Righteousness

“The LORD is our righteousness.”

— Jeremiah 23:6

Righteousness is conformity to a right standard: God’s own moral perfection, and the standing before him that he requires of, and provides for, human beings. The Old Testament typically uses the term for right conduct within a covenant relationship, especially fidelity to God’s law and care for the vulnerable (Ps. 15; Isa. 56:1). The New Testament, particularly in Paul, most often uses it forensically: a right legal standing before God’s judgment, not achieved by keeping the law but received as a gift through faith in Christ (Rom. 1:17; 3:21-22).

Confessional Witness

The 1689 Second London Baptist Confession locates righteousness first in creation itself. God made humanity “after the image of God, in knowledge, righteousness, and true holiness,” with “the law of God written in their hearts, and power to fulfill it.”¹ That original righteousness was forfeited at the Fall. The confession’s own chapter on justification states how it is restored to believers, not by their own obedience but by Christ’s righteousness credited to them; that chapter’s full statement is examined at imputed righteousness.

Biblical Basis

The Old Testament often speaks of righteousness as something Israel receives from God rather than achieves on its own: “from him, accordingly, is their righteousness” (Isa. 54:17), “only in him are righteousness and strength” (Isa. 45:24), and, most directly, “the LORD is our righteousness” (Jer. 23:6; 33:16).² The righteous person, in the Psalms and Isaiah, is one who walks uprightly and deals justly with a neighbor (Ps. 15:2; Isa. 56:1), the ethical sense the term carries throughout the Wisdom and Prophetic books.

The New Testament continues both senses. Jesus tells his hearers to “hunger and thirst for righteousness” (Matt. 5:6) and to “seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness” (Matt. 6:33), an ethical and relational sense close to the Old Testament’s own. Paul, reflecting on his own life as a Pharisee under the law, presses the term into its forensic sense: God’s righteousness is “revealed” in the gospel “from faith for faith” (Rom. 1:17), “apart from the law” although the Law and the Prophets bear witness to it (Rom. 3:21), so that God is himself “just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus” (Rom. 3:26). Because “for our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Cor. 5:21), Paul counts his own former righteousness “as loss” beside the righteousness “that comes through faith in Christ” (Phil. 3:8-9).³

Historical Development

Luther’s discovery

Martin Luther’s break with Rome grew out of a protracted struggle over the meaning of one phrase in Rom. 1:17, “the righteousness of God.” Luther had read it, as the church long had, as God’s own righteous standard by which he judges and condemns sinners. His eventual discovery reversed the reading: the phrase did not mean “the righteousness by which God is righteous in himself but the righteousness by which we are justified from within himself, which happens through faith in the gospel.”⁴ Read this way, the verse announces a gift rather than a demand, and Luther’s opposition to the indulgence system followed from this reinterpretation rather than preceding it.⁴

The Formula of Concord

The Lutheran churches settled the doctrine’s terms in the Formula of Concord (1577), which confessed that faith is “the means and instrument through which we lay hold of Christ as our Savior and thus, in Christ, lay hold of this righteousness that avails before God,” a righteousness of Christ’s obedience reckoned to the believer rather than infused into them.⁵

Calvin’s accent

Reformed theology reached the same doctrine of righteousness by a different route. Where Luther arrived at it through his own struggle over Romans, “Calvin made predestination the center of his theology and viewed justification in its light”: because righteousness belongs to those God has already chosen, it appears in Calvin’s own writing “more as a gift granted to us by God than as a benefit we accept by faith.”⁶

The nineteenth-century shift

Later Protestant theology moved the doctrine away from this forensic ground. Friedrich Schleiermacher treated justification, and so the believer’s righteousness, as “the reverse side of conversion,” an experience of the individual rather than a divine legal verdict. Albrecht Ritschl restored some of its objective standing but relocated righteousness to “a possession of the church’s faith in Jesus’s message of the love of God,” gained by joining the church rather than credited to the individual sinner.⁷

Related Doctrines

References

The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 4, “Of Creation,” para. 2. ↩
Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 20, “Justification, Sanctification, and Perseverance”: “From him, accordingly, is their righteousness (54:17); only in him are righteousness and strength (45:24). He is the Lord, their righteousness (Jer. 23:6; 33:16).” ↩
Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, chap. 20: “Reflecting on his life experience as a Pharisee under the law, Paul accents the righteousness (or justice; Gk.: δικαιοσυνη, dikaiosynē) of Christ imputed to believers by faith alone.” ↩
Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, chap. 20: “Luther developed this opposition over a longer period as he wrestled with the meaning of ‘righteousness of God.’ Luther’s great discovery was that this did not mean ‘the righteousness by which God is righteous in himself but the righteousness by which we are justified from within himself, which happens through faith in the gospel.’” ↩ ↩²
Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, chap. 20, quoting the Formula of Concord (1577): “faith alone, which, however, ‘is not a mere knowledge of the stories about Christ,’ but ‘a gift of God and a true and living faith,’ is the means and instrument through which we lay hold of Christ as our Savior and thus, in Christ, lay hold of ‘this righteousness that avails before God.’” ↩
Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, chap. 20: “Calvin made predestination the center of his theology and viewed justification in its light… As a result, the righteousness of Christ is presented more as a gift granted to us by God than as a benefit we accept by faith.” ↩
Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, chap. 20: “Schleiermacher viewed justification as the reverse side of conversion and as part of regeneration… Ritschl, however, again fixed attention on the objective significance of justification… by understanding it as a possession of the church’s faith in Jesus’s message of the love of God which the individual gains by joining the church.” ↩