What is the righteousness, which is credited to Abraham’s children?
Is it God’s own covenant faithfulness? NTW – No, it’s not God’s own covenantal faithfulness. The righteousness word has two particular metaphorical sets of resonances. One is the covenant and the other is the law court. And it’s not accidental that they go together. It’s not just two metaphorical resonances out of nowhere. This is something that traditional evangelical scholarship has been very bad on seeing – the Israel-rootedness of Paul’s metaphors. Leon Morris will say that Paul has all these metaphors for redemption and atonement. There’s the slave market and the law court. It’s just as though Paul is ransacking all possible metaphors. But it’s much more focused than that. Romans 4 is the classic case where this comes. I can’t remember all that I’ve said about Romans 4 in the commentary since I wrote it two years ago and I haven’t been back to revisit it recently. The key thing is that God chose Abraham and his family in order that through him the problems of the world might be ad
