Justification of the Ungodly Again

Joe Rigney writes to point out that NT Wright’s interpretation of Romans 4:5 (namely, that “justification of the ungodly” is equivalent to “bringing nations into Abraham’s family”) runs up against a problem in Romans 5:6, where Paul tells us that “at the right time, Christ died for the ungodly.” Joe notes that “ungodly” there is contrasted to “righteous” and “good” (v. 7), both moral categories rather than categories having to do with status (Jew/Gentile). Besides, Paul says that “we” were helpless when Christ died for the ungodly, including himself among the ungodly for whom Christ died.

Since Christ’s death is the basis for justification (“justified by His blood,” 5:9), Romans 5 teaches that “justification of the ungodly” through the death of Christ means what Protestants have always said it means, namely, that Christ died for immoral sinners, and that God justifies those immoral sinners. Joe suggests that this means that Abraham’s belief in the “justification of the ungodly” doesn’t exclude Abraham. Justification of the ungodly is not just about the nations; it’s about Abraham too.

These are excellent points. I don’t think that they undermine Wright’s point, but they do mean that his interpretation of 4:5 has to be adjusted a bit. Here’s a suggestion:

What I found compelling in Wright’s argument is the conclusion that justifying the ungodly in 4:5 refers to the promise made to Abraham, the promise that Abraham believed. This promise was a promise of reward, which Wright convincingly argues is the promise of land, a seed, and a “worldwide family.” 4:3 says that Abraham believed God; 4:5 speaks more generally about “one who” believes in the God who justifies the ungodly. I take it that despite the more generic language 4:5 is still talking about Abraham’s faith, and still talking about the specific promise made to Abraham and sealed in the covenant of Genesis 15 (which passage Paul quotes in verse 3 and follows throughout the passage). Abraham believed the God who justifies the ungodly, and in the context of Genesis and of Paul’s argument, that does seem equivalent to saying that Abraham believed the God who promised him a seed like the stars and a land for them all.

But this doesn’t necessarily exclude Abraham himself from the category. In fact, the notion that Abraham himself is one of the ungodly justified by God fits the narrative of Genesis quite well. Abraham was called from Ur of the Chaldees, from the worship of idols (cf. Joshua 24:14). He was an outside, not a covenant partner, yet Yahweh called him into covenant partnership, reckoning him as a righteous man. Abraham trusts that Yahweh will also justify the rest of the ungodly nations in part because of his own experience. In Romans 4, Paul’s primary point in using the phrase is to talk about the inclusion of the nations in the covenant of Abraham, the inclusion of those who share the faith of Abraham. But we can apply the same phrase to Abraham himself at an earlier stage in the story.

The pattern here is similar to the sequence of events with Abraham and Isaac. Hebrews 11 tells us that Abraham went to Mount Moriah confident that he would return to Isaac because he knew that God would raise the dead. How did he know that? Abraham already had seen Isaac raised from the dead: Isaac was resurrected a birth, born from the dead man Abraham and the dead womb of Sarah his mother.

On this basis, we can make sense of Romans 5:6. The “we” at the beginning of that chapter is not, as it sometimes is in Paul’s letters, a “Jewish we.” It is rather a “believing we,” the “we” of those whose transgressions were removed and who were justified in the death and resurrection of Jesus (4:25). All of the “we” were helpless – Jew and Gentile, as Paul has shown from the beginning of Romans. All were in the position of being outsiders to God’s covenant purposes, until Christ died “for the ungodly” and thus laid the basis for the justification of the ungodly. Thus, what is implicit and subordinate in Romans 4 (that Abraham himself was originally among the ungodly, and were justified by grace) becomes explicit in Romans 5 (that Paul, along with Jews and Gentiles, were originally among the ungodly, and were justified by grace).