“Righteousness” and “justification” have the same range of meaning as “honor” (Hebrew כבוד kaboud or Greek τιμαω timao) because honor denotes how one is regarded by others and as one claims for one’s self. To honor another is synonymous with “imparting glory” (εδοξασαν—edoxasan) to another. For Paul, honor is glory that is given to another as a gift as a matter of grace. It connotes a certain virtue and sacred value conferred by a patron on a servant/client. IT is well known that one of the problems of discussing this issue in English is that in Greek the words “righteousness” (δικαιοσυνη) and “to justify” (δικαιοω) are cognate terms. However, that crucial association is lost when translated as “righteousness” and “justification” in English. “To justify” is pregnant with covenant-related meaning in Paul’s thought. Thus, Hendrick Grobel translates it as to “rightwise” and E. P. Sanders has attempted to overcome this deficit in English by translating “to justify” as “to righteous.” Nevertheless, both terms miss the essential idea that God honors us because he is honorable in keeping his covenant. However, if we assert that we are honored by God because he is honorable, or that we are loved by God because he is loving, we recapture better a sense of what is asserted. Honor and respect are not properties of the one honored and respected, but of the one who confers them. God loves his children—not because they have earned or merited his love, but because he is loving.
In the traditional matrix of explaining God’s righteousness
and justification by grace, we are granted a certain property P because God has
property P and he has imputed property P to us. However, “moral righteousness”
is a property that cannot be given to or transferred form one person to
another. Moral properties such as righteousness by their very nature describe a
person who has done certain acts. It describes the reciprocal relation between
a person’s acts, what choices arise out of a person’s character, and how
personal character is formed in making such choices. Thus, it is a person’s “character”
that is righteous, and no one else can confer my character on me but me. My
character characterizes me and not anyone else. However, honor is something
that is imputed or ascribed to a client by a patron. Love is a certain regard
and interpersonal commitment that one person can have for another without having
been earned—in the way the parent loves a child. God can grant us honor without
a community that honors him y himself recognizing us as his sons and daughters.
He can love us because he is loving. Further, love, by its nature, is given
without being earned. What is transferred to us is not mortal standing before
God, but honor. The honor that is transferred to us it not our own, but Christ’s
honor that he demonstrated by his willingness to submit to all things for the
Father. Christ is honored by the father for his life of total devotion and
service to God. God honors us because we swear fealty or primary loyalty to him
through the meditation of Jesus Christ. The crucial point of Pau’s theology of
justification by grace is that those who are “in Christ” are justified by faith
in Christ, for to be “in Christ” is to be a part of the corporate body that God
has accepted as being in right-relationship with him through the covenant given
by grace that is brokered by Christ as mediator.
Furthermore, the faithfulness at issue is the “obedience of
faith” wherein we commit to honor God by living the rest of our lives as
devoted clients who honor and glorify him by doing loving acts (Romans 15;
16:26). “Faith” is a much richer term in Hebrew (אֱמוְּנָה—emunah) and
Greek (πιστις—pistis) than it is in English. It means interpersonal faithfulness,
loyalty, trust, and belief in the sense of committed conviction shown by one’s
entire way of life. Faith as discussed by Paul entails the type of loyal faithfulness
and lifelong commitment that is inherent in patron-client relationships.
However, the notion of covenant faithfulness involved in justification by faith
is best seen by the topic of the “new perspective” on Paul, . . .
Blake T. Ostler, Exploring Mormon Thought: The Problems of
Theism and the Love of God (Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books, 2006), 303-4
