The Justification of Abraham
Notes on Romans 4
After providing a summary of his own gospel of ‘deliverance by fidelity’ (1:16–17; 3:21–26) and a masterful reductio ad absurdum of the Teacher’s alternative gospel, largely in the latter’s own terms (1:18–3:20), Paul goes on to engage the Teacher on another, more directly exegetical level, in relation to Abraham and his offspring (3:27–4:25).
Abraham surely featured prominently in the Teacher’s proclamation, representing the idolatrous pagan ‘converting’ to Torah observance, getting circumcised, and as a result being declared righteous and receiving as a reward the promised offspring, blessing, and inheritance from God.
Abraham does not so naturally fit into Paul’s framework, and that could explain why Paul does not discuss Abraham outside of these polemical ‘justification’ texts, here and in Galatians. Nevertheless, Paul manages, or at least tries very hard, to construe Abraham as scriptural evidence of his gospel, and he does so in the following way.
2.1 Fidelity and Resurrection
In the Scriptures, Paul reads that God promised Abraham the blessing of innumerable offspring and inheritance (cf. Gen 12:2–3; 13:15–17; 15; 17:2, 4–8, 16, 19–21). Paul interprets this as Abraham and his offspring being promised star-like rulership over the cosmos — not just the land! (cf. 4:13). A divine people ruling the world — the kingdom of God in a nutshell.¹
However, Abraham and Sarah were of age, and increasingly so as the years progressed and the promise of offspring awaited fulfilment. Accordingly, a ‘righteous act’ (dikaiosyne)² of the creator God was required, consisting of ‘raising’ a son out of the ‘deadness’ of Abraham and Sarah (4:19) — in other words, resurrection. This takes place in Genesis 21:1–2 as Isaac is miraculously conceived.
This ‘two-stage’ gifting of the promised offspring is explained by Paul in terms of ‘credit’, which he derived from the Septuagint of Gen 15:6 (see Rom 4:3 and passim) and which is akin to our modern notion of a check. In Campbell’s words: “Money is promised to the recipient of the check and is now in effect his or hers, but the money itself has not yet been paid” (Deliverance, 730). The ‘money’ was ‘credited’ with the promise, but ‘paid’ only with the conception of Isaac. This also means that “Abraham trusted in God and it was credited a righteous act³” and “Abraham was ‘justified’/delivered” (4:2; cf. 4:5) refer to two different points in time, separated by many years!
During the intermediary time, Abraham showed remarkable fidelity (4:14–22), making him a good forerunner of Christ (4:25), who was also faithful and then given life, as well as of believers (4:23–24), who now through the pneuma share in Christ’s fidelity and life while still awaiting the final resurrection. Like Abraham, they have been credited with resurrection, namely through the pneuma dwelling in them, but they still await its payment on the final day (cf. 8:9–11).⁴
The ‘payment’ was already guaranteed in the giving of the promise by God’s own loving faithfulness
Importantly, Abraham’s initial trust, maturing into fidelity,⁵ did not earn the fulfillment of the promise (see below). Rather, the ‘payment’ was already guaranteed in the giving of the promise by God’s own loving faithfulness. There is a strong unconditional nature to it; it was given apart from works, in relation to trust, and therefore whether Abraham would continue to sin or obey (see below), God would fulfill it. We could say that the resurrection/glorification of Abraham and his offspring was lovingly ‘pre-purposed’ by God (cf. 8:28–30). Human trust and faithfulness, in turn, mark the road of Abraham and his offspring from the reception of the promise to its fulfillment.
We could sum up the ‘ordo salutis’ of Abraham as promise — trust — crediting — fidelity — resurrection, with on and off human and divine actions, but the divine being the decisive ones. (Importantly, God’s election and calling yet precede the divine promise, though they’re only implicit in this chapter; they do occur in chapter 8.)
This, then, is how Abraham is construed to testify to Paul’s gospel of ‘deliverance by fidelity’ through Christ and his pneuma, apart from works, for both Jew and pagan. Circumcision (and any further observances by Abraham) was only the seal of a righteous act of resurrection already received ‘as a check’ while he was uncircumcised (4:9–12).
2.2 ‘Justification’ and Forgiveness?
As in Galatians 3, Paul displays quite some creativity in this ‘resurrectional’ and ‘fidelic’ account of Abraham. However, a lot of interpreters get sidetracked by Paul’s quotation of Psalm 32:1–2a in Romans 4:6–8, from which they conclude that God’s ‘righteous act’ consists of the forgiveness/covering/non-imputation of sin. However, Paul does not cite this text to explain the nature of God’s righteous act itself, which he does explicitly and clearly in 4:16–25 (namely as resurrection), but its manner, namely ‘credited (apart from works)’.
