Whether humans can be righteous and meet God's standards

[Starlight]

Not a single person on earth is always good and never sins.

In general, the tone of Ecclesiastes seems to be that of an old man who looks at the world around him and makes comments on it. There is a certain world-weariness to his commentary, and in general he seems to think that life can be unfair and random so you better enjoy it while it lasts. When I see him making a statement like what you quoted above I see it as a comment on his part about what he feels he has seen in his life. It's not a mathematical or scientific statement of "I, personally, measured the righteousness of every single human being in the entire history of the world, and found they all sinned". Rather it's a "seems like there's lots of sin around" kind of statement.

So I don't think we should, for example, read it as contradicting the statements in Genesis that Noah was righteous and blameless in his generation or that Lot was the one righteous man in a corrupt city. The old man in Ecclesiastes hadn't met Noah or Lot and measured their righteousness. So I think elevating the comments of the man in Ecclesiastes to the level of Universal Theological Truth is a misunderstanding of them.

That said, I don't necessarily have any problem with the idea that everyone in the world commits some sort of minor sin at some point in their lives simply by virtue of them being human and imperfect. My problem comes with people who try and claim that minor sins are equivalent to major sins, or that God requires 100% perfection and doesn't tolerate the least imperfection. I don't see such views as being what the biblical writers believed.

[Sparko]

The Starlight summary of Ecclesiastes: "You kids git off my lawn!"

[One Bad Pig]

Understood.
The New Living Translation renders that verse as a paragraph translating it:

Not a single person on earth is always good and never sins.

I'm pretty sure that neither one of us cares very much for the NLT. Quit grasping at straws, already.

[bling]

In general, the tone of Ecclesiastes seems to be that of an old man who looks at the world around him and makes comments on it. There is a certain world-weariness to his commentary, and in general he seems to think that life can be unfair and random so you better enjoy it while it lasts. When I see him making a statement like what you quoted above I see it as a comment on his part about what he feels he has seen in his life. It's not a mathematical or scientific statement of "I, personally, measured the righteousness of every single human being in the entire history of the world, and found they all sinned". Rather it's a "seems like there's lots of sin around" kind of statement.

So I don't think we should, for example, read it as contradicting the statements in Genesis that Noah was righteous and blameless in his generation or that Lot was the one righteous man in a corrupt city. The old man in Ecclesiastes hadn't met Noah or Lot and measured their righteousness. So I think elevating the comments of the man in Ecclesiastes to the level of Universal Theological Truth is a misunderstanding of them.
How does a teenager on up keep from coveting what others have?

All mature adults sin but sin has a purpose in helping the nonbeliever become a believer and fulfill his/her earthly objective. Our “objective” is not to never ever sin, so “sin” is not the problem, while unforgiven sin can be a huge problem.

That said, I don't necessarily have any problem with the idea that everyone in the world commits some sort of minor sin at some point in their lives simply by virtue of them being human and imperfect. My problem comes with people who try and claim that minor sins are equivalent to major sins, or that God requires 100% perfection and doesn't tolerate the least imperfection. I don't see such views as being what the biblical writers believed.

How does a teenager on up keep from coveting what others have?

All mature adults sin but sin has a purpose in helping the nonbeliever become a believer and fulfill his/her earthly objective. Our “objective” is not to never ever sin, so “sin” is not the problem, while unforgiven sin can be a huge problem.

[37818]

In general, the tone of Ecclesiastes seems to be that of an old man who looks at the world around him and makes comments on it. There is a certain world-weariness to his commentary, and in general he seems to think that life can be unfair and random so you better enjoy it while it lasts. When I see him making a statement like what you quoted above I see it as a comment on his part about what he feels he has seen in his life. It's not a mathematical or scientific statement of "I, personally, measured the righteousness of every single human being in the entire history of the world, and found they all sinned". Rather it's a "seems like there's lots of sin around" kind of statement.

So I don't think we should, for example, read it as contradicting the statements in Genesis that Noah was righteous and blameless in his generation or that Lot was the one righteous man in a corrupt city. The old man in Ecclesiastes hadn't met Noah or Lot and measured their righteousness. So I think elevating the comments of the man in Ecclesiastes to the level of Universal Theological Truth is a misunderstanding of them.

That said, I don't necessarily have any problem with the idea that everyone in the world commits some sort of minor sin at some point in their lives simply by virtue of them being human and imperfect. My problem comes with people who try and claim that minor sins are equivalent to major sins, or that God requires 100% perfection and doesn't tolerate the least imperfection. I don't see such views as being what the biblical writers believed.

With God righteousness must be given, that is, credited, and always was [Genesis 6:8; Genesis 15:6]. Since all men are sinners [Ecclesiastes 7:20]. This was and is done by God meeting His own requirement for justice. God in order to be both fully just and fully merciful provided His own means to meet this. [Isaiah 53:6-12; 1 Corinthians 15:3-4.]

Romans 3;23-26,
. . . For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God; Being justified freely by his grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus: Whom God hath set forth to be a propitiation through faith in his blood, to declare his righteousness for the remission of sins that are past, through the forbearance of God; To declare, I say, at this time his righteousness: that he might be just, and the justifier of him which believeth in Jesus. . . .

