On Righteousness

But let justice roll on like a river,

        righteousness like a never-failing stream!

Amos 5:24

I want to take you on a bit of a thought-journey with me in this (and possibly some subsequent) post. I've been thinking a lot about the language of 'righteous' lately. Partly due to preaching recently on James 5 (including 5:16, The prayer of a righteous person is powerful and effective), partly due to other things that have come across my metaphorical desk.

I suspect that most of us don't spend very much time thinking about being righteous or the concept of righteousness. It's not language or a conceptual realm we daily visit. I also suspect that most Christians in circles I am in have a very judicial & Pauline way of thinking about this, for example through the lens of Romans 3 esp v10 "There is no one righteous". When we hear 'righteous' we tend to leap to 'right before God', which good protestant doctrine tells us no one is on the basis of their works, only Jesus is righteous, therefore I am definitely not 'righteous'. Isn't that the whole point of convincing everyone else and ourselves that there's no way we could possibly be righteous and so we need a saviour?

I'm not disputing this reading of Romans, though I think even Paul needs some, shall we say, cleaning of our glasses when we read him? But when we go away to the rest of Scripture we soon hit a very big problem, and that is that we continually hear talk of 'the righteous', and it seems like large swathes of the Scriptures treat people as righteous.

Let's submit exhibit A. Last year our church had a weekend away together, our speaker was Glenn Davies on the book of Job, and one thing that struck me and has stayed with me was how in his opening he dealt with the language of Job's righteousness through this question, "Do any of you consider yourselves to be righteous?" His point was, that the New Testament considers regular, ordinary believers to be holy, to be righteous, and that this isn't tantamount to being perfect and sinless. What it does mean is that we have set into right relationship to God, and continue in that relationship through confession and repentance. A person who is righteous is not perfect and sinless, but deals with their sins through the means God has appointed. In the OT, the sacrificial system, in the NT by confession and repentance. That's incredibly helpful and insightful.

Exhibit B. I was listening to an interview with Max Botner, who has recently produced a book for Greek students to read outside the New Testament, and in the interview he was dialoguing with the host about Philo and the Letter of Aristeias, and the way the Torah was presented to ancient Greeks, that the Torah was primarily about two things: piety and righteousness. To put this another way, what we owe to God and what we owe to each other. This is not an uncommon way to divide up the Decalogue into 3/7 or 4/6 commandments. And so 'righteousness' language in this sense and context, and in Greek in particular, has to do with how humans treat each other. It's not an abstract yardstick before God per se.

Exhibit C. I was listening to this sermon by Tim Keller, on Isaiah 56:1-8. A lot of what he says in the opening of this sermon about justice language and righteousness reminded me of his book Generous Justice, which another friend had just reminded me of in some email correspondence, and Keller does us the favour of name-dropping where he's getting his ideas from, which made it easy enough to go back to the book and search out the footnotes. But the core idea here is that there are two Hebrew terms, often translated 'righteousness' and 'justice', and they express important distinct concepts that do not line up very well with what we hear when we hear those English words. So now we're going to follow the bread crumb trail...

So, when we follow that trail, we open up Christopher Wright's book, Old Testament Ethics for the People of God (2013). Chapter 8 is on just this topic, "Justice and Righteousness". He picks up Ps 33:5, "The Lord loves righteousness and justice; the earth is full of his unfailing love", and starts by discussing the vocabulary. The first key word here is צדק which you'll often see transliterated as ṣdq, but for our average reader, tsedeq or tsedaqa will do. This word has to do with what is 'straight' or 'right'. Here's a long quote from Gossai:

In order for an individual to be ṣaddîq [righteous], it means that of necessity he or she must exist and live in a manner which allows him or her to respond correctly to the values of the relationship [which may include relationships of spouse, parent, judge, worker, friend, etc.] . . . In essence then ṣdq is not simply an objective norm which is present within society, and which must be kept, but rather it is a concept which derives its meaning from the relationship in which it finds itself. So we are able to say that right judging, right governing, right worshipping and gracious activity are all covenantal and righteous, despite their diversity.¹

The second word Wright explores is שָׁפַט , often transliterated špṭ, but again shapat will do for our readers. As a noun, typically translated 'justice' or 'judgment', as a verb 'to judge'. We'll talk a lot more about it in a subsequent post. But the argument that Wright and others make is that tsdq has to do with right relations between people, and shpt has to do with rectifying relations when things have gone wrong.

Keller relates these two kinds of justice to philosophical discussions of justice. If you ever want a "too much information for an introduction" to a philosophical topic, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has you covered. Or we can just read Wolterstorff, whom we last met when we read his heart-wrenching reflections on the early death of his son. In the rest of his life, Nicholas Wolterstorff has been a lifelong Christian philosopher, and written extensively on Justice, including a book just called Justice: Rights and Wrongs, which explores the relationship of two types of primary justice.²

All of which is a long-winded way of saying that right back to Aristotle there's a way of talking about Justice in these two terms. Primary justice (or Distributive Justice) is about "what is the best way to organise human society for right relations between people", and Rectifying justice which is "what is the best way to rectify relations when right relations between people break down".

Just at some very fundamental levels these kinds of distinctions help us a great deal, not least in reading the Scriptures. I think that many Christians read the OT Law as a set of deontological commands, "do this because God says so, end of story". This is not far from the literalist reading that usually accompanies the slogan "God said it, I believe it, that settles it".

Whereas, what Wright is arguing for in terms of the Old Testament, is that the Sinai covenant in particular is about shaping a society to have primary justice at its center, and providing case law (shout out to Ryan for banging on about this) for discerning situations where primary justice is lost and rectifying justice is needed. But this approach helps us to enter into the question of "what we owe to each other", i.e. primary justice.

When we think about righteousness in this way then, we have a far better handle on what it means to 'be righteous', it means not so much "do I measure up to an abstract and arbitrary list of tick-boxes that God tells me to do", and much more, "am I living in right relationship to all those around me to whom I have community and societal obligations?"

There's more to be said on this topic, but I think that's enough for today. In a follow-up post we'll look more at shapat and rectifying justice, and then we'll see where we go from there.

Photo by Joel & Jasmin Førestbird on Unsplash

1. Gossai, Hemchand, Justice, Righteousness and the Social Critique of the Eighth-Century Prophets, American University Studies, Series 7: Theology and Religion, vol. 141 (New York: Peter Lang, 1993), 55– 56.

2. In particular, the notion of Primary Justice as idealised conditions/relations between human beings, and rights-based approaches. Again, a topic for another day.