Romans 1:16

f. δύναμις γὰρ θεοῦ ἐστιν : for it is a power of God. It does no injustice to render “a Divine power”. The conception of the Gospel as a force pervades the epistles to the Corinthians; its proof, so to speak, is dynamical, not logical. It is demonstrated, not by argument, but by what it does; and, looking to what it can do, Paul is proud to preach it anywhere. εἰς σωτηρίαν : σωτηρία is one of a class of words (to which ζωὴ, δόξα, κληρονομία belong) used by Paul to denote the last result of the acceptance of the Gospel. It is the most negative of them all, and conceives of the Gospel as a means for rescuing men from the ἀπώλεια which awaits sinners at the last judgment. In παντὶ τῷ πιστεύοντι Ἰουδαίῳ τε πρῶτον καὶ Ἕλληνι another of the main interests of the writer in this epistle is brought forward; the Gospel is for all, the same Gospel and on the same terms, but without prejudice to the historical prerogative of the Jew. Romans 1:17 shows how the Gospel is a Divine saving power. It is such because there is revealed in it δικαιοσύνη θεοῦ. Plainly, δικαιοσύνη θεοῦ is something without which a sinful man cannot be saved; but what is it? The expression itself is of the utmost generality, and the various definite meanings which have been assigned to it attempt to justify themselves as relevant, or inevitable, by connecting themselves with the context as a whole. There can be no doubt that the fundamental religious problem for the Apostle that which made a Gospel necessary, that the solution of which could alone be Gospel was, How shall a sinful man be righteous before God? To Luther, who had instinctive experimental sympathy with the Pauline standpoint, this suggested that δικαιοσύνη θεοῦ meant a righteousness valid before God, of which a man can become possessed through faith; for such a righteousness (as the condition of salvation) is the first and last need of the sinful soul. In support of this view reference has been made to Romans 1:18, where ἀσέβεια and ἀδικία ἀνθρώπων are represented as the actual existing conditions which the δικ. θεοῦ has to replace. No one can deny that a righteousness valid before God is essential to salvation, or that such a righteousness is revealed in the Gospel; but it is another question whether δικ. θεοῦ is a natural expression for it. The general sense of scholars seems to have decided against it; but it seems quite credible to me that Paul used δικ. θεοῦ broadly to mean “a Divine righteousness,” and that the particular shade of meaning which Luther made prominent can be legitimately associated even with these words. Until lately, scholars of the most opposite schools had agreed in finding the key to the expression δικ. θεοῦ in two other Pauline passages, where it is contrasted with something else. Thus in chap. Romans 10:3 δικ. θεοῦ is opposed to man's ἰδία δικαιοσύνη; and in Philippians 3:9 the opposition is more precisely defined: μὴ ἔχων ἐμὴν δικαιοσύνην τὴν ἐκ νόμου, ἀλλὰ τὴν διὰ πίστεως Χριστοῦ, τὴν ἐκ θεοῦ δικαιοσύνην ἐπὶ τῇ πίστει. If this contrast were allowed to tell here, the righteousness of which Paul speaks would be one of which God is the source or author; we do not bring it to Him, He reveals it for our acceptance. And this also, of course, answers to the facts: Gospel righteousness is a gift, not an achievement. But then, it is said, there is nothing in the passage to suggest such a contrast; there is not any emphasis whatever on θεοῦ to bring before the mind the idea of a righteousness not due to God, but a work of man's own. To this it may fairly be answered that the contrast did not need to be specially suggested; if it had not presented itself instinctively to those to whom Paul wrote, they would not only have missed the point of this expression, they would not have understood three lines anywhere. We must assume, upon the whole, in the recipients of Paul's epistles, a way of conceiving the Gospel answering broadly to his own; the invisible context, which we have to reproduce as best we can, may be more important sometimes than what we have in black and white. The broad sense of “a Divine righteousness” covers this second, which may be called the historical Protestant interpretation, as well as Luther's; and the fact seems to me an argument for that broader rendering. In view, however, of the undoubted difficulty of the phrase, new light would be welcome, and this has been sought in the O.T. use of δικαιοσύνη (צְדָקָה), especially in the Psalms and in Isaiah 40-66. See, e.g., Psalms 35:24; Psalms 35:28; Psalms 51:14; Isaiah 56:1; Isaiah 62:1; Psalms 98:2. In the last of these passages we have a striking analogy to the one before us: ἐγνώρισε κύριος τὸ σωτήριον αὐτοῦ, ἐναντίον τῶν ἐθνῶν ἀπεκάλυψε τὴν δικαιοσύνην αὐτοῦ; and in others we cannot but be struck with the parallelism of “righteousness” and “salvation,” sometimes as things which belong to God (Psalms 98:2), sometimes as things which belong to His people. On the strength of facts like these, Theod. Häring, in a stupendous programme entitled Δικ. θεοῦ bei Paulus (Tübingen, 1896), argues that δικαιοσύνη θεοῦ means the judicial action of God in which He justifies His people and accomplishes their salvation. This fits into the context well enough. Put as Paul puts it how shall man be just with God? the religious problem is a judicial one, and its solution must be judicial. If the Gospel shows how God justifies (for of course it must be God, the only Judge of all, who does it), it shows everything: salvation is included in God's sentence of justification. Häring himself admits that this interpretation is rather of philological than of religious import; this “rechtfertigendes Walten Gottes” cannot but have as its consequence “the justification of man, a righteousness which proceeds from God and is valid before God” (Δικ. θεοῦ bei Paulus,. 68); that is, this meaning leads by immediate inference to 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 Romans 3:5, e.g., Häring himself admits this; in Romans 3:25-26, where he insists on the same sense as in Romans 1:17, he does not so much as refer to the clause διὰ τὴν πάρεσιν τῶν προγεγονότων ἁμαρτημάτων ἐν τῇ ἀνοχῇ αὐτοῦ, which, it is 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 attribute of God (cf. Romans 3:5) 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 difficulty 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. Romans 3:24-26) is a righteousness which, as man cannot produce it must be from 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 conception of an eternal and necessarily self-imparting righteousness of God. The Apostle, in chap. 3 and chap. 5, takes our minds along another route. See Barmby in Expositor for August, 1896, and S. and H. ad loc ἀποκαλύπτεται 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 a μυστήριον : cf. Romans 16:25 f. ἐκ πίστεως εἰς πίστιν. Precise definitions of this (e.g., Weiss's: the revelation of the δικ. θεοῦ presupposes faith in the sense of believing acceptance of the Gospel, i.e., it is ἐκ πίστεως : and it leads to faith in the sense of saving reliance on Christ, i.e., 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. Cf. 2Co 2:16; 2 Corinthians 3:18. This N.T. doctrine the Apostle finds announced before in Habakkuk 2:14. 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.

The Gospel of God's righteousness is necessary, because the human race has no righteousness of its own. This is proved of the whole race (Romans 1:18 to Romans 3:20), but in these verses (Romans 1:18-32) first of the heathen. The emphasis lies throughout on the fact that they have sinned against light.