Romans 1:16–17 is the thesis of Paul’s longest letter. He is not ashamed of the gospel, he says, because it is God’s power to save everyone who believes. Then he says why:
For in it [the] righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith, just as it is written: “But the righteous [one] will live by faith.”
Everything in Romans turns on the phrase at the start of that verse, δικαιοσύνη γὰρ θεοῦ, “the righteousness of God”. It comes back at the turning point of the letter (3:21–26), in Paul’s grief over Israel (10:3), and in two other letters (2 Corinthians 5:21; Philippians 3:9). But the phrase can be read in more than one way, and the way a reader takes it changes what the gospel is about. This article sets out the readings, shows how translations have taken sides, and explains what Open Word Bible does.
A word English splits in two
The first difficulty is English itself. Greek has one family of words built on one root: dikaios, “righteous” or “just”; dikaiosynē, “righteousness” or “justice”; and dikaioō, “to justify”, to declare or make someone righteous. A Greek reader hears the connection between them at once.
English has two families, one from Old English (“right”, “righteous”, “righteousness”) and one from Latin (“just”, “justice”, “justify”). There is no verb “to righteous”, and “justice” sounds more like a court or a social cause than like a person’s standing with God. So when Paul says that God is “righteous” and “justifies” the one who has faith (Romans 3:26), English hides the fact that he is using the same word twice. Translators have to choose between the two families, phrase by phrase, and every choice loses some of the link.
Where Paul got the phrase
Paul’s Bible was the Old Testament, and there God’s righteousness is not mainly a standard he measures people by. It is God acting to put things right, and especially to rescue his people. Psalm 98:2 sets it beside salvation:
The LORD has made known his salvation; before the eyes of the nations he has revealed his righteousness.
The two halves of the verse say the same thing twice: God’s salvation and God’s righteousness, צִדְקָתֽוֹ (ṣidqātô), are both shown to the nations. The meaning decision calls this God’s “saving justice”, and the Balanced level says “his saving power” and “his justice”. Isaiah pairs the same two words: “My righteousness is near; my salvation has gone out” (51:5). The record there describes God’s righteousness as God acting to put right what is wrong and to rescue his people, and the Readable level says “I will soon set things right”.
Notice the verb in Psalm 98: God has revealed his righteousness. Paul uses the same idea in Romans 1:17: in the gospel, God’s righteousness “is revealed”.
Three readings
The meaning decision for Romans 1:17 is marked uncertain, and a footnote lists the readings. Broadly, there are three.
A quality God has. The righteousness of God is God’s own justice or faithfulness: God is righteous. Paul certainly uses the phrase this way in Romans 3:5, where human wickedness “shows God’s righteousness”, and in 3:25–26, where God shows that he is just. On this reading, the gospel reveals what God is like.
A gift God gives. The righteousness of God is a righteousness from God: a right standing that God gives to people who believe. This is how Philippians 3:9 puts it in so many words. Paul wants to be found in Christ, “not having my own righteousness that is from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God resting on faith”. There the Greek has ἐκ θεοῦ δικαιοσύνην, “from God”, not simply “of God”. On this reading, the gospel reveals how people receive a righteousness that is not their own.
Something God does. The righteousness of God is God’s saving action: God putting the world right, keeping his promises, rescuing and setting free. This is the sense of the Psalms and Isaiah. On this reading, the gospel reveals God in action.
The readings overlap, and many readers hold more than one. The question is where the weight falls.
What difference it makes
It may seem like a fine distinction, but each reading makes Romans 1:17 say something different about the gospel.
If the righteousness of God is a quality God has, the gospel is first of all news about God: it shows that God is just. That is true, and Romans 3:26 says it. But on its own it leaves the question Luther struggled with. Why is it good news to a sinner that God is just?
If the righteousness of God is a gift, the gospel is news about how a person stands before God. Someone who could not be in the right by their own record is given a right standing as a gift, received by faith. This reading puts the stress on the individual believer, and it has been at the centre of Protestant preaching since the Reformation.
