Paul and the Apocalyptic Imagination

by Ben C Blackwell

  Käsemann’s interpretation of “the righteousness of God” in Paul is shaped by this religionsgeschichtliche thesis, especially in terms of method. Working in the tradition of Hermann Cremer’s programmatic suggestion that Paul’s expression, “the righteousness of God,” is derived from and consonant with the Old Testament understanding of righteousness as a “relational concept” (Verhältnisbegriff),[10] Käsemann’s hermeneutic works to the Pauline definition of δικαιοσύνη θεοῦ from the pre-Pauline meaning of the phrase. In his words, “I begin my own attempt to interpret the facts by stating categorically that the expression δικαιοσύνη θεοῦ was not invented by Paul.”[11] For Käsemann, δικαιοσύνη θεοῦ is a “formulation which Paul has taken over,” a formulation stemming from Deut. 33:21 and mediated to Paul via apocalyptic Judaism, as evidenced by the use of the phrase in T. Dan 6:10; 1QS 10:25; 11:12; 1QM 4:6.[12] This means that, from where Paul stands in the history of his religion, δικαιοσύνη θεοῦ is a “feste Formel,”[13] a traditional phrase with a trajectory of use that pre-defines the phrase as used by Paul. Thus, while Käsemann can say, with reference to Phil. 3:9 and Rom. 3:22, that “whatever else God’s eschatological righteousness may be, at any rate it is a gift,”[14] he insists on “der Machtcharakter der Gabe” because “the formulation which Paul has taken over [i.e., δικαιοσύνη θεοῦ] speaks primarily of God’s saving activity, which is present in his gift.”[15]

  The hermeneutic, governed by the religionsgeschichtliche thesis, is that defining δικαιοσύνη θεοῦ in Paul requires finding δικαιοσύνη θεοῦ outside of and before Paul. Käsemann knows what Paul means when he writes “the righteousness of God”—“God’s lordship over the world which reveals itself eschatologically in Jesus”[16]—because he knows that “in the field of the Old Testament and of Judaism in general,” the same phase is used to describe God’s saving action undertaken in faithfulness to those with whom he is in covenant relationship.[17] To borrow Luther’s words to describe Käsemann’s method, pre-Pauline “use and custom,” what we might call the theological lexicon of the Old Testament and apocalyptic Judaism, interpret “the connection of [Paul’s] words.” Hence, David Way’s suggestive observation: “although [Käsemann] pays a great deal of attention to the historical background of the theme . . . he does not treat the actual occurrences of [δικαιοσύνη θεοῦ] in Paul’s letters in any detail.”[18]

  But that is not to say that Käsemann is necessarily wrong. Rather, what this juxtaposition with Luther and Herbert exposes is that the word “apocalyptic” can function in a variety of ways. This, perhaps, is both its peril and potential, but in this case, it is necessary “to call a thing what it is” (Luther).[19] For Käsemann, to say that “apocalyptic is the mother of [Paul’s] theology” is to say that δικαιοσύνη θεοῦ is a “formulation which Paul has taken over,” a “feste Formel” which he employs to interpret God’s saving actions in Jesus Christ. By contrast, to call Luther and Herbert apocalyptic readers of Paul is to say that, for them, Jesus Christ is the apocalypse, the unveiling of God’s righteousness, and thus the one who defines the phrase δικαιοσύνη θεοῦ. As an answer to the question concerning the religious and theological context for Paul’s “righteousness of God” phrases, I regard Käsemann’s identification of Jewish apocalyptic as both broadly correct and necessary. Paul’s announcement of God’s righteousness has eschatological judgment as its theological register, a prominent if not universal feature of the early Jewish apocalypses. Furthermore, an examination of righteousness language prior to and contemporaneous with Paul is an indispensable task in establishing what these lexemes have and can mean, and thus why they are apropos as an articulation of the Pauline gospel. The problem is not in the identification of Jewish apocalyptic as the history-of-religions background of Pauline theology; the problem occurs when this religionsgeschichtliche thesis morphs into a hermeneutic that defines Pauline terms by antecedent usage, and thereby, (ironically) fails to interpret the gift of Christ as itself the apocalypse that reveals the definition of “the righteousness of God.”[20]

