Justification

5:21 forms the climax of a three-chapter build-up of sustained exposition of the nature of apostleship as the embodiment of the gospel, the gospel of God's faithfulness in the Messiah, and also the climax of a thrice-repeated sequence of just such a double statement about the Messiah's death on the one hand and the apostolic ministry on the other.

It is of course popular to say that, since the language of "righteousness" is essentially "relational," "justification" actually means "the establishment of a personal relationship," a mutual knowing, between the believer and God, or the believer and Jesus. But this is extremely misleading

the point of the covenant always was that God would bless the whole world throughAbraham's family. The point of Romans 3:1-8 is not a general discussion about God's attributes and human failure. Likewise, the unfaithfulness of the Israelites is not their lack of belief.

It is as though Paul cannot get tired of saying it: if you want to know who we are, we are people in whom God is at work, because of and according to the pattern of the Messiah, for the benefit of you and of the wider world.

But its own internal irony, claiming the Scriptures as its sole authority but needing to misread them to force through its central point, has come home to roost, albeit through the oblique and frequently misleadingly stated so-called new perspective.

At least, however, Piper does not go in the far more frequent wrong direction, that of deducing, from the fact that "righteousness" in the Bible is a relational term, that it refers to the relationship between Godand humans, making "justification" mean "the establishment of a relationship between me and God."

To describe that period as offering the "historic roots" of evangelicalism is profoundly disturbing. Proper evangelicals are rooted in Scripture, and above all in the Jesus Christ to whom Scripture witnesses, and nowhere else.

It would have been taken for granted that "God's righteousness" referred to the great, deep plans which the God of the Old Testament had always cherished, the through-Israel-for-the-world plans, plans to rescue and restore his wonderful creation itself, and, more especially, to God's faithfulness to those great plans.

And here, in the middle of the passage, Paul quotes a line whose immediate sequel, if I am right, simply repeats the exact meaning of 2 Corinthians 5:21b: I have given you as a covenant to the people. Or, in Paul's language, "That we might, in him, become the righteousness of God."