We may ask. Why is not love the antithesis to anger? It really is, in St. Paul's view. The en- tire justification of men is due to God's love. 'Therefore, as we are justified by faith, let us enjoy our peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ . . . since God's love Hoods our hearts. . . . God proves his love for us by this, that Christ died for us when we were still sinners' (Ro 5'-°). St. Paul never distinguishes, as moderns have often done, between love and righteousness in God. In- cidentally, as we have already seen, he recognizes a sense in wdiich 'righteous' is less than 'loving' as applied to men, but God is never 'righteous' to him in this sense of the term. Probably the reason why he prefers to speak of God's righteous- ness rather than of His love, in this connexion, is either because he cherishes the old classical term, or because he was dealing with a controversial topic in its own vocabulary, or because he desired to emphasize the moral quality and aim of God's nature and dealings with men. This may be why he uses ' righteousness ' here, just as elsewhere he chooses to speak of grace, which is only the Divine love in action upon the sin of men. ' Righteous- ness' is God's nature revealed in its special purpose of dealing with the desperate situation of man's sin and guilt ; the Johannine theology uses ' love ' outright in this connexion, but St. Paul generally
* E.g. in 326 (God ' just himself and the justitier of ' men).
3yu
KIGHTEOUSNESS
KIGHTEOUS.NESS
prefers the term 'grace' as an equivalent for tliis purpose in its jjersonal action upon sinners who yield, ami ' anger' for the rehition of God to wilful disobedience and rebellion. It is characteristic of his Jewish training that he employs a term like ' righteousness ' to express not only what was fundamentally a religious relation between God anil man, but also the moral issues of that relation. The ])ersistence witli which he rules out any human element which might compromise the absolute grace of God in justifying sinners becomes all the more significant when we find that he did not hesitate still to use this very term 'righteousness' as one of the words for the ethical outcome or aspect of justification. To this we may now pass. (c) Gods righteousness and the new life. — The problem of the ne.\us between this faith-righteous- ness and the moral life of the Christian, between the free forgiveness which cuts away 'works' as establishing any claim on God and the strong ethical interests of the Pauline gospel, is un- usually difficult, but it has sometimes been made needlessly difficult by dogmatic handling. For example, some of the Reformed theologians, in a laudable effort to oppose the Roman theory of merits, occasionally tended to reduce faith to a bitrren assent, which emptied it of ethical content, making it either (a) a mere organ for receiving the initiiil blessing of forgiveness, i.e. assent to a doctrine of salvation, or (b) too much a matter of subjective feeling. Luther himself, in his sheer anxiety to safeguard the interests of saving faith, now and then allowed himself to say paradoxical things which suggested that there could be justif}'- ing faith apart from love. Luther is certainly a better exegete of St. Paul at this point, in the main, than the tradition derived from Augustine. Augustine tended to regard human faith as worth- less until it was infused and vitalized by Divine grace, and he seems now and then to read St. Paul as if God's grace revived faith and made it ethically valid by means of the sacraments. The spirit of Luther's fundamental interpretation is at any rate more true to the Apostle's teaching. At the same time, the problem of the relation between right- eousness by faith and the conduct of the Christian really does belong to the problem of justification (q.v.), for St. Paul, as we have seen (above, p. 372), does not scruple to speak of the Christian life as ' righteousness ' in the non-technical as well as in the technical sense of the term. The vexed prob- lem of the relation between righteousness by faith and the judgment on works (wliich includes Christians) might be supposed to lie, strictly speak- ing, outside oiir subject ; for while St. Paul regards justifying faith as in no essential respect ditterent from the faith which underlies the entire course of the Christian experience, he generally employs other methods of statement (the 'fruit of the Spirit,' etc.) to elucidate the general conduct of the Christian. The terminology of righteousness by faith did not rule his whole theology. Yet, whatever explanation may be adopted of the nexus between the so-called forensic and ethical sides of his tlieology, the term ' righteousness ' is not always dropped when he proceeds to state the latter. This is clear, e.g., in Ro 6'^'^-, where he reiterates the thought that Christians must dedicate them- selves to 'the service of righteou.sness.' Life is a service, however you take it, he implies.* In fact, apologizing for the oxymoron, he calls the new life a ' slavery to righteousness ' ! ' Set free from sin, you have passed into the service of righteousness '