KIGHTEOUSNESS
RIGHTEOUSNESS
389
God to justify sinners, what justilies Him in justi- fying tliein, is the IXaar-fipLov of Christ. It is tlirough this sacrilicial death that (Jod's moral character as SUaios becomes, in rehition to liuniaii sin, the attitude and action of a BiKaiuv. Till Christ and outside of Christ there is no righteous- ness for men.
This is the vital point at which the conception of righteo<]sness crosses the conception of atonement in St. i'aul's theology. Without trespassing on the province of the articles Justikication and Atone- ment, we may point out that in the present pas- sage St. Paul distinctly regjvrds tlie sacrilicial death of Christ as the e.\plicit sentence of God on human sin. This is why he speaks of the past, and in so doing uses SiKaimrvfr] in v.^'- in the specific .sense of 'justice.' In the death of Christ as the one adequate ottering for sin, God now shows His real mind towards sin and sinners as punitive and judi- cial ; He condemns sin, and thus cannot be sus- pected of any indifference to it. Men, arguing from the long past when He forbore to exhibit any such weighty reprobation as the death of Christ now conveyed, might impugn His justice, as if He were indifferent to moral interests. But the terrible expression of His real attitude in the death of Christ removed any such suspicion ; it revealed for the first time and finally His true verdict on sin. If He had forborne to show this until now, that was because He sent Christ, as St. Paul elsewhere argues,* at the proper moment in the world's history, not because of any failure to conserve the interests of justice. St. Paul would have admitted that sins had been visited by God's anger in the past ; this is the thought of Ro 1"'- (' God's anger is revealed from heaven against all the impiety and wickedness of men'). The mere fact of death (Ro 5'-') showed that sin had consequences for sinners. But until the death of Christ on the Cross the full exhibition of God's condemnation of sin could not be made ; and it had to be made, not only in view of the previous forbearance or abey- ance of judgment, by which God had spared the Jews, instead of punishing them by extinction, but in order to realize the new righteousness. That new righteousness or state of acceptance with God involved a recognition of the just connexion between sin and death ('God himself is just'), and at the same time of a gracious power triumphing over both ('all are justified for nothing by his grace through the ransom provided in Christ Jesus,' 'he justifies man on the score of faith in Jesus'). This demonstration was furnished in the death of Christ, the Divine Being who died on the Cross neither as a sinner nor as a sinless individual but as God's Son, the innocent for the guilty, reversing the fatal consequences of Adam's transgression and inaugurating a new relationship between God and His people, on the basis of faith in Himself. When St. Paul describes this death as a ransom, he is thinking pre-eminently of its positive results in the creation of fellowship rather than of its negative side. The uppermost idea is the restora- tion to God of those who belong to Him, not of what they are ransomed from, nor of the particular price paid. It is God who provides this sacrifice, as it is God who desires the restoration. Obviously, the new content of the religion is larger than the old .sacrificial metaphors employed to state it, but i\a(rT77pioi' does carry sacrificial meaning. Here as elsewhere the fundamental thing in righteousness is the positive relation of life to which those who believe in Christ are admitted, their new standing beforeGod('Weare justified by faith . . .through our Lord Jesus Christ we have got access to this grace where we have our standing '). It is not
* ' In due time' (Ro 6^), ' when rh n\riatjju.a toO xpovov came ' (Gal 4-1).
exhausted in the assurance that they are now con- sidered far from blauie and no longer liable to punishment. Whether ' the righteousness of God ' means God bringing men to Himself or the rela- tion in which they stand to Him when they are thus brought home — and both meanings naturally emerge, and emerge together, in St. Paul's lan- guage—the cardinal idea is the same ; it would be scholastic to imagine that he thought of this righteousness either as a preliuiimiry action of God, clearing away the obstacles in order to let the Spirit have full play, or as a state which required to be vivified by a second act of grace. Here the contrast between the Law and the ran- som is enough to explode any such misinterpreta- tion. The l\ajT-fipiot> eiuibles (Jod to do what the Law could never do, and if the Law meant any- thing it meant the maintt^nance of living com- munion between God and men.
Such were the presuppositions underneath the first allusion to the Divine righteousness in Romans (1"), for the gospel in which it is disclosed has been already described in vv.-" as a gospel of re- demption through Jesus Christ, God's Son. God's anger is revealed from heaven against human sin, and the counterpart is the revelation of His right- eousness, for the moral situation is such that man cannot put himself right with God. This revelation of His righteousness is inaugurated by the sacrificial death and resurrection of Ciirist ; it is not a revela- tion which has been in existence from the beginning, the revelation of a Divine attribute which con- stantly unfolds itself in human history and has acquired a heightened expression through Christ. On the other hand, it is not punitive, for the attitude of God to sin is described as 'anger.' What is denoted by ' righteousness ' is saving power, as defined more fully elsewhere.* The main diH'erence between the use of the phrase SiKaio- aivT) 6eov here and in most of the other passages is that the emphasis falls upon biKaiocvvrj in this passage, not on 6eod. The contrast is between ■ righteousness ' and ' anger.' Human sin leaves no alternative but for God to show His moral dis- pleasure in punishment, but He freely and gra- ciously reveals through Christ how sinners can be right with Him. His righteousness is the new- hope for men who have brought upon themselves His anger.