The Upper Register

ETS Far West Region Meeting, April 8

I’ll be in Escondido tomorrow at Westminster Seminary California for the Far West Region Meeting of ETS. At 5:00pm, I will be reading a paper in which I summarize the chapter of my dissertation where I analyze the language of righteousness (and the righteousness of God) in the Old Testament.

Which reminds me — both of my mentors (Drs. Hagner and Kim) and the external reader have examined my dissertation, “ΔΙΚΑΙΟΣΥΝΗ ΘΕΟΥ: A Lexical Examination of the Covenant-Faithfulness Interpretation.” The first two passed it as superior and the third passed it as adequate. Part of the third reader's concern with my dissertation flows from the fact that, although he is a fellow critic of the New Perspective on Paul, he questions the Reformed interpretation of righteousness as a gift from God, isolated from Christ, and wishes to recover Luther’s own view of Christ himself as our righteousness, which (he argues) does not rely on the concept of imputation. Nevertheless, he had some very helpful and detailed criticisms that I will need to ponder more carefully. In any event, it is a relief to know that I have passed. So, it looks like I will be graduating this June. 

Dissertation update

I was originally hoping to finish my dissertation by the end of this year, but things got really busy for me at work. So I have had to recalibrate. Now I'm aiming to finish by the end of next year, 2010. However, I have managed to write the first four chapters.

The fourth chapter is critical, because here I examine all occurrences of the two nouns for "righteousness" in the Hebrew OT (276 occurrences), as well as the translational equivalent in the Septuagint. I just submitted chapter 4 to Professor Seyoon Kim (my second reader) and he had some encouraging things to say. Although I need to beef up my argument in a couple of sections, he said, "You have put the needle to the balloon of the relational theory of righteousness." 

Next up are chapters on the use of righteousness in Jewish literature, such as the Dead Sea Scrolls, but especially Jewish Greek literature like the Letter of Aristeas, the Wisdom of Solomon, and Philo. My focus in these chapters will be to show that "righteousness" in Greek-speaking Judaism was not fundamentally different from its usage in the Hebrew OT or in extra-biblical Greek. In all three cases, it is fundamentally a norm concept rather than a relational concept.

Having critiqued the the NPP's interpretation of "the righteousness of God" as "God's covenant faithfulness," I will then make the positive case for the traditional Reformation interpretation of "the righteousness of God" in terms of the gift of righteousness (judicial status) from God, with a secondary meaning in Rom 3:25-26, namely, God's attribute of justice demonstrated via the propitiatory sacrifice of Christ.