As his section on Romans begins, Wright continues to reason beside the point. He begins, not surprisingly, with Romans 1:16-17 and with a discussion of what is meant by the “righteousness of God.” He says that, in effect, if we just read this verse without all the blinkers created by seventeenth century debates, we could see quite plainly that the “righteousness” involved here couldn’t be “anything other that God’s own ‘righteousness’, unveiled, as in a great apocalypse, before the watching world” (p. 154).
“But — still remembering Piper’s own statement about how Paul’s terms must ultimately be understood with reference to the actual contexts in which he uses them — the best argument for taking dikaiosyne theou in 1.17, 3.21, and 10.3 as ‘God’s faithfulness to the covenant with Abraham, to the single-plan-through-Israel-for-the-world’, is the massive sense it makes of passage after passage” (pp. 154-155).
So here is an expanded version, my summary of what Wright believes these verses to be saying.
“For I am not ashamed of the good message of what the Messiah has done, for it is God’s power for salvation, the fulfillment of His promise to Abraham, to all who believe, to the Jew first and also the Greek. For God’s faithfulness to His covenant promises is unveiled in it, from the Messiah’s faithfulness to our response of faith, as it is written, ‘The righteous shall live by faith’ (Rom. 1:16-17).
I began by saying that Wright was reasoning beside the point. Everyone agrees that this verse is compressed, and that if we want to understand it in the context of the rest of Romans, we have to pull it out, and watch it telescope outwards in our hands. There is no other way, for example, to deal with the cryptic phrase “from faith to faith.” But when Wright is done telescoping it his way, we are still left with all the same questions, and the same need to answer those questions the way the old perspective (and Paul in the rest of Romans) does. Wright is like the evolutionist who, pressed on the question of how life could have arisen on earth, takes refuge in the thesis that aliens planted the seeds of life here. Well, okay. Where did the aliens come from then?
I quite agree with Wright’s point that God in heaven does not have a righteousness that is directly imputed to us. I also agree that when God sent the Messiah He was displaying His covenantal faithfulness. So, does that make me new perspective? No, because we still have to answer the question of what God, in His expression of that covenant faithfulness, actually sent this Messiah to do. More on this in a moment.
This debate is like two boys arguing about a promise that their father had made them — say, that if they made the honor roll that semester, he would take them on a hunting trip. One boy is excited because they have both made the honor roll, and so he says, “this means that Dad is going to take us hunting.” And the other boy replies, “No, it simply means that Dad is faithful to his promise.” There is not really room for a debate here. There is no contradiction between saying that the father is faithful and saying that the father is faithful because he did what he said he was going to do. Wright persists in detaching “God’s covenantal faithfulness” from the obedience of the Messiah, who was the Incarnation and full embodiment of that covenantal faithfulness. Here is how I would pull on Romans 1:17-18, telescoping it outward.
“For I am not ashamed of the good message of what the Messiah has done, for it is God’s power for salvation, the fulfillment of His promise to Abraham, to all who believe, to the Jew first and also the Greek. For God’s faithfulness to His covenant promises is unveiled in it, a faithfulness revealed in the obedience of the Messiah on our behalf, which we appropriate by faith from first to last, as it is written, ‘The righteous shall live by faith’ (Rom. 1:16-17).
Yes, God’s righteousness is seen in His covenantal faithfulness. But that covenantal faithfulness is an incoherent concept without a Messiah who lived a perfect, righteous life that could be
gifted to us. Without that gift of the Messiah’s righteousness, God would
not have been covenantally faithful. Paul is already stretching, looking forward to this point.
“And not as it was by one that sinned, so is the gift: for the judgment was by one to condemnation, but the free gift is of many offences unto justification. For if by one man’s offence death reigned by one; much more they which receive abundance of grace and of the gift of righteousness shall reign in life by one, Jesus Christ.) Therefore as by the offence of one judgment came upon all men to condemnation; even so by the righteousness of one the free gift came upon all men unto justification of life” (Rom. 5:16-18).
I get righteousness from Jesus the same way I got unrighteousness from Adam — by imputation. My representative, my federal head, acted on my behalf, and what he did was credited to me.
So why was the righteousness of Jesus given to me as a gift? Because God is righteous and fulfills His covenant promises. It makes no sense for Wright to argue that because the father is “covenantally faithful,” he does not have to take his boys on that hunting trip. If he broke his promise, then he wouldn’t be faithful. If God didn’t send a Messiah whose obedience could then be reckoned or imputed as ours, then He wouldn’t have been faithful.
This is why, if the “righteousness of God” in chapter 1 means what Wright says it does, it still needs to telescoped outward as “the faithfulness of God in sending a Messiah whose righteousness would be imputed to us.” If someone else were shown to exist and was telescoping it out to be saying “the righteousness of God Himself imputed to us, oh yeah, through Jesus, I guess” then God bless him too in spite of the muddle. I don’t know who would say that, but any way you cut it, we are put right with God because someone else has obeyed Him on our behalf. No getting away from it, at least not in Paul.