The key word that connects the Psalm text to Paul’s present discussion of Genesis 15:6 is the verb ‘credit’ (Gk: logizo).⁶ This is an application of the second hermeneutical rule of Hillel, in which texts that use the same word can be taken as talking about the same thing. In the Psalm, instead of trust being credited (with a righteous act), it is sin not being credited (presumably with some form of punishment). Importantly, sin is not the opposite of trust, but of the law observance (‘works’) Paul’s been discussing. Accordingly, God disregards both Abraham and David’s lack of law observance, by crediting Abraham with something he did not deserve and not crediting David with something he did deserve; in either case, God does not work on the basis of meritorious obedience, which of course undermines the central tenet of the Teacher’s gospel.
Paul’s point in citing this text,⁷ then, is, to highlight that God’s crediting disregards people’s law observance — whether they had not yet received commandments to fulfill, like Abraham, or had transgressed commandments, like David. The ‘blessedness’, then, which David describes or pronounces (lego, 4:6; cf. Jewett), consists of that gracious disregard — the thing that both Gen 15:6 and Psa 32:1–2a talk about — , which in the case of the Psalmist leads to forgiveness and atonement and in the case of Abraham the ‘resurrection’ of Isaac. Importantly, the former need not at all be understood in the retributive terms of the Teacher, but that is besides the point.⁸
The ‘blessedness’ consists of God’s gracious disregard for law observance
Note also that if Paul’s concern had been Abraham’s forgiveness or atonement, it is very peculiar that he does not mention or argue for Abraham’s sinfulness and subsequent confession or repentance. He does mention, somewhat casually, that God justifies “the ungodly” (4:5). This indirectly casts Abraham as ‘ungodly’, but it seems more intended as a general truth, posited directly against the Teacher’s fiery rhetorical opening of God’s wrath being revealed against pagan “ungodliness and unrighteousness” (1:18). In other words, Paul is saying here: God is a God who, in Christ, has delivered pagans — yes, those very ungodly and wicked people you [the Teacher] have been castigating! and which now includes you [Romans] and previously included Abraham, who before God’s call were ‘God-less’, not-worshipping-the-only-true-God pagans.
However, again, if the whole point had been Abraham’s forgiveness, you would expect an explicit reference to his sins or transgressions that are being forgiven. What we do get later on is an explicit reference to his “dead body” (4:19) from which Isaac is resurrected — the center of Paul’s discussion. We could say that the ‘problem’ is not so much moral as ontological (which Paul will explain in cosmological terms in Romans 5–8), which means that the ‘solution’ is transformative, not legal.
Casting Abraham as sinful would also have been an uphill battle since not a lot was known about Abraham’s life before his divine call, and Abraham was generally revered by Jews, including the Teacher, precisely for his later obedience. In the Teacher’s gospel, Abraham’s proto-Torah observance ‘earned’ the promises as a ‘reward’. Paul, in turn, does not question the uprightness of Abraham, but reframes it through the notion of a priorly ‘credited’ gift of which the giving was already ensured in the crediting, regardless of any later obedience. This does not mean that Abraham’s ‘fidelity’ was irrelevant, but rather that it was part of a threefold story of (1) divine promise, (2) human trust and fidelity, and (3) resurrection, all governed by a loving God — in other words, a gospel story.
Jewett, who understands justification in other, more social terms, also argues against the identification of justification with forgiveness:
“Paul wishes to stress God’s merciful action toward those who have no claim on honorable achievement, and he subsumes the references to forgiveness in the psalm citation under this category. In contrast to the mainstream of commentators who understand justification as forgiveness of sins, following the Augustinian legacy, Paul retains a stress on the new relationship of honor [or rather, the righteous act of deliverance] that God chooses to “reckon” to those who do not deserve it. This is congruent with the idea of blessing, for as Kent Richards observes, ‘The primary factor of blessing is the statement of relationship between parties,’ rather than the concrete benefit itself. In this instance Paul signals in advance that the secondary text from Ps 31 should be understood as confirming that God grants righteous status [or rather, etc.] to the undeserving and thus establishes a new relationship between God’s self and the community of those who accept grace without any claim of having earned it” (315–16).
He cites Meyer, Koch, and Neubrand as pointing to “the confirmatory function of Ps 31 in this context” (316n110) — that is, the text confirms an already present element in Paul’s argument (God’s crediting), instead of adding a new element (forgiveness/atonement).
Finally, the general absence of cultic terminology in Paul is noteworthy (though that fact is somewhat mitigated if one takes the Pseudo-Paulines as authentic; cf. aphesis in Eph 1:7; Col 1:14). Paresis in Romans 3:26 is a rare word that could also mean ‘release’, which is most plausible when it is tied to redemption/liberation (apolytrosis, 3:24) — and a similar thing could in fact be argued for the Pseudo-Pauline texts (see apolytrosis in Eph 1:7, 14; Col 1:14).
