Justification

Rather, unless we are absolutely forced to deny it, we should assume that when Paul appears to be laying down first principles about God's future judgment, he is laying down first principles about God's future judgment.

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.

The whole point of Abraham in Romans 4, as I have said before in relation to Galatians 3, is not that he is an "illustration" or an "example," as though the saving plan consisted of the simplistic narrative, "Humans sin; God rescues; all is well (and, by the way, God has done this here and there in the past as well)."

Thatis precisely not what 2:17-20 is saying. The boast is "Well, but I am the solution to this Problem."

Paul has announced in Romans 3:21 that God has been faithful to the covenant; Romans 4, so far from being an "illustration" or "example" of this (as though Abraham could be detached from his historical moorings and float around like a lost helium balloon wherever the winds of ahistorical hermeneutics might take him), is the full

"Righteousness" carries the overtones both of "justice"-the Creator's passion to put things right-and of "faithfulness"-YHwx's faithfulness to the covenant which he established so that through it he might indeed put all things right.

His "acts of righteousness" are thus the acts he performs as outworkings or demonstrations of his covenant faithfulness. But, even at that point, "righteousness" does not mean the same as "salvation."

a "low" ecclesiology, a mere individualism with saved individuals getting together from time to time for mutual benefit, were to turn out to be a denial of some of the key elements of Paul's missionary theology?

Romans 2:1-16 must take its place, not as an odd aside which doesn't fit with what Paul says everywhere else, but as a central statement of something he normally took for granted.