“For I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ: for it is the power of God unto salvation to every one that believeth; to the Jew first, and also to the Greek. For therein is the righteousness of God revealed from faith to faith: as it is written, ‘The just shall live by faith.’”
We have now looked at Paul’s initial greetings to the Christians of Rome and if we can imagine our exploration of the Epistle as a travel adventure with St. Paul, with our texts today we have finally arrived at the outskirts of the imperial city. For a moment let us imagine that we stand next to Paul upon some great hill taking in the vision before us – the great City of the Earth sometimes called the “umbilicus mundi,” the “navel of the world.” Way off we may have recognized the Circus Maximus but the Roman Forum and most of the pagan temples as well as the grand baths would have been hardly visible amongst the chockfull, wall-to-wall building of stucco brick or wood, hay and stubble. The harbor known as the Emporium would be jam-packed around the clock with barges and boats being furiously unloaded and then reloaded with goods from around the world. Based on the supply of grain known to have been required to feed the city’s inhabitants for one year in Augustus’ reign, the population of Rome, on the day Paul set foot there, would have been around 1,400,000 souls. The smoke and haze from small fires for cooking in homes and shops would rise and camouflage the little capillary-like streets that teemed with life and tied the city together. It would be very easy to get lost. And unless we do this right, it would be very easy to get lost in the Epistle to the Romans as well.
And if we liken the whole Epistle to the city itself and if we liken the verses to the little streets that hold the whole together, today we come upon the verse that will either open wide the doors of meaning to Paul’s Epistle or shut them up. We stand before two roads that diverge at the entrance of the city and we must take one and leave the other behind. I am speaking metaphorically of two interpretations of verse 17:
“For therein is the righteousness of God revealed from faith to faith: as it is written, ‘The just shall live by faith.’”
The words “For therein” point back to verse 16:
“For I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ: for it is the power of God unto salvation to every one that believeth; to the Jew first, and also to the Greek.”
St. Paul is not ashamed of the Gospel of Christ because he is a true apostle and Christ himself was known by all to have said his true disciples would not be ashamed of him:
“For what is a man profited, if he gain the whole world, and lose or forfeit his own self? For whosoever shall be ashamed of me and of my words, of him shall the Son of man be ashamed, when he cometh in his own glory…” Luke 9:26
The Gospel of Christ that Paul proclaims unashamedly is itself the power of God, God’s power that is capable of saving everyone – unleashed into the world. Rome was massive, powerful and wealthy and Augustus may have move armies to feed the citizen of the city, but the God of Jesus Christ is more powerful than Caesar and Paul is his slave. When Paul says that the Good News of Christ is able to save everyone who believes, by belief or faith he means more than simply assenting to the truth of something. He means that it saves those who believe, receive and adjust their frail and flawed lives according to the Gospel of Christ. This is more than merely assenting to the truth with our minds; it is assenting to the truth with our whole lives. There is no such thing as mere “believe-ism” for Christians.
And it means that the life that Christ lived, the death he endured and his own bodily resurrection – the Gospel – is for “everyone.” That is every single person – each individual person and the whole world are both the objects of God’s redeeming love in the Gospel of Jesus Christ:
“to every one that believeth; to the Jew first, and also to the Greek.”
That is Paul’s way of saying that the saving power of the Gospel of Christ is meant for the individual and for the whole cosmos. The Church of God is saved, but the individual members of the Church of God are saved as well. God’s salvation in Christ is not just meant for the community of the Church, it is also meant for each individual person who believes and is baptized into Christ. There is no phony division between the individual and the community in the work of God. Again Jesus made this very point:
“What man of you, having an hundred sheep, if he loses one of them, doth not leave the ninety and nine in the wilderness, and go after that which is lost, until he find it?” Luke 15:4
Jesus is not suggesting that a shepherd should leave 99 sheep unattended in the wilderness in order to find the one lost sheep, but rather that that value of the community of the Church may not be set against the value of the individual person whom Christ loves and calls into his life.
“For therein is the righteousness of God revealed from faith to faith: as it is written, ‘The just shall live by faith.’”
Paul is saying that the Gospel of Christ – the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ is both the saving power of God and a revelation of God’s righteousness. Now we have come a fork in the road as we prepare to enter Rome – here two roads diverge and we must chose one or the other. What am I talking about? We must decide what Paul means by “the righteousness of God?” Like the poet we may be sorry that we cannot take both roads, but the fact of the matter is that we cannot do so. We have to take one or the other. And our decision on this matter, on the meaning of the words “God’s righteousness,” will make all the difference as we attempt to understand what Paul was saying to the Roman Christians.