Paul is telling a cosmic Exodus story and his point is very much liberation. Campbell notes astutely that atonement language does not do the heavy lifting in Paul’s discussions of salvation through Christ; rather, it “nuanc[es] and enrich[es] points that have already been established on other grounds” (Deliverance, 651). There are links between Abraham, David, and Christ, but these have not to do with atonement but with resurrection and exaltation (see e.g. anistemi, ‘raise up’, in 2 Sam 7:12, as well as sperma, ‘seed’, which is taken up in Gal 3; and kleronomia, ‘inheritance’ in Ps 2:8).
Finally, what about Paul’s reference to Christ being “delivered over for our trespasses” (4:25)? How does that tie into Paul’s discussion of Abraham’s ‘resurrection’? It is an example of Paul taking a traditional formula, much like in Galatians 1:4 (see Martyn), and taking it in his own direction, which, as becomes clear from the surrounding argument, revolves around a liberation, through dying to the flesh and rising again in pneuma, from the powers that produce those transgressions — including, scandalously, the law (e.g. 7:5). That, then, is where we’re heading next.
Endnotes
1. A kingdom could be said to consist of (1) a king, ruling over (2) a people, in (3) a land. In Paul’s case, the people coincides with the kings, who receive delegated authority from the ultimate king, God; and the land is expanded to the whole cosmos. Jesus is the forerunner of the people, as he is now raised to the right hand of God. One day, all celestial powers will be subdued to Christ and those in Christ will rule.
For this idea of cosmic inheritance and rulership, besides Romans 4:13, see 5:17; 8:32; 1 Cor 3:21–23; 6:2–3 (perhaps Phil 2:15); more broadly, 1 Cor 15; it is implicit in any references to the cluster of notions of ‘resurrection’, ‘glory’, the divine ‘image’, being ‘seated at the right hand of God’, enemies being subdued ‘under his feet’, divine ‘sonship’, ‘inheritance’, etc. For its OT background, see (i.a.) Gen 1:26; Psa 2, 8, 72, 81, 89, 110; and Dan 12:1–2. For more on this in relation to Paul’s polytheistic framework, see the articles of David Burnett; in relation to Romans 4 specifically, see his “So Shall Your Seed Be”. On the notion of glory, cf. Haley Goranson Jacob, Conformed to the Image of His Son: Reconsidering Paul’s Theology of Glory in Romans.
2. Campbell argues for the following meaning of dikaiosyne: “as a singular, saving, liberating, life-giving, eschatological act by God, who in so acting is behaving as the divine ruler of the cosmos can and should” (Deliverance, 750; see ch. 17).
3. Here eis is used for an accusative; the same thing is stated in clearer terms in verse 6, where dikaiosynen is in the accusative case. Clearly, for Paul, God is the subject of the crediting, dikaiosyne the direct object, and both faith and Abraham the indirect object (which therefore inform each other). However, Paul for the sake of argument adopts the more clumsy scriptural phrasing: “[to] faith was credited to [Abraham] the righteous act”.
4. It might seem that Paul is saying that believers will be credited with resurrection in the future; this would undermine the meaning of logizo as a two-staged gift (check and payment): “Now the words, “it was credited to him,” were written not for his sake alone but for ours also, to whom it will be credited, who believe in him who raised Jesus our Lord from the dead…” (4:23–24). However, seen from the time of writing of Genesis 15, the ‘crediting’ of believers was future, but for the Romans that promised future is present. They have been credited with resurrection, and they still await its payment. (After coming to this solution, I read that Jewett had found the same solution in Kühl; see Jewett, Romans, 341, referring to Kühl, Römer, 135, “followed with hesitation by Wilckens, 1:277; more clearly by Luz, Geschichtsverständnis, 113.”
5. Arguably, the dio of 4:22 refers to Abraham’s initial trust at the giving of the promise in Gen 15:6, which it cites, and not its maturation into fidelity which the preceding verses describe (e.g. verse 19 refers to Abraham’s fidelity at the age at which he finally received Isaac, namely about a hundred years old).
6. Note that English translations can give semblance of another connection, namely Abraham being ‘blessed’ by God (see Gal 3) and David pronouncing someone ‘blessed’. The former, however, involves the Greek eulog- word group, the latter the makar- word group, constituting a so-called ‘macarism’ (of which Jesus’ ‘Beatitudes’ are also examples).
7. Besides making explicit that it is God who is doing the logizo (or not), which was only implicit in Gen 15:6; so Longenecker.
8. For a comprehensive and up-to-date take on sacrifice in the Bible, that decisively dismantles the ‘penal substitutionary atonement’ reading (which is freight with presuppositions from the Teacher), see Andrew R. Rillera,
Lamb of the Free: Recovering the Varied Sacrificial Understandings of Jesus’s Death (Cascade Books, 2024).
