Following up an earlier post: How are we to understand the connection of the reception of the Spirit and being counted as righteous in Galatians 3:5-6? Some alternatives suggest themselves:
1) Righteousness is a status and the Spirit is the gift that God gives to those whom He counts righteous.
2) Righteousness is a status and the Spirit grants faith that is the instrument by which we accept that status. Or, following Wright, the Spirit grants the faith that marks us as those whom God will regard as righteous (regeneration before justification).
3) Righteousness is a status and the reception of the Spirit is the phenomenological expression of that status (as in Acts 10-11 perhaps).
4) Righteousness describes moral character transformed by the Spirit. This doesn’t appear to fit the context; Paul quotes Genesis 15:6 to the effect that Yahweh imputed righteousness to Abram, which would a confusing way to say that Abram became morally righteous.
5) What Paul describes is a “deliverdict,” a declaration/imputation of righteous status that is simultaneously a deliverance by the Spirit from the bondage of sin.
6) We take “justification” as J. Louis Martyn does, as “rectification,” and the Spirit is the agent by which damaged sinners are rectified.
Whatever alternative is correct (and surely there are others), it is striking that Paul brings the gift of the Spirit into such close proximity to justification. Theologians charge, with justice, that justification has been worked out in a “binitarian” rather than a Trinitarian fashion. Not Paul, though.
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