We are talking about the meaning of two words – “God’s righteousness.” There is one road that has seen far more traffic than the other and that is the one paved by Martin Luther and Luther’s road has been taken as the received wisdom of the Reformation ever since. How did Luther and the Reformers understand verse 17?
According to Luther and other Reformers, the “righteousness of God” means “God’s verdict of righteousness upon the believer.” In other words “God’s righteousness” isn’t about God at all, but it should be understood as God’s imputation of righteousness to believers. What does that mean? It means that God declares the believer to be righteous because of his faith, not because of his faithfulness. No such quality as actual righteousness belongs to the believer; it is not in any sense personal righteousness and in fact it is impossible for the believer to have actual righteousness at all because he is always a sinner. Those who hold to this interpretation of God’s righteousness will be fond of verses that seem to support their position:
“But we are all as an unclean thing, and all our righteousnesses are as filthy rags.” Isaiah64:6
So when Paul writes of the God’s righteousness in the Epistle to the Romans, from Luther’s understanding Paul means the verdict of righteousness that God declares on behalf of the believer: you are declared to be as righteous as Christ himself because you have faith in Christ, because you believe in the Gospel. But in fact you are not righteous one single bit and even what you think may be righteous in your life is no more than a filthy, unclean rag. This is justification by faith alone as understood by Luther and many of the Reformers.
There are those who take this to its logical conclusion – beyond where Luther and the Reformers would have gone – which is antinomianism, which means that there is no moral law to which a Christian is obligated because faith alone is necessary for salvation. The belief that God’s righteousness is in fact the righteousness of Christ applied to the believer, that the Christian is declared to be as righteous as Christ because of faith alone is certainly the well-beaten path since the Reformation. The problem with that interpretation of verse 17 is that it is wrong and if we take that road as we venture into Romans we will soon get lost and find nothing but one cul-de-sac after another.
“For therein is the righteousness of God revealed from faith to faith: as it is written, ‘The just shall live by faith.’”
So the job before us now is to understand how St. Paul understood “the righteousness of God” and take that road. First of all, Paul’s understanding of righteousness or uprightness or doing justice was from the perspective of a Jew in antiquity and so it would never be something that an individual person accomplished on his or her own as an isolated individual. Righteousness, being upright, doing justice means living up to the claims that others make upon us by virtue of our covenantal relationship with them. Righteousness is known by virtue of our relations within a community. For Jesus and his Apostles, including St. Paul the community that laid claim upon their lives was Israel who embodied the covenant that God made with Abraham. But now Paul says that there is a greater relationship, a new community, and a new covenant that one enters into by believing the Gospel of Christ. And this new covenant is for everyone, the Jew and for the Greek, for the whole world.
But remember that belief or faith is not merely assenting to the truth of the Gospel, but rather it is receiving it into one’s life so that having faith in Christ is equivalent to being faithful to Christ. To live according to the truth of the Gospel is to live in accordance to one’s belief and that is to live by faith – “the just shall live by faith.” To repeat, this is never an individual, isolated experience – it is always in the holy community of the Church, the New Israel.
How then do we define God’s righteousness? The “righteousness of God” is God’s own “covenant faithfulness” to Jesus Christ and to all who are in Jesus Christ. It is God’s own action in restoring and sustaining his fallen creation in Christ. Furthermore, God’s gift of salvation also challenges and enables us to respond faithfully to his gift of Christ. It is not mere imputation. Justification by faith means that God not only counts us righteous, but he is busy making us righteous by drawing us and by sustaining us in the Church. Luther was right about one thing: on our end, we will continue to be a flawed, imperfect partner; but on God’s end he will continue to sustain us as we grow up and mature in this saving relationship. We are justified by faith because we are completely dependent upon God’s faithfulness. What is astonishing is that our puny trust in God, our flawed faith is a sign of God’s faithfulness. And his faithfulness is unveiled to the whole wide world by the faith of a single Christian just as much as by the faith of the whole Church. This is the road that we shall take as we leave the other one behind. Now if you are not entirely sure that you see the difference between the two diverging roads, if it seems a bit cloudy right now, don’t worry about it. The deeper we trod into Romans, the more focused will the righteous God become.