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18. ᾽ΑΠΟΚΑΛΥΠΤΕΤΑΙ γὰρ ὀργὴ Θεοῦ dm οὐρανοῦ ἐπὶ πᾶσαν
ἀσέβειαν καὶ ἀδικίαν ἀνθρώπων τῶν τὴν ἀλήθειαν ἐν ἀδικίᾳ " κατεχόν-
rather of philological than of religious import; this ‘‘ rechtfertigendes Walten Gottes’’ cannot but have as its conse- quence ‘‘the justification of man, a tighteousness which proceeds from God and is valid before God” (Aux. θεοῦ dei Paulus, S. 68); that is, this meaning leads by immediate inference το the other two. But it can by no means be carried through (any more than either of the other two) in all places where the phrase occurs; in ili. 5, ¢.g., Haring himself admits this; in iii, 25, 26, where he insists on the same sense as in i. 17, he does hot so much as refer to the clause διὰ τὴν πάρεσιν τῶν προγεγονότων ἁμαρτημάτων ἐν τῇ ἀνοχῇ αὐτοῦ, which, it 1 not too much to say, necessitates a different shade of meaning for δικαιοσύνη θεοῦ there: see note. The advantage of his rendering is not so much that it simplifies the grammar, as that it revives the sense of a connection (which existed for the Apostle) between the Gospel he preached, and even the language he preached it in, and the anticipations of that Gospel in the O.T., and that it gives prominence to the saving character of God’s justifying action. In substance all these three views are Biblical, Pauline and true to experience, whichever is to be vindicated on philological grounds. But the same cannot be said of another, according to which righteousness is here an attribute, or even the character, of God. That the Gospel is the supreme revelation of the character of God, and that the character of God is the source of the Gospel, no one can question. Certainly Paul would not have questioned it. But whether Paul conceived the righteousness which is an eternal attri- bute of God (cf. iii. 5) as essentially self-communicative—whether he would have said that God justifies (δικαιοῖ) the ungodly because he is himself δίκαιος--- is another matter. The righteousness of God, conceived as a Divine attribute, may have appeared to Paul the great diffi- culty in the way of the justification of sinful man. God’s righteousness in this sense is the sinner’s condemnation, and no one will succeed in making him find in it the ground of his hope. What is wanted (always in consistency with God’s righteousness as one of His inviolable attributes—the great point elaborated in chap. iii. 24-26) is a righteousness which, as man cannot produce it. must be from
s 2 Thess.it 6,7.
God, and which, once received, shall be valid before God; and this is what the Apostle (on the ground of Christ’s death for sin) announces, But it introduces confusion to identify with this the con- ception of an eternal and necessarily self-imparting righteousness of God. The Apostle, in chap. iii. and chap. v., takes our minds along another route. See Barmby in Expositor for August, 1896, and S. and H. ad loc. ἀποκαλύπ- τεται intimates in a new way that the Divine righteousness spoken of is from God: man would never have known or conceived it but for the act of God in revealing it. Till this ἀποκαλύπτειν it was µυστήριον: cf. xvi. 25 f. ἐκ πίστεως εἰς πίστιν. Precise definitions of this (e.g., Weiss’s: the revelation of the Sux. θεοῦ presupposes faith in the sense of believing acceptance of the Gospel, 7.e., it is ἐκ πίστεως: and it leads to faith in the sense of saving reliance on Christ, z.¢., it is εἰς πίστιν) strike one as arbitrary. The broad sense seems to be that in the revelation of God’s righteousness for man’s salvation everything is of faith from first to last. Gy. 2 Cor. ii. το “iii, πδ Της NED: doctrine the Apostle finds announced before in Hab. ii. 14. ἐκ πίστεως in the quotation is probably to be construed with ζήσεται. To take it with δίκαιος (he who is righteous by faith) would imply a contrast to another mode of being righteous (viz., by works) which there is nothing in the text to suggest. The righteous who trusted in Jehovah were brought by that trust safe through the impending judgment in Habakkuk’s time; and as the subjective side of religion, the attitude of the soul to God, never varies, it is the same trust which is the condition of salvation still.