For if Abraham was justified by works, he has something to boast about―but not before God. For what does the Scripture say? "Abraham trusted in God, and it was credited to his account for righteousness" [Genesis 15:6]. Now to the one who works, wages are not paid as a gift, but rather as what is owed. But to the person who doesn't work, but places trust in the One who justifies the ungodly, his or her faith is "credited for righteousness." (Romans 4:2-5, trans. JRM)
At last we come to Romans 4:4-5, where what I have dubbed the "unimaginable glory" of Paul's eschatological gospel of God's saving righteousness comes to its most shocking, radical expression. These verses, with their memorable characterization of God as the One who "justifies the ungodly," are often viewed as being theologically programmatic, not only in popular evangelicalism, but in scholarly circles as well. [1] This is largely due to the widespread opinion that Paul, in verse 4, is simply laying down a "general principle" or "generally applicable rule" [2] ―in other words, one with trans-temporal or timeless theological implications directly detrimental to his (implied) Jewish interlocutors and anybody else who, supposedly like them, desired then or desires now to secure his or her position before God by means of moral effort. However, though Paul certainly is at pains in this chapter to present Abraham's example as the paradigm for those Jews and Gentiles who, through faith in Christ, are to become his children "according to the promise" (cf. esp. 4:23), closer inspection makes it abundantly clear that the Apostle is being, as usual, more subtle than this. Indeed, verses 4-5 operate on two levels: at ground level, as it were, he is simply interpreting his text, Genesis 15:6, in the context of Genesis 15 as a whole; yet he presents this interpretation in such a way that at a second level, ongoing implications for his readers are drawn out for the matter at hand.
The clearest pointer to this multi-level strategy is the usually neglected (unobserved?), yet surely not coincidental, fact that the term generally translated "wages" in Romans 4:4, misthos, occurs in Genesis 15:1 LXX [3] with reference to the reward promised to Abram, the inheritance he would receive consisting in countless descendants (Genesis 15:5) from many nations (Genesis 17:5; Romans 4:17). At ground level, the issue Paul is dealing with concerns what, if anything, could have motivated God to reward Abram with this promise. As far as the second level significance for Paul's readers is concerned, what is at stake, if the originating scriptural context is taken seriously, is being identified as one of these promised eschatological descendants of Abraham, children of the promise of Genesis 12:3; 18:18; 22:18 (cf. Galatians 3:8). [4] To make his case, Paul walks a tightrope, making his contemporary point by means of a close reading of the Genesis text itself. [5]
When Paul speaks of Abraham's "reward," one is tempted to look for something that would have prompted such a response from God. What Paul noticed in Genesis, as significantly as surprisingly, was the absence of such a precipitating act or "work" on the Patriarch's part. Nothing he had done warranted such an initiative of divine beneficence. And it is this very asymmetry or lack of correspondence that the Apostle highlights in verses 4-5. Instead, what we find in the Genesis story is this: God promised Abraham an innumerable progeny (Gen 15:5); Abraham "believed God, and it was credited to his account for righteousness" (Gen 15:6); and God concretized that "crediting" by cutting a covenant with Abraham (Gen 15:7-21). From the shape of this narrative Paul then makes a fundamental theological deduction about how human beings now can and must relate to God if they are to be counted as Abraham's children "according to the promise."
Utilizing the common accounting term logizōmai ("I reckon, calculate, charge to one's account"), derived from Genesis 15:6, Paul applies both what the text says and what it does not say to the matter at hand. He does so by making a contrast between two potential ways of "calculating" pay or favor to a person. This rhetorical contrast, summed up in the prepositional phrases kata charin ("as a gift") and kata opheilēma ("as [one's] due"), could not be more stark. On the one hand, those who work are not remunerated voluntarily, as a gift; instead, they are paid as a matter of obligation. [6] On the other―and here the Apostle explicitly makes theological application to his readers' situation―the one who does not work, but (only) believes in the One who justifies the ungodly, his or her faith is counted for "righteousness." It is the second scenario which fit the narrated experience of Abraham, and thus it is also, by definition, the one which must fit the experience of his children of promise.
