Justification and God’s Kingdom

The traditional understanding of Paul’s doctrine of justification has an inherent problem of relating to his ethics. Following its anthropocentric approach to the doctrine, even the New Perspective makes little contribution toward resolving it. Hence, appreciating the facts that Paul places the doctrine in Romans within the inclusio of the Davidic Messiah Jesus’ rule over all the nations as God’s Son in Rom 1:3-5 and 15:12 and that his thesis about the doctrine in Rom 1:16-17 is but a soteriological statement about the effect of the Christologically formulated gospel of Rom 1:3-4, Seyoon Kim approaches the doctrine from both the Christological and anthropological perspectives. Thus he interprets justification as Herrschaftswechsel (cf. Kasemann), a transfer from the Satanic kingdom into the kingdom of God and his Son Jesus the Lord. This understanding makes him stress the present phase of justification as the process of rendering the obedience of faith to the Lord Jesus, and explain afresh the relationship between justification sola gratia/fide and judgment according to works. So he sets forth the thesis that Paul’s gospel of justification is a post-Easter soteriological form of Jesus’ gospel of God’s kingdom.