  Written in Scripture, Revealed in Christ

  Paul’s use of the phrase δικαιοσύνη θεοῦ resists definition by an inherited, even canonical, lexicon. As Rom. 9:30–10:4 demonstrates, Paul’s scriptural and theological heritage names δικαιοσύνη and incites Israel to pursue it (Rom. 9:31), but, for Paul, the content of God’s righteousness cannot be dislocated from its unveiling in Christ (Rom. 1:17; 3:21–26; 10:4). In using the expression δικαιοσύνη θεοῦ, Paul is speaking the language of Deuteronomy, David, Deutero-Isaiah, and Daniel, but as Paul interprets the crisis of his present, it is precisely the readers of these scriptural texts who are “ignorant of the righteousness of God” (ἀγνοοῦντες τὴν τοῦ θεοῦ δικαιοσύνην, Rom. 10:3; cf. Phil. 3:4–9). Thus, while “the law and prophets witness to the righteousness of God,” it is not in the law and the prophets that the righteousness of God is revealed. Rather, “the righteousness of God is revealed in the gospel” (Rom. 1:17).[21] To locate the definition of the specifically Pauline use of the phrase δικαιοσύνη θεοῦ in the lexicon of the Old Testament and early Judaism is thus to find its meaning in a place Paul never put it. For Paul, “the righteousness of God” is not a conceptual a priori that enables him to gauge the soteriological significance of Jesus’ history; “the righteousness of God” is that which “has been made visible” (φανερόω) in the event Paul calls “the redemption that is in Christ Jesus” (Rom. 3:21a, 24) and “continues to be unveiled” (ἀποκαλύπτω) in the proclamation of the same (Rom. 1:16–17). In the words of the first edition of Barth’s Römerbrief, “Die Wirklichkeit der Gerechtigkeit Gottes im Christus ist das Neue im Evangelium.”[22]

  To suggest that Paul theologizes from an inherited notion of divine righteousness to an interpretation of the Christ-event is therefore to read Paul backwards, and to read him, in the most basic sense, un-apocalyptically. Paul does not employ δικαιοσύνη θεοῦ to make sense of what happens in Jesus; for Paul, δικαιοσύνη θεοῦ just is what happens in Jesus. The unveiling of the righteousness of God, for Paul, occurs, “in it”—that is, in “the gospel” (Rom. 1:16–17). And because, according to the opening lines of Romans, “God’s son [Jesus Christ]” is the subject matter of “God’s gospel” (εὐαγγέλιον θεοῦ . . . περὶ τοῦ υἱοῦ αὐτοῦ, 1:1, 3), Paul’s evangelical definition of δικαιοσύνη θεοῦ is a christological definition.[23] Jesus Christ, in his comprehensive and constitutive history—“the one who was born of the seed of David” and “the one who was designated Son of God by resurrection” (1:3–4), the one “who was handed over for our trespasses and who was raised for our justification” (4:25)—is the content of the gospel, and as such, the one in whom “the righteousness of God is revealed.”[24] As Luther might say, “omnia vocabula,” or at least the phrase δικαιοσύνη θεοῦ, “in Christo novam significationem accipere.”[25] To interpret “the righteousness of God” apocalyptically in this sense is to deduce its definition from the saving history of Jesus in which Paul sees God’s righteousness “unveiled” (Rom. 1:17). Only if, in Eberhard Jüngel’s words, we let Paul “decide on what a righteous God is like, not on the basis of the normal use of concepts, but only on the basis” of the event that “justifies the ungodly,”[26] can we sing George Herbert’s song: “But now . . . Christ’s veil presents thy sight.”

  The Death of Christ as the Apocalypse of God’s Righteousness

  Romans 3:21–26, at least in part, is Paul’s attempt to define δικαιοσύνη θεοῦ by announcing the evangelical event that manifests, demonstrates, and constitutes it. As the three purpose clauses of Rom. 3:25–26 indicate, God’s act of putting Jesus forward as a ἱλαστήριον is teleological: the cross of Jesus Christ intends the demonstration (ἔνδε
ιξις, 3:25, 26a) and establishment (εἰς τὸ εἶναι, 3:26b) of God’s righteousness. Earlier in Romans, Paul locates the “revelation of God’s righteous judgment” (ἀποκαλύψεως δικαιοκρισίας τοῦ θεοῦ, 2:5) “in the day of wrath” (ἐν ἡμέρᾳ ὀργῆς), a time when “God will repay each one according to their deeds” (κατά τὰ ἔργα, 2:6). In this context, the initially generic “one who works the good” (2:7) is specified in Romans 2:13 as a “doer of the law.” In this eschatological judgment, then, the law is the criterion, and therefore, because “all are under sin” (3:9) and “no one is righteous” (3:10), the revelation of God’s righteousness in accordance with this criterion can only mean wrath (3:5). Thus, when the eschatological judgment described in Rom. 2:5–16 is imagined in Romans 3:20, the confrontation of universal human unrighteousness and the forensic criterion of the law ends in universal condemnation: ἐξ ἔργων νόμου οὐ δικαιωθήσεται πᾶσα σὰρξ ἐνώπιον αὐτοῦ.