[[Once again, as an aside, as was mentioned above, one must be careful not to over-mirror-read the participial constructions tōi … ergazomenōi and tōi … mē ergazomenōi pisteuonti de ("to the one who works"/"to the one who does not work, but believes") so as to attribute to Paul's Jewish contemporaries the pretension that they could earn or establish their position before God by the performance of works apart from grace. [7] Of course, this text may legitimately be used to refute such a pipe dream should anybody have it, but Paul's point, stripped of such illegitimate polemics, is far more simple: Abraham―and by extension anybody else on this side of the Christ event who wants to be counted among his children―did nothing to render him deserving of the "gift" he received from God, namely, being given the promise of a worldwide family and being "put in the right" as God's covenant partner. [8] ]]
Paul's description of God as the "One who justifies the ungodly" (ton dikaiounta ton asebē) has direct relevance to the foundational Abraham narrative, and not merely because the Patriarch, the prototypical proselyte of Jewish tradition, was an erstwhile pagan from Ur, and hence by definition "ungodly," before being chosen by God (narratively speaking) to be his covenant partner. Indeed, God's promise to Abraham, from the very start in Genesis 12, involved the eschatological "blessing" of all peoples of the earth―which the Apostle equates with "justification" in Galatians 3―"in" the Patriarch. Here in Romans 4, Paul interprets God's promise of a countless progeny (Gen 15:5) in light of the (later) divine claim to have made Abraham "a father of many nations" (Gen 17:5; Rom 4:17). "Ungodliness" (asebeia) was, to the Jewish mind, characteristic of the Gentile world, without the Law and thus unable to meet God's moral demands (Rom 1:18!). Yet Paul's master stroke in this letter was to paint his fellow Jews into a corner from which they could not escape and put them into the dock along with the Gentiles (Rom 2:1-3:20). God, however, is a God who is faithful to his covenant promises. And so, in manifestation of his saving "righteousness," Christ "died for the ungodly" (hyper hēmōn apethanen, Rom 5:6), Jew and Gentile alike. Only on that basis could they be "justified" and become members of the family promised to Abraham in Genesis 15.
Paul's language of "justifying the ungodly" in verse 5 corresponds in function to the formulation "credited as a gift" (logizesthai kata charin) in verse 4, and thus recalls Romans 3:24, where "all" (i.e., Jews and Gentiles) who believe, being sinners, are "justified freely by (God's) grace" (dikaioumenoi dōrean tēi autou chariti) through the redemption in Christ Jesus." And it is here, with the language of "grace," that what we have described as Paul's redefinition project in Romans 4 is seen to involve a third element. As we have emphasized, in light of the eschatological manifestation of God's saving righteousness in Christ, the Apostle believed he had no choice but, for want of a better term, to redefine the classic Second Temple Jewish doctrine of election: he has redefined, first, who the "seed" of Abraham are who inherit the covenant promises; second, he has correspondingly redefined who the "righteous" are; and now, third, in doing these first two he has thereby radically redefined what God's "grace" entails.
At this point one should note that Paul, in using the language of "grace" (charis) [9], was not, as is sometimes imagined in popular Christian circles, utilizing a technical term with the sense of "undeserved favor." Indeed, when used in the sense of a favor or gift given, the term had no necessary connotations of being undeserved. But for Paul, God's gift of Christ most certainly was undeserved: rather than it being the vindication of the godly, it was the justification of the ungodly. Along these lines, Paul, by excluding "works (of the Law)" as the path to "justification" (Rom 3:28) or the inheritance of the promise (Rom 4:16), thereby excludes all potential human determinants of value ("symbolic capital") in the sight of God, be they moral achievement ("Old Perspective") or tokens of ethnic, covenantal privilege ("New Perspective"). And thus, because God gives his Gift to the ungodly, his grace is entirely unconditioned. To put it differently, because there is no "fit" between the person and God's gift to her, God's grace, in Barclay's terms, is utterly "incongruous." "God acts," he writes, "in the absence of human worth." [10]
But is faith to be seen, in some sense, to be a token of worth accepted by God in the place of works? For instance, Joseph Fitzmyer interprets Romans 4:3 thus: "Abraham's faith was counted by God as uprightness, because God sees things as they are." [11] Such a reading, however, misses Paul's point entirely. Indeed, his point in adducing the example of Abraham is that God's pronouncement of justification is not the result of his "seeing things as they are." Justification of the ungodly means acquittal on the basis of no human presupposition. For Paul, the "crediting of faith for righteousness" (Rom 4:3) means for God to credit "righteousness" (=the [forensic] status of "being in the right") to a person's account (Rom 4:6); it means not to have one's sins counted against him (Psalm 32:2; Rom 4:8). Hence faith, far from being a potential token of value, is instead, in the words of Barclay,
not an alternative human achievement nor a refined human spirituality, but a declaration of bankruptcy, a radical and shattering recognition that the only capital in God's economy is the gift of Christ crucified and risen. [12]
Indeed, in the case of Abraham, the faith which God calculated in his favor was simple, unadorned trust in the promise he had been given, no matter how outrageous, on the face of it, that promise appeared to be. Abraham's faith merely consisted, as Käsemann put it, in his "Yes to the message of … God." [13] And what was this promise? It was the promise of a son, which was, in the normal course of things, impossible for people of his and Sarai's age (Rom 4:19; cf. Gen 17:1, 17). Yet he took God at his word, and his faith, his "unconditional trust" and "utter dependence" on the truth of God's promise, [14] is the paradigm for his heirs today.
