[O]ne must take into consideration the fact that Paul did not develop his message of justification from the standpoint of the question posed by Luther. While Luther sought comfort for the assailed conscience of the individual sinner, and saw the portals of paradise opened up for him when he found in Rom. 1:16f. the message of the “righteousness which is valid before God” revealed as a gift for those who believe in the gospel, it is precisely in the letter to the Romans that Paul pursues the goal of showing how God, the creator and judge, brought about deliverance for Jews and Gentiles through the sending of his Son into the world. Only when one follows this perspective and sees that God causes his righteousness, which creates salvation, to be effective for Jews and Gentiles, that is, for all of humanity, in the sending, death, resurrection, and lordship of Christ, does the gospel of the righteousness of God which the apostle preaches take on a real worldwide dimension as well as taking on relevance from the perspective of the theology of creation. But that is not all. If one takes as a starting point this cosmic dimension of the gospel, then Romans can be understood as a whole in that it deals from chapters 1 to 16 with God’s righteousness in Christ for the salvation of the entire world. This comprehensive interpretive perspective includes that of Luther’s within it, but also goes far beyond it. It has been tested out exegetically and insightfully carried through by various modern interpreters of Paul (above all by A. Schlatter, E. Käsemann, and U. Wilckens). This perspective makes plain the soteriological breadth of the Paulin view of justification, together with the breadth of its creation theology. (Peter Stuhlmacher, Paul’s Letter to the Romans: A Commentary [trans. Scott J. Hafemann; Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox Press, 1994], 32)
The conceptual world of “justification” derives from the Old Testament and early Judaism. In Is. 50:7-9, God’s servant speaks of the fact that God will stand by him in his lawsuit against all his enemies and procure justice for him. Conversely, the sinner must confess that no human being is just before God, the judge (Ps. 143:2), or that, according to the Greek version of the text, “is justified (by God.” “Justification” and “to be justified” refer to legal acts. They can be used of contemporaneous acts within history but they can also refer to a legal act at the end of time (cf. Sir. 23:11; Ps. Sol. 8:26 on the one hand, and Is. 43:9; 45:25; Tg. Is. 53:11, on the other). Jesus speaks of “being justified” in the sense of the forgiveness of sins, which in turn is seen as an acceptance by God in the present (Lk. 18:14). Paul was also thoroughly acquainted with such a present-tense use of the expression, but he always linked it with an end-time perspective. The justification experienced in the present establishes the hope and certainty of justification in the final judgment. The justification experienced in the present establishes the hope and certainty of justification in the final judgment. Within early Judaism, the Qumran community comes the closest to this Pauline language convention (cf. 1QS 11:9-12). The active, “to justify,” is reserved in Paul’s writings for the activity of God (c. Gal. 3:8; Rom. 3:26, 30; 4:5; 8:30, 33). The passive, “to be justified,” can designate the recognition which the sinner must pay to the just God at the (final) judgment (cf. Rom. 3:4 following Ps. 51:6) . . . usually the passive designates the acceptance which people experience (or continue to be denied) by God at the judgment (cf. Gal 2:16f.; 3:11, 24; Rom. 2:12; 3:20, 24, 28, etc.) . . . In a postbiblical collection of Jewish homilies it is reported that “God said to the Israelites: Repent in those ten days between the New Year and the day of Atonement and I will declare you to be righteous on the day of Atonement and make you (through the forgiveness of sins) a new creature” (Pesiq. R. 40:169a). In exactly the same way it is already stated by Paul that “if someone is in Christ, (he) is a new creature; the old has passed away, behold, the new has come into being” (2 Cor. 5:17 with 5:21), and this promise of salvation, in a new way similar to Rom. 3:25f., can itself be traced back to the missionary church in Antioch. Atonement through Christ as a new creature and justification on the basis of the atoning death of Christ were already intertwined in the early church before Paul (and for this reason then also by him in 2 Cor. 5:14-21 and Rom. 5:1-11). Moreover, Rom. 3:23-26 has already shown us how concretely Paul understands “justification” (see above) and this is confirmed by the parallels between “to be justified” and “to be sanctified” in 1 Cor. 6:11 and Rom. 8:30. According to biblical thought, justification is a legal act of the creator God and therefore at the same time an act of new creation, by virtue of which those who are justified participate in the glory and righteousness which exist in God’s presence. Hence the dogmatic distinction which arose in the history of the church between a justification which is first only reckoned legally (forensic-imputed) and a justification which is at work (effective) is, measured by the examples just named, an unbiblical abstraction. (Ibid., 62, 63-64, emphasis added)
On Paul’s theology of water baptism in Rom 6:
The specifically Pauline understanding of baptism results from the fact that the apostle calls special attention to those assertions concerning justification which determines the meaning of those baptismal texts which had already existed before him (1 Cor. 1:30; 6:11; Rom. 3:25f.; 4:25, etc.). In other words, Paul understands baptism from the perspective of the gospel entrusted to him. He thus emphasizes that those who are baptized obtain in baptism a share in the effect of the atoning death of Jesus on the cross, that they are “sanctified” through him, and that they are aligned with Christ as their living Lord and reconciler. At baptism, those who are baptized are given over to a teaching which for them is determinative for their life and consequently identical with the “gospel” of 1 Cor. 15:3-5 (cf. Rom. 6:17). Baptism, justification, and sanctification are therefore inseparably bound together with one another. By virtue of baptism those who are baptized obtain a share in the atoning power of the death of Jesus and are placed into the reality of a new life which already begins here and now in the church, but which is completed only with the future resurrection of the dead and eternal fellowship of Christ. On the one hand, then, those who believe are crucified together with Christ and buried in death in the act of baptism (Gal. 2:19; Rom. 6:6). On the other hand, the Spirit of the living Christ takes possession of the baptized, who have been freed from their sins and “sanctified,” so that, as Paul formatively says, they now live in Christ and he in them (Gal. 2:20). By the power of this Spirit they confess Christ as their new Lord (1 Cor. 12:3; Rom. 10:9f.), obediently follow his command (1 Cor. 7:19; Gal. 6:2), and look forward in certain hope to their final justification and participation in Jesus’ resurrection glory (1 Thess. 4:14; Rom. 8:28ff.; Phil. 3:20f.). With baptism as a change in lordship from sin to righteousness, from idols to Christ, those who are baptized have become “new creatures” (2 Cor. 5:17), so that they live henceforth in a life of mutuality with and for one another in the fellowship of the body of Christ (1 Cor. 12:12ff.; Rom. 12:3ff.). (Ibid., 99)
