Philippians and Philemon by Daniel L. Migliore

Author:Daniel L. Migliore
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781611644258
Publisher: Westminster John Knox Press

FURTHER REFLECTIONS

Righteousness from God

The phrase “righteousness from God” (3:9) and the closely related phrase “justification by faith alone” (sola fide) are of great importance in Paul’s theology. As noted in the introduction of this commentary (“Central Themes of the Letter”), they also continue to be a storm center in the interpretation of his thought. Paul clearly wants his readers to look to Christ rather than to their own religious and moral achievements or their social standing as the source of true righteousness. In the Reformation period, Luther and Calvin made this a cardinal point in their recovery of Paul’s teaching. Luther speaks of the “righteousness from God” as an “alien” righteousness. He means that it is not something inherent in our nature or something that we earn by our works. Rather it is the free gift of God embodied in all that Christ has done for us, and it is received by faith alone. Calvin agrees: The righteousness from God comes from outside us. It “does not belong to man”; rather, “it resides in faith in Christ.”26

Once again we note that this doctrine of Paul, central to the sixteenth-century Reformation, is often misunderstood and distorted. It is a serious misreading of Paul’s teaching to think that our act of faith in Christ is the basis of the righteousness from God or God’s justification of us rather than what God in Christ has done for us. In effect, this flawed understanding turns upside down all that Paul wants to say.27 Paul never makes the mistake of giving priority to our act of faith over God’s act in Christ. The righteousness from God is God’s gracious act of rectifying or justifying the ungodly in the life, death, and resurrection of Christ on our behalf. Our act of receiving God’s gift neither causes nor prompts nor supplements God’s giving. It simply accepts the gift given.

How does this Pauline teaching of righteousness from God, or justification by grace received by faith, bear on the life and witness of the church today? First, it counters the common human inclination to see one’s own piety and morality as deserving of acclamation in contrast to the life and practices of others. What invariably flows from this attitude is what Reinhold Niebuhr called “the fury of self-righteousness.”28 We see this fury often at work in disputes among family members, in ecclesiastical controversies, in battles in the halls of Congress, in struggles between advocates of social change and those defending the status quo, in hot or cold wars between nations. “The righteousness from God” that centers on the saving activity of Jesus Christ is a sheer gift, but at the same time it places under judgment all human claims of being absolutely in the right, claims that brook no criticism and give no quarter, offspring of what Paul calls “a righteousness of my own.”

Second, Paul’s message of the righteousness from God announced in the gospel relieves those who receive it of the burden of proving their human worth and dignity to God, to others, and to themselves.

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