That Abraham is the paradigm of faith for those who would "walk in his footsteps" (tois stoichousin tois ichnesin, Rom 4:12) and be counted his eschatological children is made clear in the peroration to his midrash in verses 23-24: "It was not written for his [i.e., Abraham's] sake alone that 'It was reckoned,' but for our sakes as well, to whom it [i.e., our faith] is to be reckoned …" What is more, it is not simply "faith" as a dispositional quality that the Patriarch and his spiritual children have in common. Paul insists, rather, that the faith exercised by Abraham is the very same faith that Christians exercise when they confess, "Jesus is Lord," and believe God raised him from the dead (Romans 10:9). [15]
Paul develops the nature of Abraham's faith by means of a two-fold description of the God in whom he placed his trust: He is "the God who gives life to the dead and calls things that do not exist into being" (theou tou zōiopoiountas tous nekrous kai kalountas ta mē onta hōs onta, Rom 4:17). [16] From Genesis 15 the Apostle learned that the Patriarch's faith consisted in his unswerving faith [17] that God, despite the "deadness" of his and Sarai's reproductive organs (Rom 4:19), had the power to do what he had promised [18] and provide him with the son he previously had been unable to bear. By doing so God thus called into being the "seed" which were to become the bearers of the initial promise to Abraham to be the conduit of blessing for all peoples on earth (Gen 12:3).
As one can readily see, Abraham's faith that God would "raise" his and his wife's procreative capacities from the dead has a certain parallel with the earliest, most basic Christian confession, to which Paul alludes in verse 24, when he refers to those who "believe in him who raised Jesus our Lord from the dead" (tois pisteuousin epi ton egeiranta 'Iēsoun ton kyrion hēmōn ek nekrōn; cf. Rom 10:9). But the linkage is closer than one based on analogy alone. For Paul's entire argument in Romans 3:21-4:25 is concerned to show how God's covenant promises to Abraham have been fulfilled in Christ, who is the "seed" of Abraham "according to the flesh" (kata sarka) [19] and who thus, through his death and resurrection, brought the covenant benefits to Jews and Gentiles alike who believe (Rom 4:25). God, in raising Jesus our Lord back to life, shows himself to be the God who gives life to the dead. God, in creating a worldwide family of Jews and Gentiles who mirror his faith in the God who raised Jesus from the dead, shows himself to be the God who acts by the principle of creatio ex nihilo. And so we see how the faith of Abraham is the very same faith exercised by believers in Christ today.
One more thing. I would like to suggest that one further aspect of God's gracious operation by the principle of creatio ex nihilo consists in the very faith through which a believer is accounted "righteous" before God. As was mentioned above, this "faith" is not to be understood as a sort of dispositional achievement on the part of the believer that conceivably could be viewed as a token of worth or symbolic capital that might prompt God's favor. Indeed, in the programmatic Romans 1:16-17, Paul declares that the gospel―defined in Romans 1:3-4 as the Scripture-fulfilling messianic career and resurrection of Jesus, God's "Son" [20]―is not a bare recitation of gospel "events" and an "invitation" to believe, but a royal announcement whose very proclamation unleashes God’s power to “call” people effectively to salvation through faith. [21] God's grace carries no antecedent conditions. Human inadequacies are met by created divine adequacy. The ungodly are thereby justified. But, one wonders, is this just? And is this the end of the matter? These questions await the next, and final, installment, of the series.
