Bucer wrote, “Because by faith we embrace this righteousness and benevolence of God, it shines in us, and thus he imparts himself, so that also we, too, are driven by some zeal for righteousness.”
He’s got just about everything you’d want there: Righteousness comes by faith; righteousness embraced by faith is not outside us but also “shines in us”; but this shining of God’s righteousness in us is God Himself imparted to us, not some grace-stuff or habitus ; and when we embrace the righteousness of God and receive God the Righteous One Himself, we are impelled to live in and for righteousness. One could hardly do better.
YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE
Letters
Joshua T. Katz’s (“Pure Episcopalianism,” May 2025) reason for a theologically conservative person joining a theologically liberal…
The Revival of Patristics
On May 25, 1990, the renowned patristics scholar Charles Kannengiesser, S.J., delivered a lecture at the annual…
The Enduring Legacy of the Spanish Mystics
Last autumn, I spent a few days at my family’s coastal country house in northwestern Spain. The…
