What Is Righteousness?
What is the right way to understand righteousness?
You can listen to the audio version of this essay here.
We’ve spent the last two weeks among the weedy details of theories of truth. We covered two prominent theories and their possible application to the gospel, and then we explored the basics of a third alternative, which we glimpse by prioritizing the relationship between truth and action.
We’ll return to topics in that ballpark next week, when we talk about knowledge. Today we’re taking a detour into something totally different. The purpose here is twofold. First, it will give us a break from the stuff about truth. Second, it will allow us to cover a topic that we wouldn’t otherwise get to for a long time.
That topic is righteousness. We talk about it all the time, and we know it’s important. But what is it? Here I want to offer a way of thinking about righteousness that connects the idea to laws. Of itself that may not be super original, but I’ll have a few things to say about laws as well, and they’ll make it more interesting (in a good way or a bad way, I’m not sure yet).
In the future we’ll take on the topic of righteousness and sin in an extended sequence of essays. This is a tiny preview of what that will look like, without fleshing out many of the details.
On to the goods, then, with righteousness!
Righteousness in Galatians, and righteousness in general
In the King James translation, the word “righteousness” appears four times in the book of Galatians, including as part of important statements about Abraham and righteousness (3:6) and law and righteousness (3:21). The corresponding Greek word, δικαιοσύνη, dikaiosynē, appears four times as well.
But dikaiosynē is a common word throughout the New Testament, appearing more than 80 times total: 7 in Matthew, 2 in John, almost 30 in Romans, 6 times in the Peter epistles, and so on. Such a wide distribution for such a common word presents a problem in trying to understand what righteousness is in the New Testament—depending on what we look at, we may end up with an idea of righteousness in Paul, or in John, or in Peter, or in some other author or book. But that wouldn’t be the same thing as understanding what righteousness is in the New Testament, much less in general.
To understand how to think about righteousness in general, we’d have to look at a much wider variety of sources, including restoration scripture, the sermons of Joseph Smith, our own experiences with righteousness, and other things. We’d then have to try to determine which ideas are the most important ones in order to take those as the basis for how we understand it. It would be a lot of work.
We’ll take up that work at some point in the future in a full sequence of essays. But since, at the rate we’re going, we won’t get to a sequence on the nature of righteousness until around 2027, I thought it might be nice to say a few things about it here. We’ll probably get a chance to talk about it a few additional times before getting to that sequence, too, so this essay and those future ones will make some preliminary points on the way to a fuller examination.
Our first preliminary point here, then, will be a look at the Greek word I mentioned above, dikaiosynē. The “ē” makes a long “a” sound, so the pronunciation for this word is “di-kai-oh-soo-nay.” We’ll see the relationship between that word and a few others, and we’ll also see the words that mean the opposite. These words will make a connection between righteousness and law, and then we’ll develop the idea of law just a bit.
Whatever the view we end up with after this, I’m not saying that this is necessarily the New Testament view of righteousness, or the Book of Mormon view, or even the LDS view. This is just an entry point into what you might come up with if you took all those sources and tried to put them all together with other things you know, for the most comprehensive view possible.
