Saturday, February 6, 2021

W.G. Kümmel on Paul's Understanding of "To Justify" being Transformative, not Declarative Merely

  

There has always been a great deal of discussion about whether Paul speaks only of a "pronouncing righteous" or of a "making righteous" by God. In reality this is an idle dispute. It is true that the verb used by Paul in itself means nothing more than "declare righteous, pronounce righteous"; cf. also the contrast of "pronounce righteous" and "condemn" in Rom. 8:33-34; further, I Cor. 4:4: "I am not aware of anything against myself, but I am not thereby acquitted. It is the Lord who judges me" (RSV). But for Paul, God's action that acquits is a creative action which causes the godless to become righteous and makes the sinner into a "new creation"; in II Cor. 5:17, 21, "If  anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has passed away; behold, the new has come into being," is in parallel with "He had made him who knew no sin to be sin for us, that we might become the righteousness of God in him." And as in Rom. 5:1 Paul says, "We have peace with God," as a consequence of being justified by faith, so he says of himself, having turned away from the righteousness of the law: "I . . . not having my own righteousness which is of the law, but that [righteousness] which is through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God on the basis of faith" (Phil. 3:9; cf. also Col. 2:13-14). Indeed, for Paul God is the one "who gives life to the dead and calls into being that which does not exist" (Rom. 4:17), and therefore God's judgement is an event and his pronouncement of righteousness has "the character of power. Thus if for Paul "God's righteousness" denotes God's saving action, which in the present end-time declares sinful man righteous and thus is a newly creative force, then what is meant thereby becomes fully comprehensible to be sure, only when we observe the connection of this divine action with Jesus Christ and the precondition of faith for the pronouncement of justification. (W.G. Kümmel, Theology of the New Testament: Study Edition [John E. Steely; London: SCM Press, 1974], 198-99, emphasis in bold added)

 

Further Reading


Response to a Recent Attempt to Defend Imputed Righteousness