First, I believe it is significant
that the patristic and medieval tradition, especially among the Greek-speaking
fathers, is nearly unanimous in taking δικαοσυνη as referring to the righteous status
conferred on the believe as a gift and the genitive θεου as a genitive of source of author. If
the fathers who were native Greek speakers did not see “covenant faithfulness”
or iustitia salutifera in this Pauline lexeme, and rather interpreted δικαοσυνη in a manner more in line with its traditional meaning
in extra-biblical Greek (i.e., as “righteous” or “a righteous status”), then
there is good reason to doubt that correctness of the Hebraic/relational view.
Second, while the
Reformers undeniably departed from the patristic and medieval tradition when
they asserted that the righteousness from God is imputed rather than infused,
they nevertheless operated within the same lexical and syntactical framework of
patristic and medieval interpretation. (Charles Lee
Irons, “ΔΙΚΑΙΟΣΥΝΗ ΘΕΟΥ: A Lexical Examination of the Covenant-Faithfulness
Interpretation” [PhD Dissertation; Fuller Theological Seminary, May 2011], 12-13)
This is not to say that the church
fathers held what would later be known as the Reformational understanding of justification.
None of them made the sharp distinction between justification and
sanctification that would later characterize the Reformation’s central insight.
(Ibid., 25)
To be sure, there are important points
of discontinuity between the Reformation and the patristic interpretational traditions.
Arguably the most significant point of discontinuity is that the Reformation tradition
treats “the righteousness of God” as the imputed righteousness of Christ,
making a sharp distinction between justification as a purely forensic act, on
the one hand, and the moral renewal and sanctification of the believer, on the
other. (Ibid., 26)
In his anti-Pelagian treatise, “On the
Spirit and the Letter,” Augustine made the following statement about Rom 3:21:
He does not say, the righteousness of
man, or the righteousness of his own will, but the “righteousness of God,”—not that
whereby He is Himself righteous, but that with which He endows man when He
justifies the ungodly. (Augustine, De spiritu et littera 9.15. NPNF1
5.89)
Augustine’s interpretation was hugely
influential throughout the medieval period, and even Luther, Calvin and the
Reformation tradition followed the same general path, although they
emphasized that the righteousness was given to humans by a forensic declaration
rather than by the transformation of the new life in Christ. (Ibid.,
278-79)