[2] For the former, Moo, Romans, 263; for the latter ("eine allgemein geltende Regel"), Otto Kuss, Der Römerbrief: übersetz und erklärt, 3 vols. (Regensburg: Verlag Friedrich Pustet, 1963) 1:182 (cited by N. T. Wright, "Paul and the Patriarch: The Role[s] of Abraham in Galatians and Romans," in Pauline Perspectives: Essays on Paul 1978-2013 [Minneapolis: Fortress, 2013] 554-91 [at 562]).
[3] Ho misthos sou polys estai sphodra ("Your reward will be very great").
[4] What is rarely observed is that Paul, in Romans 4:13, speaks of Abraham and his "seed" (sperma) receiving the promise to inherit "the world." Here his language, as in Galatians 3:16, almost certainly betrays the influence of Genesis 22:18. What this means is that the Apostle has conflated God's promise of a son to Abram in Genesis 15:4 with the promise to Abraham in Genesis 17:5 that he would be the "father of many nations (Rom 4:17). And not only that. Explicitly in Galatians 3, and implicitly here in Romans 4, he has whittled down the physical seed through Isaac, the bearers of the promise per se, to a point, to Christ, who―so Paul argues in detail in Romans 3:21-26―has brought fulfillment of the Abrahamic covenant through his death and resurrection (cf. Gal 3:16), and has correspondingly reinterpreted the promise of a worldwide family through the prism provided by the foundational promise to Abram in Genesis 12:3. One becomes a member of this eschatological "seed"―Jew and Gentile alike―only by means of union with the one "seed par excellence, Jesus Messiah.
[5] Francis Watson (and he is hardly alone in this) suggests the "reward" in context is "righteousness" (Paul, Judaism and the Gentiles: Beyond the New Perspective, 2nd ed. [Grand Rapids and Cambridge: Eerdmans, 2007] 262). N. T. Wright considers this "hardly convincing" ("Paul and the Patriarch," 562 n.25), though I fail to see how. In verses 3-5, what is at issue is the crediting of "righteousness," however that is to be defined, to a person's account. Is this to be done as payment for what is due or as a gift (more on the latter anon)? Wright is at pains to emphasize the historical reference to Abraham in Paul's language and counter Pelagian mirror-reading exercises, both of which are all well and good. But even on his own terms, "righteousness" is cognate with "covenant membership" and the "reward" is to be identified with the covenant promises given to him in Genesis 15. Not to mention that Paul's point in the chapter is that Abraham's example is the paradigm for those who belong to his spiritual progeny.
[6] Here Paul uses the term misthos in the sense of "pay," playing on the ambiguity of the term used in Genesis 15:1 for Abram's "reward."
[7] Cf., inter alia, Gathercole, Where Is Boasting? 245, who identifies the "worker" of Romans 4:4 as Paul's implied interlocutor of 2:1-3:20. Even less a propos are anachronistic Augustinian value judgments such as that expressed by Moo, when he criticizes Paul's fellow Jews for their "synergism with respect to salvation" (The Epistle to the Romans, 263). The issue is not one of Augustinianism's appropriateness in terms of Systematic Theology (after all, I am an Augustinian myself). It is one of its relevance in this discussion vis-à-vis the historia salutis and Moo's anachronistic evaluation of Second Temple Jewish views of grace. The issues are exceedingly complex and to deal with them adequately would take us too far afield.
[8] Cf. John M. G. Barclay, Paul and the Gift (Grand Rapids and Cambridge: Eerdmans, 2015) 484.
[9] Note, of course, that what we might refer to as Paul's "concept" of "grace" ought not be limited to his use of the term charis. Cf. Barclay's appendix, "The Lexicon of Gift: Greek, Hebrew, Latin, English," in Paul and the Gift, 575-82. One who isn't careful in this regard is James R. Harrison, Paul's Language of Grace in Its Graeco-Roman Context (WUNT 2.172; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2003).
