rightness: being and doing what is right, and being set right by the God who is himself right
One Greek word carries a range that English splits across several. At its core it means conformity to what is right, but the New Testament writers fill that core from more than one direction, and the reader has to let the context decide which is in view.
In the Gospels and the general letters it most often names a quality of life: the right conduct God asks of his people, the integrity that does what is fair and faithful. In Paul it concentrates into something more startling: not only the rightness God requires but the right standing God gives, the verdict that a person stands clear before him, received through trust in Christ rather than earned by keeping rules. Alongside both, the word can point upward to God himself, to the rightness of his own character and the saving justice by which he sets wrong things right and rescues those who are wronged.
These senses are not separate words that happen to look alike. They hold together around a single idea, that of being right and being made right, which is why the same word can move from a person's honest dealings to God's courtroom verdict to God's own faithful character without changing its spelling. The disagreement among careful readers is not over whether the word means all this, but over which shade a given verse intends, especially in Paul's dense phrase "the righteousness of God."
Nuances
Disputed
In Paul's phrase "the righteousness of God," readers disagree about what the rightness belongs to and does. The traditional Reformation reading takes it chiefly as a right standing God gives and credits to the believer through faith. The New Perspective reads it as God's faithfulness to his covenant promises. A tradition running from Ernst Kasemann reads it as God's own saving activity that sets the world right. A participation stream reads it as God's character that believers are drawn into by union with Christ. Most agree Paul uses the phrase with more than one of these forces in different verses.
- contestedRight standing given and credited (Reformation/forensic); C.E.B. Cranfield, Romans (ICC, 1975-79); Charles Lee Irons, The Righteousness of God (WUNT II/386, 2015); Mark Seifrid, Christ Our Righteousness (NSBT 9, 2000); Thomas Schreiner, Romans (BECNT, 2nd ed. 2018)
- contestedGod's covenant faithfulness (New Perspective); N.T. Wright, Paul and the Faithfulness of God (2013); James D.G. Dunn, Romans (WBC, 1988)
- contestedGod's saving rectifying activity (apocalyptic); Ernst Kasemann, Gottesgerechtigkeit bei Paulus (1961); Peter Stuhlmacher, Gerechtigkeit Gottes bei Paulus (FRLANT 87, 1965); J. Louis Martyn, Galatians (Anchor Bible, 1997)
- minorityGod's character entered by union with Christ (participation); Michael Gorman, Inhabiting the Cruciform God (2009); Douglas Campbell, The Deliverance of God (2009)
Whether the Hebrew background of the word (the family translated by the Greek) carries a built-in sense of covenant faithfulness, as Hermann Cremer argued and the New Perspective assumes, or whether it primarily denotes conformity to a norm with saving justice as one part of that. Charles Lee Irons's concordance study challenges the covenant-faithfulness reading as reading a concept into the word.
- contestedThe word carries a relational, covenant-faithfulness sense; Hermann Cremer, Die paulinische Rechtfertigungslehre (1899); Gerhard von Rad, Old Testament Theology, vol. 1
- contestedThe word denotes conformity to a norm; saving justice is a subset, not covenant faithfulness as a stable sense; Charles Lee Irons, The Righteousness of God (WUNT II/386, 2015); Mark Seifrid, Righteousness Language in the Hebrew Scriptures and Early Judaism (2001)