When a familiar word gets challenged
You know the feeling. Someone questions something you have always believed, and your guard goes up before they even finish the sentence. That happened to Daron on this episode. His guest, author Wayne Jacobsen, brought an idea that pokes at one of the most familiar words in the whole Bible. Daron’s first reaction was not curiosity. It was resistance. Maybe you have felt that too.
A word we may have been reading wrong
Wayne’s new book with Tobie van der Westhuizen, Just Love, makes a bold claim. The Greek word we translate as righteousness reads as justice in nearly every other text from the same era. Other language Bibles already use their word for justice. Wayne is not saying our Bibles are wrong to contain the word. He is saying one translation choice, made centuries ago, may have shifted our focus from the justice God’s love produces in us to a private scorecard of piety and sin management. That is a big idea. It deserves a careful look, not a quick yes or no.
Why letting go of a paradigm is so hard
Here is the honest part. For 500 years we have leaned on words like righteousness to settle our standing with God. Am I good enough? Did Jesus cover it for me? Those questions run deep, so healthy skepticism makes sense when someone wants to move a word that load-bearing. Wayne agrees. Test it. Wrestle with it. That is exactly what Daron does out loud in this conversation. The goal is not to hand you a verdict. It is to invite you into the kind of honest wrestling that can open up how you see God’s love and your place in His story.
Listen to the full episode and decide for yourself. Questions or pushback? Email daron@daronearlewine.com.
Connect with Daron
Subscribe for new episodes every week. Questions or reactions, send them to daron@daronearlewine.com.
Episode Summary:
A stranger emailed Wayne Jacobson with a claim that sounded like nonsense. The word righteousness is not really in the Bible. It turned out to be a translation problem 500 years in the making.
In this clip, Wayne walks through how one Greek word came to be translated righteousness in our Bibles when it is translated justice everywhere else, and what changes when you put it back.
Key Takeaways
⚡️ The Greek word behind righteousness is translated justice in every other text of its day, including Plato’s Republic.
⚡️ Reading it as justice instead of righteousness reframes nearly every verse where the word appears.
⚡️ The Reformation resolved righteousness through the cross but left transformation unresolved, which is exactly the gap this reopens.
Connect with Daron on Social Media:
Links to the Daron Earlewine Podcast
YouTube | Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Libsyn
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Wayne: The subtitle draws people into it. How one mistranslated word distorted the gospel. That’s where we want to take people. This came out of the blue for me. I had just finished a book called It’s Time, Letters to the Bride of Christ at the End of the Age. I didn’t even get time to unpack that before I got a very strange email from South Africa. A guy tells me, “I want to share something with you that I can’t find anybody who will really listen to me about.” His opening statement was, “The word righteousness is not in the Bible.” I go, okay, this one’s a kook. I hear a lot of kooks from time to time. But as I began to read what he was saying, he wasn’t saying it’s not in the Bible we have, because all of our Bibles contain the word. It’s one of those anchoring words of the Christian faith. “Seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness and all these things will be added to you.” So I’m going through the Scriptures in my head, writing him back, “I don’t know what you’re saying.” But what he was unpacking was that it’s a mistranslation. In no other Greek text of the day, when the Bible was originally written, do we translate this word as righteousness. The word comes out as justice in every other non-biblical text of the day. The one he anchored in most was Plato’s Republic, which is about the just man living in a just society with just laws and just leaders. This is Toby, my co-author. He was trying to read it in the original Greek and it made no sense, because the word dikaiosynē, the Greek word we all translate righteousness, he kept translating as righteousness and it made no sense. So he looked at other translations and realized everyone else was translating it justice. Every other language translation of the Bible uses their word for justice. They don’t have a word like we do for righteousness. As I explored that, I realized what he was talking about is how love has been teaching me to live for the last 25 years. Suddenly Scripture made a whole lot more sense if we could move the word righteousness out of there, which preoccupied us with personal piety and sin management, instead of the justice that love produces in our hearts through the work of Christ.
Daron: As my mom tried to explain it to me a couple of weeks before the book came out, I found myself wrestling with the idea before I’d even read any of it. It was almost like I was arguing with the theological police in my own head. I don’t know who this guy is, I trust Wayne, but who’s this other guy in the mix? I don’t know if we can mess with that. That can’t be the case. What is it in us that creates that? “I have to defend this” or “this can’t be true,” even though as I read the book I’m thinking this opens me up to understand the love of the Father and my role in the kingdom tenfold. Why is it so hard for us to let go of an old paradigm?
Wayne: It’s not just an old paradigm. We’ve used righteousness, along with forgiveness and justification, to negotiate a sense of standing with God, with Jesus accomplishing it on the cross. So in one sense we think, “Am I righteous enough?” We worry about our sin, we pray confession. On the other hand, we have 500 years of the Reformation teaching us our righteousness is what Jesus declares over us when we get saved. So I don’t have to be righteous, he gives me that righteousness. How we’ve negotiated this word has bedrocked so much of Christianity. So when you talk about moving a word like that, we ought to be skeptical. We ought to be suspicious, because this is an easy thing for someone to drag in here and take us astray. So we tried to be careful to draw the lines and show how it got mistranslated. It wasn’t anyone’s malicious intent. The Catholic Bible actually has justice, and because the Protestants were translating this word as righteousness, one of the Catholic writers said, “You’re changing the very nature of the gospel by changing that word to righteousness instead of justice.” So we were warned 500 years ago. But by then Martin Luther and some of Calvin’s ideas had taken hold. “We’ve taken care of righteousness. Jesus accomplished it for us, so we don’t have to worry about it.” But then we’re conflicted about how sanctification happens. If I’m already declared righteous, then I have amnesty, I’m going to get into heaven without anything. So how do I have the motivation to let godliness appear in my life? That’s the conflict in most Christian traditions. Is it works if we try? Is it being a couch potato if we don’t? And our best righteousness always fails. That’s what Luther was trying to deal with. Trying to be righteous doesn’t work, so we do need some way Jesus resolved that on the cross. But when it’s justice, it changes the nature of almost every Scripture where we find righteousness.