  This is the rhetorical and theological prelude to Paul’s announce-ment that “the righteousness of God is made visible” (3:21), a statement which in the forensic and nomological terms of Rom. 2:5–3:20 should mean an eschatological revelation of God’s righteousness according to the law that results in the condemnation of the unrighteous. But Paul announces a “righteousness of God” that is “made visible apart from the law” (3:21) and that effects not the judgment, but the justification of sinners (3:23–24). One way to hear Paul’s proclamation about God declaring the unrighteous righteous through the death of Christ as the demonstration rather than the disqualification of God’s righteousness is to read Rom. 3:24–26 in conversation with Rom. 2:4–10. The universal non-justification of the unrighteous announced in Rom. 3:20 reads like the only and inevitable conclusion of the coming judgment. In its wake, Paul’s location of God’s righteousness in an event that calls the unrighteous righteous sounds like, to borrow Kant’s characterization of the cross, a “moral outrage.”[27] But for Paul, the righteousness of God is seen and instantiated in God’s justifying act of putting Jesus forward as a ἱλαστήριον because, rather than circumventing the eschatological judgment envisioned earlier in the letter, Rom. 3:24–26 interprets the cross of Christ as the enactment of that eschatological judgment in the “now” (3:21, 26) of Jesus’ death.

  There is an oft-noted lexical connection between Rom. 2:4 and 3:26a (ἀνοχή), but it is seldom observed that this divine patience functions within parallel plotlines.[28] In both Rom. 2:4–10 and 3:24–26, ἀνοχή is used to characterize an era in contrast to a time defined by the disclosure of God’s righteousness (δικαιοκρισίας τοῦ θεοῦ, 2:5; δικαιοσύνη αὐτοῦ, 3:26). As Bornkamm remarks, in Romans “the periods of salvation history” are “placed in contrast to each other as the time of patience and the time of the showing of righteousness.”[29] This observation is offered by Bornkamm as an exegesis of Rom. 3:25–26, but as it stands, it is an equally apt description of the implicit plotline of Rom. 2:4–5: the present is the time of God’s kindness and patience and concludes with the coming apocalypse of God’s righteous judgment. Within this narrative sequence, the end of the era of divine patience is the arrival of the eschaton in the form of a future judgment (2:5–10).

  Romans 3:24–26 tells a sequentially similar story, but with an all-important temporal twist. Romans 2:4–5 contrasts the present era of patience with the future enactment of justice in the form of a judgment κατὰ τὰ ἔργα. Romans 3:25–26, by contrast, presents the past as the time of the ἀνοχή τοῦ θεοῦ, the time in which God delayed the revelation of his righteous-judgment “by passing over former sins” (διὰ τὴν πάρεσιν τῶν προγεγονότων ἁμαρτημάτων).[30] And this era is juxtaposed, not with the future “day of wrath,” but with the present demonstration of divine righteousness that is the cross of Jesus Christ. Thus, in narrative terms, God’s act of putting Jesus forward as a ἱλαστήριον in Rom. 3:25–26 is functionally parallel to “the revelation of God’s righteous-judgment” in Rom. 2:5.[31] In other words, the death of Jesus Christ is the demonstration of God’s righteousness in that the “now” (νῦν) of Golgotha is the eschatological enactment of the final judgment.[32] Expressed in terms of the parallel between Rom. 2:5 and 3:25–26a, the present “demonstration of divine righteousness” (ἔνδειξιν τῆς δικαιοσύνης αὐτοῦ, 3:25, 26a) is the occurrence of the promised “revelation of God’s righteous judgment” (ἀποκαλύψεως δικαιοκρισίας τοῦ θεοῦ, 2:5).[33] The “now” of the cross is the “day of wrath” (2:5), the day God reveals his “righteous judgment” (2:5) and thereby, shows himself to be righteous (εἰς τὸ εἶναι αὐτὸν δίκαιον, 3:26; cf. 3:5).