[Doug Shaver]

One of the biggest mistakes I think that Protestants and Roman Catholics typically make in their biblical interpretation (which Eastern Orthodox interpreters usually don't) is arriving at the theological idea that all humans fall short and cannot meet God's standards. (An obscure discussion here was beginning to touch on this, so I thought it was worth a thread of it's own).

Ancient Jewish writings are choc-full of mentions of the final judgement, and talk of righteousness. In the typical Jewish conception, what is needed to pass the final judgement is a 51% level of goodness rather than evil. They use the binary categories of "righteous" and "wicked" to discuss the two groups of mostly-good and mostly-bad people. (And so the question of "so what if the person has exactly 50% good and evil" comes up in the Testament of Abraham.) It was accepted that a person could repent of their previously wicked ways, and seek to do good, and it was believed that because God was a loving and kind and forgiving father that he would wipe the person's slate clean if they sincerely repeated. The phrase "repentance and forgiveness" attained a proverbial character in ancient Jewish literature, and we see it repeated approvingly in the NT.

It is important to note that there was a universal acceptance among these Jewish writers that humans could be "righteous" by being generally good people and trying to follow God's commandment to the general best of their abilities, and that there were plenty of humans who achieved such a standard to acceptable levels (>50%+) and that therefore God would judge them positively. Two of the best scholarly works on the subject that I'm aware of are: Righteousness in Matthew and his World of Thought by Przybylski and Judgment and Justification in Early Judaism and the Apostle Paul by VanLandingham, and I highly recommend both of these to anyone interested in a serious scholarly study of these topics.

In the Eastern Orthodox Christian tradition there tends to be a similar understanding of the theology of salvation to this historical Jewish view. The idea being that through a process of sanctification (aka theosis) the Spirit strengthens people in goodness and righteousness, leading them to be Christ-like people whom God approves of. However in the Western Christian tradition in the period from Augustine through to the Medieval theologians there was the introduction of some very different and very dubious doctrines which completely change the entire salvation process, and which rely on some key (mis)readings of biblical passages. These novel ideas include:
1. That 'righteousness' should be re-defined from 51% good to 100% good. "Righteous" = "perfect". And, as such, no human is ever righteous because nobody is absolutely perfect.
2. Every single individual person falls short of God's required standard. Because God's required standard has been pushed from 'generally good' up to 'perfection' (aka the new definition of "righteous"), and so not a single person meets it.

Obviously these two ideas struggle to find any sort of evidence in the historical Jewish tradition because they are so fundamentally opposed to it. The most that can be said for them is that some Jewish writers did note that "nobody's perfect" and those trite and trivial observations can be taken out of context and creatively redeployed as supposedly supporting evidence for these two new ideas.

When we look at the gospels, Jesus gives his most lengthy portrayal of the last judgement in Matthew 25 where he explains that those who give material assistance to those in need are those that will be judged righteous. That is not an unmeetable standard of righteousness by any stretch of the imagination, and it falls totally within the spectrum of historical Jewish views. Notably Jesus does not say "God will judge everyone unrighteous on their merits at the final judgement because none have met his perfect standard, and only those who have the perfection of Christ imputed to them will be regarded as righteous". The other portrayals of the final judgement in the NT are also consistent with the general historical Jewish theme.

The ideas #1 and #2 rely for their support almost solely on a particular interpretation of a particular part of Romans. This should in itself strongly imply they are wrong, because we would reasonably expect such crucial teachings that so squarely contradicted pervasive Jewish belief (and Jesus' gospel teachings) should be expounded clearly and in detail multiple times, and if we find it only occurring once it suggests that it is probably the interpretation of the passage that is wrong.

IMO, Paul in the first 5 chapters of Romans spends his time emphasizing that those who actually do good are the ones whom God considers righteous, and that one's status as a "Jew" rather than as a "gentile" is irrelevant in God's sight, rather it is only a person's faithfulness to God's commandments that matters. Paul seems to be setting his argument in direct opposition to the minority Jewish view found in the book Wisdom of Solomon that all Jews are amazing people whom God has chosen and given them the law and sanctified with his spirit, whereas the gentiles are all horrible people in the extreme, and thus that God's final judgement will be the "righteous Jews" vs the "wicked gentiles". Paul paraphrases the zealous ravings from Wisdom of Solomon 13-14 in Romans 1:18-32, and then responds himself by vehemently attacking it in Romans 2 where Paul lays out his own view:

6 God “will repay each person according to what they have done.” 7 To those who by persistence in doing good seek glory, honor and immortality, he will give eternal life. 8 But for those who are self-seeking and who reject the truth and follow evil, there will be wrath and anger. 9 There will be trouble and distress for every human being who does evil: first for the Jew, then for the Gentile; 10 but glory, honor and peace for everyone who does good: first for the Jew, then for the Gentile. 11 For God does not show favoritism... For it is not those who hear the law who are righteous in God’s sight, but it is those who obey the law who will be declared righteous. 14 (Indeed, when Gentiles, who do not have the law, do by nature things required by the law, they are a law for themselves, even though they do not have the law. 15 They show that the requirements of the law are written on their hearts, their consciences also bearing witness, and their thoughts sometimes accusing them and at other times even defending them.)

