Saturday, September 18, 2021

Matthew Fenn on Luther's Understanding of "the Righteousness of God" in Romans 1:17

  

Luther was schooled in the nominalist tradition of the via moderna, following thinkers such as William of Ockham and Gabriel Biel. While there were indeed nominalists who are Augustinian, such as Gregory of Rimini, the school of nominalists who trained Luther was not. From Biel’s textbook, Luther learned that the sinner was not so far gone that they could not do what lay within them and respond to God with some small moral effort. These influences can be seen in the beginning of Luther’s lectures on the Psalms in 1513. It was during these lectures on the Psalms when Luther encountered the concept of “the righteousness of God.” Biel and the nominalist scholars with whom Luther was acquainted all understood iustitia Dei as a subjective genitive referring to God’s own retributive justice, whereby he punishes those who break divine law.

 

Luther had great distress over, even hatred for, this phrase “the righteousness of God” because it seems to him that Paul talking about the gospel revealing the righteousness of God in Romans 1:17 was a further revelation of God’s retributive justice. Luther found it impossible to see how the retributive justice of God could be “good news” for sinners. Sometime in the Autumn of 1514, Luther found his solution. He saw the righteousness of God not as a quality of God but as a gift from God. For Luther, the righteousness of God is that righteousness God gives to us to receive passively by faith. The righteousness that God’s justice demands of us is the very thing that God freely gives to us. So, Luther saw it as an objective genitive, not a subjective genitive. To his delight, Luther found precedent for his interpretation in St. Augustine’s anti-Pelagian work On the Spirit and the Letter.

 

Far from a simplistic reading, if one looks at how Luther understood the righteousness of God in other passages in Romans, it becomes clear that his view is a bit more nuanced. In effect, Luther thought that God’s gift of righteousness and his free justification of the sinner exhibits God’s own righteousness. God demonstrates that he is righteousness not because he punishes the wicked but because he gives righteousness to sinners as a gift. Chester further notes, “The point for Luther is not to deny that the phrase ‘the righteousness of God’ means God’s being righteous in God’s self, but rather to insist that this subjective genitive sense is true for us only on the basis of the objective genitive sense” (Chester, Reading Paul with the Reformers, 209). This connection between the subjective genitive sense and the objective genitive sense for Luther is made chiefly by means of union with Christ by faith. For Luther, faith in God is directly connected to God’s righteousness because faith ascribes righteousness to God. Additionally, faith and participation with Christ are intimately connected, as Christ “is present in the faith itself.” As Vainio points out, for Luther, the righteousness of God is the righteousness of Christ, and through faith we participate in Christ (Olli-Pekka Vainio, “Luther and Theosis: A Response to Critics of Finnish Luther Research,” in Pro Ecclesia 24, no. 4 [2015]: p. 63).

 

What is new in Luther is not necessarily his reading of the text, but how Luther applies this text to the salvation of sinners. Luther places a complete emphasis upon the saving action of God through Christ for the sake of the sinner. (Matthew Fenn, “Defending God’s Honor: The Righteousness of God in Light of Honor and Shame,” in Jordan Cooper and Matthew Fenn, eds., The Doctrine of Justification: Theological Essays from the Weidner Institute [The Weidner Institute, 2021], 221-68, here, pp. 225-28)