Iustitia Dei: A History of the Christian Doctrine of Justification

by Alister E. McGrath

An example will make this point clear: It has become a commonplace in some quarters to suggest that the dik group of terms – particularly the verb dikaioo, ‘to justify’ – are naturally translated as being ‘treated as righteous’ or ‘reckoned as righteous’, and that Paul’s Greek-speaking readers would have understood him in this way. This may be true at the purely linguistic level; however, the Greek Christian preoccupation with the strongly transformative soteriological metaphor of deification appears to have led to justification being treated in a factitive sense.53 This is not, however, to be seen as a conceptual imposition on Pauline thought, but rather a discernment of this aspect of his soteriological narrative.