If the righteousness of God is God’s saving action, the gospel is news about what God has done in the world. In Jesus, God has kept his promises and acted to put right what was wrong. The individual believer is included in that, but the canvas is wider: Israel, the nations, and in the end the whole creation (Romans 8:19–21).
The readings are not rivals in every respect. A gift implies a giver who acts, and an action of God reveals what God is like. That is why the meaning decision, as the next sections show, tries to hold them together rather than choose one and discard the rest. But a translation still has to put words on the page, and the words will lean.
How the question shaped history
The second reading has a famous history. Martin Luther, looking back near the end of his life in the preface to his Latin works (1545), said that he had hated the phrase “the righteousness of God”. He had been taught to understand it as the justice by which God punishes sinners, and he could not see how that was good news. Then, thinking about the connection with “the righteous will live by faith”, he came to understand it as the righteousness by which God, in mercy, makes a person righteous through faith. He wrote that he felt as if he had been born again and had entered paradise through open gates.
Luther’s German Bible put that understanding into the text. In Romans 1:17 it does not say simply “the righteousness of God”. It says, in effect, “the righteousness that counts before God”. That is a translation that has taken a side.
In the twentieth century the debate moved. Rudolf Bultmann read the phrase in Luther’s line, as a gift from God. His former student Ernst Käsemann, in a 1961 essay, argued that this was too narrow: God’s righteousness is God’s saving power, a gift that cannot be separated from the giver, through which God reclaims his creation. N. T. Wright has argued for reading it as God’s faithfulness to his covenant, his promise to Abraham to bless the world through his family. Others continue to defend the gift reading, and point to Philippians 3:9 and Romans 10:3.
How translations take sides
Most English Bibles, from the King James Version to the English Standard Version and the New Revised Standard Version, say “the righteousness of God” and leave the ambiguity in place. That is the Greek’s own wording, and it lets the reader decide, though most English readers will hear only the first reading: God’s own goodness.
Some translations choose. The New International Version of 1984 said “a righteousness from God is revealed”, which takes the gift reading. Its 2011 revision went back to “the righteousness of God”. Some meaning-based translations, such as the Good News Translation, explain the phrase as how God puts people right with himself, which leans toward God’s action, and toward its result in people.
No rendering avoids taking a side entirely. Even “the righteousness of God” chooses English words that most readers hear as a quality God has.
What Open Word Bible does
The meaning decision for Romans 1:17 chooses this sense: God’s righteousness is God acting rightly to put people right with himself. The reason it gives is the one this article has followed. In the Psalms and Isaiah, God’s righteousness is God acting faithfully to save and set right. Romans speaks of it both as God’s own (3:5, 3:25–26) and as given to those who believe (3:22, 5:17). The phrase most likely holds both: God shows himself right by putting people right. The other readings, a status God gives and a quality of God, are listed as alternatives in the footnote.
That decision is the same at every level. The wording differs.
Literal, quoted at the top, says “[the] righteousness of God”, with the article in brackets because the Greek has none.
Balanced says the same, and puts the verb in a continuing form, because the Greek verb is in the present tense:
In it the righteousness of God is being revealed, from faith for faith. As it is written, “The one who is righteous will live by faith.”
Readable says what the phrase means:
The good news shows God’s righteousness: how God puts people right with himself. It comes by faith, and it leads to faith. As Scripture says, “The person who is righteous will live by faith.”
The Readable wording is the place where the project most clearly takes a side, and the record says so. Its rendering decision is marked uncertain, and notes that reviewers should check that the explanation does not narrow the phrase. “How God puts people right with himself” names God’s action and its result in people. It says less about God’s own justice, which matters in Romans 3:25–26. The same wording is used at Readable in 3:21 and 10:3, and each of those decisions carries the same note for reviewers.
From faith to faith
Two other phrases in the verse carry footnotes, and both are marked uncertain.
