Rom. 5:16, 18—“of many trespasses unto justification ... through one act of righteousness”; cf. 1 Tim. 3:16—“justified in the spirit.” The distinction between δικαίωσις and δικαίωμα may be illustrated by the distinction between poesy and poem,—the former denoting something in process, an ever-working spirit; the latter denoting something fully accomplished, a completed work. Hence δικαίωμα is used in Luke 1:6—“ordinances of the Lord”; Rom. 2:26—“ordinances of the law”; Heb. 9:1—“ordinances of divine service.”
(d) δικαιοσύνη—is the state of one justified, or declared just (Rom. 8:10; 1 Cor. 1:30). In Rom. 10:3, Paul inveighs against τὴν ἰδίαν δικαιοσύνην as insufficient and false, and in its place would put τὴν τοῦ Θεοῦ δικαιοσύνην,—that is, a δικαιοσύνη which God not only requires, but provides; which is not only acceptable to God, but proceeds from God, and is appropriated by faith,—hence called δικαιοσύνη πίστεως or ἐκ πίστεως. “The primary signification of the word, in Paul's writings, is therefore that state of the believer which is called forth by God's act of acquittal,—the state of the believer as justified,” that is, freed from punishment and restored to the divine favor.
Rom. 8:10—“the spirit is life because of righteousness”; 1 Cor. 1:30—“Christ Jesus, who was made unto us ... righteousness”; Rom. 10:3—“being ignorant of God's righteousness, and seeking to establish their own, they did not subject themselves to the righteousness of God.” Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 2:542—“The ‘righteousness of God’ is the active and passive obedience of incarnate God.” See, on δικαιοσύνη, Cremer, N. T. Lexicon, Eng. trans., 174; Meyer on Romans, trans., 68-70—“δικαιοσύνη Θεοῦ (gen. of origin, emanation from) = rightness which proceeds from God—the relation of being right into which man is put by God (by an act of God declaring him righteous).”
E. G. Robinson, Christian Theology, 304—“When Paul addressed those who trusted in their own righteousness, he presented salvation as attainable only through faith in another; when he addressed Gentiles who were conscious of their need of a helper, the forensic imagery is not employed. Scarce a trace of it appears in his discourses as recorded in the Acts, and it is noticeably absent from all the epistles except the Romans and the Galatians.”
Since this state of acquittal is accompanied by changes in the character and conduct, δικαιοσύνη comes to mean, secondarily, the moral condition of the believer as resulting from this acquittal and inseparably connected with it (Rom. 14:17; 2 Cor. 5:21). This righteousness arising from justification becomes a principle of action (Mat. 3:15; Acts 10:35; Rom. 6:13, 18). The term, however, never loses its implication of a justifying act upon which this principle of action is based.
Rom. 14:17—“the kingdom of God is not eating and drinking, but righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit”; 2 Cor. 5:21—“that we might become the righteousness of God in him”; Mat. 3:15—“Suffer it now: for thus it becometh us to fulfil all righteousness”; Acts 10:35—“in every nation he that feareth him, and worketh righteousness, is acceptable to him”; Rom. 6:13—“present yourselves unto God, as alive from the dead, and your members as instruments of righteousness unto God.” Meyer on Rom. 3:23—“Every mode of conception which refers redemption and the forgiveness of sins, not to a real atonement through the death of Christ, but subjectively to the dying and reviving with him guaranteed and produced by that death (Schleiermacher, Nitzsch, Hofmann), is opposed to the N. T.,—a mixing up of justification and sanctification.”
On these Scripture terms, see Bp. of Ossory, Nature and Effects of Faith, 436-496; Lange, Com., on Romans 3:24; Buchanan on Justification, 226-249. Versus Moehler, Symbolism, 102—“The forgiveness of sins ... is undoubtedly a remission of the guilt and the punishment which Christ hath taken and borne upon himself; but it is likewise the transfusion of his Spirit into us”; Newman, Lectures on Justification, 68-143; Knox, Remains; N. W. Taylor, Revealed Theology, 310-372.
It is a great mistake in method to derive the meaning of δίκαιος from that of δικαιοσύνη, and not vice versa. Wm. Arnold Stevens, in Am. Jour. Theology, April, 1897—“δικαιοσύνη, righteousness, in all its meanings, whether ethical or forensic, has back of it the idea of law; also the idea of violated law; it derives its forensic sense from the verb δικαιόω and its cognate noun δικαίωσις; δικαιοσύνη therefore is legal acceptableness, the status before the law of a pardoned sinner.”
Denney, in Expos. Gk. Test., 2:565—“In truth, ‘sin,’ ‘the law,’ ‘the curse of the law,’ ‘death,’ are names for something which belongs not to the Jewish but to the human conscience; and it is only because this is so that the gospel of Paul is also a gospel for us. Before Christ came and redeemed the world, all men were at bottom on the same footing: Pharisaism, legalism, moralism, or whatever it is called, is in the last resort the attempt to be good without God, to achieve a righteousness of our own, without an initial all-inclusive immeasurable debt to him; in other words, without submitting, as sinful men must submit, to be justified by faith apart from works of our own, and to find in that justification, and in that only, the spring and impulse of all good.”
It is worthy of special observation that, in the passages cited above, the terms “justify” and “justification” are contrasted, not with the process of depraving or corrupting, but with the outward act of condemning; and that the expressions used to explain and illustrate them are all derived, not from the inward operation of purifying the soul or infusing into it righteousness, but from the procedure of courts in their judgments, or of offended persons in their forgiveness of offenders. We conclude that these terms, wherever [pg 854] they have reference to the sinner's relation to God, signify a declarative and judicial act of God, external to the sinner, and not an efficient and sovereign act of God changing the sinner's nature and making him subjectively righteous.