[10] This is the thesis of Barclay's magisterial Paul and the Gift. Cf. pp. 70-75, 331-574 (Quotation from 486).
[11] Joseph A. Fitzmyer, Romans (AB 33; New York: Doubleday, 1993) 373. Cf. also J. A. Ziesler, The Meaning of Righteousness in Paul (SNTSMS 20; Cambridge: CUP, 1972) 183-85.
[12] Barclay, Paul and the Gift, 383-84. It should go without saying that the notion I have often heard preached evangelistically in popular evangelical circles, that, in light of Christ's death for the world's sins, God has "lowered the bar," as it were, demanding faith only instead of perfect obedience for "salvation," completely misunderstands Paul. How "simple," it is said! Well, "simple," in the sense of "uncomplicated," granted. But certainly not "simple" in the sense of "easy." For such faith is, implicitly here in Romans 4, and explicitly elsewhere in Paul (e.g., 1 Corinthians 2:14), impossible to exercise apart from the Spirit's "call" through the effective word of the gospel.
[13] Käsemann, Commentary on Romans, 112.
[14] James D. G. Dunn, The Theology of Paul the Apostle (Grand Rapids and Cambridge: Eerdmans, 1998) 379.
[15] Richard Hays suggests that Abraham, instead of being merely an example or paradigm of faith, is to be "understood as a narrative prototype whose faith prefigures the faithfulness of Christ, through whom many are blessed," and that "'faith in Christ' plays no role in Rom 4" (Richard B. Hays, The Conversion of the Imagination: Paul as Interpreter of Israel's Scripture [Grand Rapids and Cambridge: Eerdmans, 2005] xii-xiii; he develops these ideas in his 1985 article, "Abraham as Father of Jews and Gentiles," reprinted on pages 61-84 in this volume. That Abraham, as a covenant head, is a representative figure, is not denied. The problem is that the "faith" exercised by Abraham in Romans 4 does not mirror, in structural terms, the proposed "faithfulness" (pistis) exercised by Christ in Romans 3:21-26, let alone the "faith" that his spiritual children are called to exercise. Furthermore, such a proposal rests on the disputed subjective genitive interpretation of the seemingly intractable pistis christou construction, concerning which I remain convinced that the objective genitive is marginally preferable. Cf. Michael F. Bird and Preston M. Sprinkle, The Faith of Jesus Christ: Exegetical, Biblical, and Theological Studies (Milton Keynes: Paternoster, 2009).
[16] This is developed admirably by N. T. Wright, "Paul and the Patriarch," 560-61.
[17] Note that, not only was Abraham "strengthened in his faith," he "gave glory to God" (dous doxan tōi theōi) (Rom 4:20), a deliberate echo and reversal of Romans 1:21-23, implicitly affirming what the structure of the Genesis narrative suggests, viz., that Abraham's call was designed to be the solution of the problem of "Adamic" humanity.
[18] Cf. Barclay: "Paul traces a deep homology between the incongruity of divine grace and the incongruity of divine power" (Paul and the Gift, 489).
[19] Cf. Cranfield: "Between the quickening of Abraham's and Sarah's deadness for the purpose of procreation and the raising of Jesus Christ from the dead there is an inward connexion which is much more than the similarity between two events both of which may be spoke of in terms of [zōiopoiēsis]; for what gave unique and absolute significance to Abraham's begetting, and Sarah's bearing, of Isaac was the fact that it was of this child that Christ Himself was eventually to be a descendant [kata sarka]" (C. E. B. Cranfield, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans, 2 vols. [ICC; Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1975-79] 1:251).
[20] Cf. James R. McGahey, "What Is the Gospel? Part 5: Romans 1:1-7," @http://jamesmcgahey.blogspot.com/2012/02/what-is-gospel-part-5-romans-11-7.html.
[21] Cf. Fitzmyer, 256: "Whenever the gospel is proclaimed, God’s power becomes operative and succeeds in saving. His power thus catches up human beings and through the gospel brings them to salvation." Cf. my whole discussion in "What Is the Gospel? Part 6: Romans 1:16-17," @http://jamesmcgahey.blogspot.com/2012/03/what-is-gospel-part-6-romans-116-17.html.
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