- 24). in the OT, as in the NT, faith is elicited by, and directed towards, *a God who makes the dead live.'
righteousness and the religion which men make sincerely and passionately for themselves, and present as their own to God ('a righteousness of their own ' here is equivalent to ' a legal righteous- ness of my own ' in Ph 3") ; and ('2) the remarkable substitution of Christ for the Torah as the means of establishing a right relation to (Jod, involving 80 supreme and novel a conception of faith that St. Paul speaks of devotion to the Torah as though it really did not make faith count at all.* But, over and above tliese characteristics, it is notice- able that, probably owing to the particular argu- ment he has in hand, he retains the classical term ' righteousness ' for the great end which men sought by right and wrong ways of religious di-scipline.