The Righteousness of God revealed

Mark Seifrid writes that:

It is clear from these contexts that when Paul speaks of the ‘righteousness of God’ he does not refer to an abstract divine attribute, but to the event of God’s justification over against fallen humanity, which paradoxically is also the justification of the fallen human being.

He sees 'the Righteousness of God' as something that cuts two ways for us sinful human beings. On the one hand it is God's retributive justice in which his wrath is rightfully poured out, but on the other hand it is also his salvific justice in which he saves his people as he promised.

If the book of Romans has as a theme the Righteousness of God being revealed (1:17), then it is noteworthy that the next verse says God's "wrath is revealed", and that "because of your hard and impenitent heart you are storing up wrath for yourself on the day of wrath when God's righteous judgment will be revealed" (2:5). These are all retributive meanings of the Righteousness of God.

But then the turning point comes in the great "but now" of Romans 3:21, where the wrath meets the salvific faithfulness to his promises:

"But now the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from the law, although the Law and the Prophets bear witness to it — the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe. For there is no distinction: for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood, to be received by faith. This was to show God's righteousness, because in his divine forbearance he had passed over former sins. It was to show his righteousness at the present time, so that he might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus." (3:21-26)

Now, in Christ, the Righteousness of God can have a salvific meaning for us.

I think Seifrid gets the meaning of the Righteousness of God better than any other, and I think that is because he is unwilling to give it an exact definition but is an unusual kind of theologian who can accept the paradox and point to Christ instead of a form of words:

Paul’s language obviously includes the idea of retribution…Any interpretation of God’s righteousness or justification in purely salvific terms is forced into the untenable position of ignoring a significant element of Paul’s language and argument as it appears in Romans…For Paul, God’s righteousness is revealed in the event of Christ’s cross and resurrection. Here the contention between the Creator and the fallen creature is decided in God’s favor and yet savingly resolved…There is no definition of ‘righteousness,’ not even in narrative terms, which adequately accounts for the simultaneity of righteous wrath and the gift of righteousness of which Paul speaks (Rom. 3:4-5; 3:21-26). The Christ-event itself supplies the final definition of the language.

Exactly right!

Quotes taken from here, which is from a great collection of big quotations on the meaning of the phrase provided by various theologians.