Being Righteous, Being Saved

Being Righteous, Being Saved September 17, 2015

“To be ‘righteous,” writes John Barclay (Paul & the Gift), “does not mean to be ‘saved.’” Rather, the “righteous” person is one who is “worthy of the divine gift of salvation” (377). God gives gifts to those who are worthy of them. The “righteous” are worthy. God gives salvation to the righteous.

This distinction helps pinpoint the conflict between Paul and the Jews/Judaizers: “Since ‘to be recognized as righteous’ is to be considered a worthy recipient of salvation, but not itself to be saved, there is no implication that Jews outside of Christ thought that they could achieve salvation by Torah-observance, earning it by their efforts rather than receiving it from God. . . . it is everywhere recognized in Second Temple Judaism that salvation is a gift of God. But it is also common (though not universal) to insist that God gives this supreme gift to fit and worthy beneficiaries” (378). That would only be natural; it was an axiom of much ancient ethics that gifts should be given to the worthy.

The issue for Paul is what qualifies a person as worthy, as righteous: “What Paul . . . denies is that Torah-observance makes a person a fitting beneficiary of divine gift, since no one is (or will be) considered ‘righteous’ on that basis. What Jewish believers have come to realize, through their ‘calling’ in grace and their experience in Christ, is that the saving gift has already been given in Christ, without regard to worth, and that God considers ‘righteous’ those whose new lives, evidenced in faith, have been generated from the Christ-event. . . . To be ‘considered righteous in Christ’ is thus the result of the Christ-gift, not the condition for it” (378).

This nicely sorts out the complications. On the one hand, Barclay is able to show in what sense Judaism was a “religion of grace,” while at the same time showing that “doing the law” was not merely a matter of “staying in.” His formulation also cuts through some opposed views of Paul: “Justification” is, Barclay argues, about how God “considers” a person, but this is not a bare status but is evidenced by a new life “generated from the Christ event.” What God values is not determined by Torah; what God values is the new life of faith that comes from Christ.


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