Justification of the Ungodly

I’m still absorbing parts of NT Wright’s recent JSNT essay, “Paul and the Patriarch: The Role of Abraham in Romans 4.” A couple of his points are very compelling.

First, he disputes what he calls a “customary” way of understanding Paul’s reference to “justification of the ungodly” in Romans 4:5. The argument generally goes like this: Abraham is a pagan and uncircumcised, hence ungodly; besides he’s a sinner; thus, he needs justification, and, since Abraham believes that God justifies the ungodly, God does in fact justify him. Abraham thus becomes a paradigm of justification by faith. Wright says that this amounts to the view that “Abraham is justified by faith because he believes in justification by faith” (p. 217).

Wright has long criticized the view that we are justified by faith by believing in justification by faith, and he does it here again. As an alternative, he suggests that the passage should be read this way:

God promises Abraham a great reward (cf. Genesis 15:1), specifically “a colossal, worldwide family, like the stars of heaven in number and occupying not just ‘the land’ but ‘the world’; in believing this promise, Abraham has to be confident that God will bring people into this family “from all sorts of ethnic and moral backgrounds,” that is, that he will bring the ungodly into the covenant people; in believing that God justifies the ungodly, then, Abraham is not thinking of his own status before God, but rather believing God’s promise “about his ‘ungodly’ descendants” (p. 218).

Wright sums up: “The ‘justifying of the ungodly’, spoken of in v. 5 as the characteristic action of the God in whom Abraham believed, is not a reference to Abraham’s own justification from within a supposed ‘ungodly’ state, but refers rather to ‘the inclusion within the sperma ’ (in other words, the ‘justification’) of non-Jews” (223).

On another point, his argument is also compelling. Slightly modifying a suggestion from Richard Hays , he understands Romans 4:1 to mean “What shall we say, then? Have we found Abraham to be our ancestor in a human, fleshly sense?”

What Wright adds here is a convincing case that this question runs through the chapter and is answered fairly explicitly in verses 16-17. There, Paul concludes that Abraham is not a father kata sarka but kata charin . Wright says, “In vv. 16 and 17 Paul declares that ‘It is of faith, hina kata charin , so that [it might be] according to grace’. So what, here, is deemed to be ‘according to grace’? It is not, here, ‘justification’, let alone ‘salvation’, but Abraham’s fatherhood of the worldwide family. The kata charin of v. 16 answers to the kata sarka of v. 1. ‘We have’, in other words, ‘found Abraham to be our father according to grace, not “according to the flesh”, so that the promise might be valid for the whole seed . . . for all those who share Abraham’s faith’. This brings us, triumphantly, to the climax of the chapter, the complete answer to the question of the first verse: ‘And this Abraham is the father of us all, in accordance with the scriptural promise that I have made you a father of many nations.’ Abraham is not merely, in other words, the father of Jews, of the circumcised, of a kata sarka family, into which Gentile converts would then have to come as circumcised proselytes, but of the whole, larger gathering which God had promised” (231).

Paul’s question in 4:1 expects a negative answer, and that’s what the rest of the chapter provides: No, he’s not just a fleshly father, even to the Jews, and if that’s true, then he can be father of Jews and Gentiles who share his faith in the God who raises the dead and keeps his promises.