Grace and Righteousness

At the heart of Paul’s gospel stands the announcement that “a man is justified by faith without the deeds of the law” (Rom. 3:28) — that God, in Christ, freely sets the sinner right by grace received through faith. This file presents the Orthodox patristic reading of justification and grace, in which God’s righteousness is gift and the justified are drawn into a real, transforming participation in Christ; it notes, without polemic, where this reading differs from later Western juridical framings; and it sets the modern “New Perspective on Paul” (Sanders, Dunn, Wright) honestly beside the Fathers.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Apostle)

The Pauline Texts

The doctrine is concentrated in Romans and Galatians. “Therefore we conclude that a man is justified by faith without the deeds of the law” (Rom. 3:28); “being justified freely by his grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus” (Rom. 3:24); “by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: not of works, lest any man should boast” (Eph. 2:8–9); “knowing that a man is not justified by the works of the law, but by the faith of Jesus Christ” (Gal. 2:16). Abraham is the pattern: “Abraham believed God, and it was counted unto him for righteousness” (Rom. 4:3; Gal. 3:6, citing Gen. 15:6). The terms are forensic in origin — dikaioō, to “justify” or “declare righteous,” dikaiosynē, “righteousness” — drawn from the law-court and the covenant. Paul sets this gift of righteousness over against “the works of the law,” and the meaning of that phrase is the great interpretive battleground.

The Patristic and Orthodox Reading

The Greek Fathers read justification within a larger frame than the law-court alone. For them, God’s act in Christ does not merely pronounce the sinner acquitted but actually makes him righteous by uniting him to Christ and pouring out the Spirit — grace is not first a legal status but a real, life-giving divine energy that heals and transforms. St. John Chrysostom, expounding Romans, stresses that justification is the lavish gift of God to the undeserving, surpassing what any acquittal could be: God “not only freed us from punishment, but also made us righteous” — he did not merely cancel the debt but bestowed righteousness as a gift, so that grace is superabundant, “not only delivering from punishment but supplying righteousness and life” (Chrysostom, Homilies on Romans 7, on Rom. 3:24–27; Homily on Romans 10–11, on Rom. 5; trans. NPNF I/11). For Chrysostom, faith itself is honored and rewarded by God, and the grace that justifies is ordered to a real renewal of life (Chrysostom, Hom. Rom. 8; NPNF I/11).

This reading sits within the broader Eastern conviction that salvation is participation — being made a partaker of the divine nature (2 Pet. 1:4) — so that justification is the threshold of sanctification and deification, not a self-standing transaction (see Theosis). Grace (charis) is understood not as a created thing handed over, nor as a mere favorable disposition in God, but as the uncreated, transforming life of God communicated to the believer; and faith is the receptive opening of the whole person to that life, which then bears fruit in love (Gal. 5:6, “faith which worketh by love”). The Orthodox tradition therefore reads Paul’s “by grace… through faith… not of works” as excluding human boasting and self-salvation, while affirming the necessary cooperation (synergeia) of the renewed will with grace (Phil. 2:12–13, “work out your own salvation… for it is God which worketh in you”; see Soteriology).

Where the Orthodox Reading Differs from Later Western Framings

The Orthodox patristic reading differs, without polemic, from certain later Western framings of justification — framings that postdate the Fathers and arose in the medieval and Reformation West. Where some later Western theology pressed justification into a strictly forensic key — an external declaration of righteousness, the imputation of an alien righteousness, sharply distinguished from the inward renewal of sanctification — the Greek patristic tradition does not separate the declarative and the transformative so cleanly: to be justified is to be brought into living union with the righteous Christ, a union that is at once gift, status, and the beginning of real renewal (Chrysostom, Hom. Rom. 7–11; cf. the broad characterization in Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, 1944). The Orthodox reading also resists framing grace primarily as a remedy for inherited guilt under a juridical scheme, preferring to speak of salvation as the healing of a nature wounded by mortality and sin and its restoration to communion with God (see Soteriology). These are differences of framework and emphasis, presented here as such; the point is not to score against the West but to state the Eastern reading on its own terms, as METHODOLOGY §4 directs.

The “New Perspective on Paul”

A major reframing of Paul’s doctrine of justification has dominated much scholarship since the late twentieth century — the so-called “New Perspective on Paul.” It begins with E. P. Sanders (Paul and Palestinian Judaism, 1977), who argued that first-century Judaism was not a religion of legalistic works-righteousness but of “covenantal nomism” — Israel kept the Law as the response to a grace-given covenant, not as a means of earning salvation — so that Paul could not have been polemicizing against Jewish legalism in the way later (especially Reformation) readers assumed. James D. G. Dunn (who coined the phrase) argued that Paul’s “works of the law” refers specifically to the covenant boundary-markers (circumcision, food laws, sabbath) that separated Jew from Gentile, so that the issue is the inclusion of the Gentiles, not works-righteousness in general (Dunn, The New Perspective on Paul, 2005). N. T. Wright recast justification as primarily about covenant membership and God’s faithfulness, eschatologically oriented, rather than about the individual’s anxious quest for a gracious God (Wright, Justification: God’s Plan and Paul’s Vision, 2009).

The New Perspective has been vigorously contested, and a substantial body of scholarship defends elements of the older reading against it [Disputed: the “New Perspective on Paul” (Sanders 1977; Dunn 2005; Wright 2009), holding that “works of the law” are Jewish identity-markers and justification is about covenant membership rather than works-righteousness, is contested by defenders of a more traditional “Lutheran” reading and by the “apocalyptic” school (e.g. critiques gathered in Carson, O’Brien, and Seifrid, eds., Justification and Variegated Nomism, 2001–2004); the field remains divided]. For the Orthodox reader, the New Perspective is of interest precisely because, in rejecting the projection of a late-Western “introspective conscience” onto Paul (cf. Stendahl, Paul Among Jews and Gentiles, 1976) and in stressing covenant, participation, and the inclusion of the nations, it converges at several points with the patristic refusal to read Paul through a purely individual and forensic lens — though the Fathers reached their reading by a different route, and the Orthodox tradition does not simply endorse any one critical school (Sanders 1977; Stendahl 1976).

The Center Held in Common

Beneath the disputes lies what the Church has always confessed: that salvation is the free gift of God in Christ, received by faith, owed to nothing in the sinner — “by grace are ye saved” (Eph. 2:8) — and yet ordered to a real transformation of life, “created in Christ Jesus unto good works” (Eph. 2:10). The persecutor who was seized by grace on the Damascus road (see Persecutor to Apostle) preached the gospel of grace because he had been its supreme instance; and the Orthodox tradition reads his doctrine of righteousness as the doorway into the whole economy of participation, union with Christ, and deification that the next file traces (see The Body of Christ and New Creation).

References

The Holy Bible, King James Version. The Epistles to the Romans, Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians; Genesis; the Second Epistle of Peter.
John Chrysostom. Homilies on the Epistle to the Romans. Trans. in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series I, Vol. 11. Buffalo: Christian Literature Company, 1889.
Sanders, E. P. Paul and Palestinian Judaism. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1977.
Dunn, James D. G. The New Perspective on Paul. Rev. ed. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008.
Wright, N. T. Justification: God’s Plan and Paul’s Vision. Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2009.
Stendahl, Krister. Paul Among Jews and Gentiles. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1976.
Lossky, Vladimir. The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church. London: James Clarke, 1957 (orig. 1944).
Carson, D. A., Peter T. O’Brien, and Mark A. Seifrid, eds. Justification and Variegated Nomism. 2 vols. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck / Grand Rapids: Baker, 2001–2004.