Paul is keen to emphasize that it is not Jews only that can do good, but that gentiles likewise can obey the law of their consciences and achieve a positive judgement from God by doing so.

In the second half of Romans 2 and then in Romans 3 Paul moves to address the claim of Wisdom of Solomon 15:2-3 that Jews don't sin and that all Jews are righteous. In the course of Romans 3 Paul quotes historical examples of particular groups of Jews and particular groups of Gentiles sinning, showing that scripture condemns both in the same language when they sin. Paul emphasizes that various people from all nations have sinned at times, and there is not some special nation of sinless people - individuals from all different nations have at times fallen short and the Jewish nation is not supernaturally exempt from this.

In my view the Western Christian tradition has misread Paul's argument here, and misread his statements about races as statements about individuals, and pretended that Paul is saying that every human individual in history has fallen short and wasn't righteous. Obviously such a reading flatly contradicts all sorts of biblical statements that various people were righteous (e.g. "Noah was a righteous man, blameless among the people of his time, and he walked faithfully with God.", "Zechariah and Elizabeth were righteous in God's eyes, careful to obey all of the Lord's commandments and regulations." etc), and this interpretation also contradicts the proof-texts that Paul is quoting from in Romans 3 which in their OT contexts are not making claims of universal human unrighteousness but are labeling a specific group of people at a specific time as unrighteous and usually contrasting those baddies with other specific historical groups of people who are implicitly or explicitly "righteous".

An interesting topic for an apologetics forum. Few things reinforce my disbelief as much as watching believers argue about how the Bible should be interpreted on such a fundamental issue as this.

[seer]

An interesting topic for an apologetics forum. Few things reinforce my disbelief as much as watching believers argue about how the Bible should be interpreted on such a fundamental issue as this.

Few things reinforce my disbelief in the quantum world as much as scientists arguing over how to interpret it...

[Doug Shaver]

Few things reinforce my disbelief in the quantum world as much as scientists arguing over how to interpret it...

No scientist is saying that anyone who doesn't believe in the quantum world is going to burn in hell.

[Starlight]

No scientist is saying that anyone who doesn't believe in the quantum world is going to burn in hell.

Gravity is a vengeful god though and punishes immediately anyone who fails to believe in him.

[seer]

No scientist is saying that anyone who doesn't believe in the quantum world is going to burn in hell.

The point is that just because there is disagreement doesn't mean there isn't a right and true answer. This has more to do with our faulty thinking than the truth of the Gospel. Rejecting the Gospel on the grounds that men disagree is merely an excuse, and it not a standard you would apply with other questions in life.

[37818]

An interesting topic for an apologetics forum. Few things reinforce my disbelief as much as watching believers argue about how the Bible should be interpreted on such a fundamental issue as this.

All such disagreements do not change the truth of the actual meaning of the text. Neither reading into the text what it does not say nor denying what it says will be the correct reading of the text. Wrong presuppositions will still be wrong.

Can you cite a case where there is a disagreement on the meaning of the text - in agreeing what it says? And both making the same presuppositions?

[Doug Shaver]

Rejecting the Gospel on the grounds that men disagree is merely an excuse, and it not a standard you would apply with other questions in life.

Agreed. But I didn't say the disagreement grounds my disbelief. I said it reinforces my disbelief, which implies that I disbelieved before I ever noticed the disagreements.

[Doug Shaver]

All such disagreements do not change the truth of the actual meaning of the text. Neither reading into the text what it does not say nor denying what it says will be the correct reading of the text. Wrong presuppositions will still be wrong.

Can you cite a case where there is a disagreement on the meaning of the text - in agreeing what it says? And both making the same presuppositions?

If you're saying that all disagreements over how to interpret the Bible arise from differing presuppositions held by the interpreters, I'm OK with that.

Would you agree that inerrancy is one such presupposition, that those who presuppose inerrancy will interpret the Bible differently from those who do not presuppose inerrancy?

[37818]

If you're saying that all disagreements over how to interpret the Bible arise from differing presuppositions held by the interpreters, I'm OK with that.

Would you agree that inerrancy is one such presupposition, that those who presuppose inerrancy will interpret the Bible differently from those who do not presuppose inerrancy?

Yes. Pick a known example and we can take it apart as to how it is being interpreted differently. The issue of reading into the text, or denying what it says. And identifying apparent presuppositions being made. There are three issues which affect this, the interpretation of the reader being referred to here, the translation used, and known textual issues of the text being translated.

[Doug Shaver]

Would you agree that inerrancy is one such presupposition, that those who presuppose inerrancy will interpret the Bible differently from those who do not presuppose inerrancy?

Yes.

In that case, the issue of whose interpretation is correct cannot be resolved until the issue of inerrancy is resolved. If you are an inerrantist, then you cannot defend your interpretation of scripture until you have defended your belief in inerrancy.