Imago Dei and Imputed Righteousness 2: Return to Eden

When I ask how Paul’s first-century audience would have understood ideas like righteousness, law, and grace, I’m not trying to dismiss the language Paul used. I’m trying to understand how that language would have landed before centuries of theological scaffolding were built around it. Paul did use accounting language. Genesis does say that Abraham’s faith was “accounted” or “reckoned” as righteousness. That isn’t a later invention or a mistranslation—it’s there in Genesis 15, and Paul deliberately echoes it.

But words don’t exist in a vacuum. They live inside worldviews.

When Abraham’s faith is “accounted as righteousness,” the text isn’t describing a moral substance being transferred into him, as though righteousness were a commodity moved from one account to another. The Hebrew and Greek terms both point more toward recognition, regard, and acknowledgment. God sees Abraham’s trust and names it for what it is: covenantal alignment. Abraham is not made righteous by an external transaction; he is recognized as faithful within relationship.

Paul’s first-century audience—both Jewish and Gentile—would not have heard this as a legal fiction. They lived in a relational, participatory worldview. Righteousness meant being rightly aligned, rightly situated, rightly oriented within God’s purposes. It was about belonging and faithfulness, not about pretending someone was something they were not.

This is why Paul insists that Abraham was reckoned righteous before the law, before circumcision, before Israel even existed as a nation. He’s not constructing a loophole in a moral system. He’s pointing back to something older and deeper: righteousness precedes law because righteousness is not created by law. Law can guide, expose, and restrain, but it cannot generate being. It cannot create a new kind of human. That was never its role.

Grace, in Paul’s world, would not have been heard as “undeserved favor toward the guilty” in the later, moralized sense. Grace was gift. It was generosity. It was benefaction that created a new relational reality. Grace did not excuse people from transformation—it enabled it. It drew people into a new way of life by changing their sense of identity and belonging.

This is where repentance takes on its original meaning. Metanoia is not self-loathing or fear-driven remorse. It is a change of mind, a shift in perception. Paul says it is the kindness of God that leads to repentance because kindness reveals truth. When fear loosens its grip, the mind can finally see clearly. Repentance is awakening, not appeasement.

All of this begins to make sense when we return to the creation story. Humanity is blessed before it does anything. God declares creation “very good” before there is any moral drama to resolve. To be created in the image of God is not to be stamped with a superficial likeness, but to be imbued with divine consciousness—to participate in God’s way of knowing, creating, and relating. Humanity is the place where divine awareness becomes localized within creation.

The problem that emerges later is not the loss of that image, but forgetfulness of it. Consciousness narrows. Fear replaces trust. Separation replaces participation. Sin is not an ontological corruption so much as a misidentification. We forget who we are and begin living from that forgetfulness.

Seen this way, righteousness does not need to be imputed because nothing essential was ever missing. What needs to happen is remembrance. When God “accounts” righteousness, God is not overlooking reality; God is naming it. Faith is not mental assent to propositions. Faith is trust—trust in God’s character, trust in God’s kindness, trust that God is love and not transactional.

Looking back, I can see that this insight was already present in my own life long before I had language for it. Twenty-five years ago, when my wife and I were far more evangelical and fundamental than we are today, we believed we heard from the Spirit that “faith is obedience.” At the time, we probably understood that in moral terms. But the phrase itself says something deeper. It does not say obedience produces faith. It says faith is obedience.

If faith is trust, then obedience is simply alignment with what one trusts. And if what one trusts is that God is love—unconditional, non-transactional love—then obedience is not rule-keeping. It is living congruently with love. It is allowing love to shape perception, desire, and action.

This reframes everything. God is not negotiating with humanity. God is not managing a ledger of moral debts and credits. God is love, and love does not operate transactionally. Grace is not God overlooking our humanity; it is God affirming it. Repentance is not changing behavior to gain acceptance; it is changing perception because acceptance has already been given.

When faith is understood this way, behavior follows naturally. Not perfectly, not mechanically, but organically. We live differently when we believe differently about who we are and who God is. Ethics emerge from awareness. Transformation flows from recognition. Righteousness is not imposed from outside but expressed from within.

Paul, read in his own context, is not announcing a legal workaround for human failure. He is announcing the unveiling of a new way of being human—one rooted in trust, participation, and indwelling divine life. What later theology turned into courtroom language was, at its heart, a relational and ontological awakening.

And perhaps that is what the story has been pointing toward all along: not a God who fixes us from the outside, but a God who invites us to remember who we have always been—very good, indwelt, and loved.