The first is ἐκ πίστεως εἰς πίστιν, “from faith to faith” or “from faith for faith”. The record takes it to mean that from start to finish it is by faith: faith is how righteousness is received and where it leads, with nothing else added. The footnote lists other readings. The first “faith” may be God’s faithfulness, and the second the human response. Or it may mean from one believer’s faith to another’s, or from the faith of the Old Testament to the faith of the New. Readable splits the idea in two: “It comes by faith, and it leads to faith.”
The second is the quotation from Habakkuk 2:4. In Hebrew the line ends וְצַדִּ֖יק בֶּאֱמוּנָת֥וֹ יִחְיֶֽה, “and the righteous, by his faithfulness, will live”. The record for Habakkuk says “by their faithfulness” at Literal and Balanced, with “his” as the alternative under the gender setting, and explains why it says “faithfulness” rather than “faith”: the Hebrew word means steady loyalty, the trust that holds firm and shows itself in a faithful life. Most copies of the Septuagint read “by my faithfulness”, meaning God’s. Paul leaves out the pronoun, and his Greek word means faith or trust. So the New Testament quotations say “faith”, because they are translated from their Greek, while Habakkuk says “faithfulness”, because it is translated from its Hebrew.
There is one more question in the quotation. The Greek order is “the righteous by faith will live”, and “by faith” can go with either neighbour. Either “the righteous will live by faith”, or “the one who is righteous by faith will live”. The record follows the first, as in Habakkuk, but notes in a footnote that the second fits Paul’s argument too, which runs from righteousness by faith (chapters 1–4) to life (chapter 5).
Romans 3:21–26
Paul picks up the theme after two and a half chapters about human guilt. “But now”, he says, God’s righteousness has been made known apart from the law, “through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe”. That phrase, “faith in Jesus Christ”, has a footnote of its own, because it can also be read as “the faithfulness of Jesus Christ”. The same question is discussed in Faith in Christ, or the faithfulness of Christ?. Here the meaning decision says simply: God’s righteousness, as in 1:17.
A few verses later the record adds something. In 3:25–26 God put Christ forward as a means of atonement “to show his righteousness”, because he had passed over sins in the past. Here, the meaning decision says, God’s righteousness is also his justice: he did not ignore sin. Verse 26 holds both senses together:
God put him forward as the means of atonement, by his blood, to be received through faith. He did this to show his righteousness, since he had passed over the sins committed before, when God held back his judgment. He did it to show his righteousness at the present time, so that he would be righteous and also the one who declares righteous whoever has faith in Jesus.
God is righteous, and he declares righteous. The Balanced level uses “righteous” for both, so that the reader can hear what the Greek says: the same word twice.
Their own, or God’s
Romans 10:3 shows the phrase in contrast. Paul’s fellow Jews, he says, have zeal for God, but “being ignorant of the righteousness of God, and seeking to establish their own, they did not submit to the righteousness of God”. The meaning decision reads God’s righteousness here as God’s own way of putting people right, which he gives, set against a righteousness of their own based on the law. Balanced varies the repeated phrase so that the long sentence reads naturally, and ends with “the righteousness that comes from God”. A rendering decision notes that this keeps the same sense.
Philippians 3:9, quoted above, makes the same contrast in Paul’s own life, and its meaning decision describes righteousness there as a right standing before God, not simply good conduct.
And in 2 Corinthians 5:21 the phrase reaches its boldest form. God made the one who knew no sin to be sin for us, “so that we might become the righteousness of God in him”. The meaning decision notes the balance of the sentence: as Christ was made sin, which was not his own, believers become God’s righteousness, which is not their own. It also notes that Paul says “become”, not only “receive”.
Why the phrase is left open where it can be
A translation has to say something, and every rendering of this phrase leans one way. Open Word Bible’s answer is to choose a sense in the meaning decision, say why, list the other senses in a footnote, and let the levels do different work. Literal and Balanced keep “the righteousness of God”, which leaves the most room for a reader to weigh the readings. Readable explains, and its rendering decision flags the explanation for review.
A reader who wants to see the whole argument can tap Romans 1:17 and read the record. The decision, the alternatives and the reasons are all there, and none of them is marked as settled.
Open Romans 1, Open Romans 3 and Open Habakkuk 2 to see the full records.