  As the καί that links the predicates “just” and “justifier” in Rom. 3:26b indicates, however, the cross is both the demonstration of God’s righteousness and the declaration that those of Christ-faith are righteous. The death of Christ is the demonstration of God’s righteousness as the proleptic enactment of God’s eschatological judgment. But—and here, we approach what Jüngel calls “the deepest secret of God’s righteousness”[34]—this carrying out of God’s contention with sinful humanity effects, not as its counterpart but as its consequence, the “nevertheless” of justification.[35] In judging unrighteousness on the cross, God justifies the unrighteous. For Paul, “the righteousness of God” revealed in the gospel is this christological act of justifying judgment. Or, to anticipate my interpretation of Rom. 3:21–24, “the righteousness of God” is God’s eschatological demonstration and declaration of righteousness enacted and spoken in the gift of Jesus Christ.

  Defining Δικαιοσύνη θεοῦ as the Righteousness of God

  through Faith in Jesus Christ

  In Rom. 2:1–3:20, eschatological judgment is not just the location of the revelation of God’s righteous judgment (2:5), it is also the context in which God recognizes “the doers of the law” as righteous (2:13, 16; cf. 3:20). Both judgment and justification occur in this forensic future. And here, judgment is carried out “according to works” (κατὰ τὰ ἔργα)—that is, as Romans 2:13 specifies, God’s pronouncement will correspond to one’s nomistic observance: “the doers of the law will be declared righteous,” or conversely, and, because “none are righteous” (3:10), inevitably, “by works of law no flesh will be declared righteous” (3:20). Because God’s righteousness operates in accordance with the criterion of the law, it confronts sinners only with a word of condemnation.[36]

  “But”—which is a very different word than “accordingly”—“the righteousness of God has been made visible apart from law” (χωρὶς νόμου, Rom. 3:21). Within the sphere of the law, divine and human justification are mutually exclusive: the justification of God (Rom. 3:4–5) entails the non-justification of sinners (3:19–20). But it is just this impossibility that Romans 3:21–26 proclaims: the divine act that is the cross of Christ establishes God as both “just” and “justifier” (3:26b). Here, as in Rom. 2:13 and 3:19–20, divine and human justification are located in the event of eschatological judgment, but in Rom. 3:21–26 the arrival of that eschaton in the “now” of Jesus’ death rewrites God’s future word of justification in the present tense (3:24; cf. 3:28 and the aorist in 5:1).[37] Justification is not a separate verdict from the one God will speak at final judgment, nor is it only “an anticipation of the future verdict.”[38] Justification is the final verdict—a forensic word from the future spoken in the enactment of God’s eschatological judgment that is the “now” of Jesus’ death (and resurrection; cf. Rom. 4:25).[39]

  Hence, the shock of Paul’s announcement: those declared righteous in this judgment are not “the doers of the law,” but “sinners.” Whereas Rom. 2:5 describes a future judgment in which human action and juridical fate correspond (κατὰ τὰ ἔργα), Paul, in Rom. 3:21–26
, locates the operations of God’s righteousness in the contradiction between human unrighteousness and the somehow stronger word of justification: “All sinned . . . and are declared righteous” (Rom. 3:23–24). Grammatically, the objects of the divine saving action implied in the passive participle δικαιούμενοι (3:24) are the sinners of 3:23,[40] and thus as James Dunn construes this Pauline paradox, “it is precisely those who have sinned and fallen short of God’s glory who are justified.”[41] The “scandal and folly” of this “word of the cross” is not hard to hear: what Paul calls “the righteousness of God” appears to be (and, within the sphere of law described in Rom. 1:18–3:20, is) an instance of injustice in which God, with what looks like forensic schizophrenia, rightly diagnoses the unrighteous (Rom. 3:23; cf. 3:10) only to rename them e contrario with the word of justification (3:24).

  For Paul, however, the declaration that sinners are righteous is not a groundless divine fiat; it is a pronouncement grounded in a gift. The adversative δέ that opens Rom. 3:21 serves what Jochen Flebbe describes as a “logisch-rhetorischen Funktion in der Opposition zu V.20.”[42] In antithesis to the (excluded) possibility of justification before God by works of law (3:20), Rom. 3:21 announces a manifestation of the righteousness of God “apart from law.” This logical contrast, however, is not between two abstract soteriological theses; it is between reality before and after the “now” of God’s “gift” (χάρις) that is “the redemption which is in Christ Jesus” (3:24). The “now” of Romans 3:21 anticipates the ἐν τῷ νῦν καιρῷ of 3:26a, indicating that the manifestation of δικαιοσύνη θεοῦ (3:21) cannot be isolated from the demonstration of God’s righteousness in the eschatological judgment that is the death of Christ (3:25–26). The contrast between Rom. 3:20 and 3:21 is thus properly eschatological: νυνὶ δέ signals the arrival of the eschaton in the event of grace that is the cross of Jesus Christ.[43]