Propitiation
Propitiation
Western Christians of earlier generations were quite familiar with the language of ‘propitiation’ in relation to the death of Christ. For the Authorized (King James) Version of the Bible, on which they were brought up, contained three explicit affirmations of it by Paul and John:
Paul: ‘...Christ Jesus, whom God hath set forth to be a propitiation through faith in his blood’ (Rom. 3:24–25).
John: ‘We have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous: and he is the propitiation for our sins.’ Again, ‘Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins’ (1 John 2:1–2; 4:10).
Although this language was well known to our forebears, they were not necessarily comfortable in using it. To ‘propitiate’ somebody means to appease or pacify his anger. Does God then get angry? If so, can offerings or rituals assuage his anger? Does he accept bribes? Such concepts sound more pagan than Christian. It is understandable that primitive animists should consider it essential to placate the wrath of gods, spirits or ancestors, but are notions like these worthy of the Christian God? Should we not have grown out of them? In particular, are we really to believe that Jesus by his death propitiated the Father’s anger, inducing him to turn from it and to look upon us with favour instead?
Crude concepts of anger, sacrifice and propitiation are indeed to be rejected. They do not belong to the religion of the Old Testament, let alone of the New. This does not mean, however, that there is no biblical concept of these things at all. What is revealed to us in Scripture is a pure doctrine (from which all pagan vulgarities have been expunged) of God’s holy wrath, his loving self-sacrifice in Christ and his initiative to avert his own anger. It is obvious that ‘wrath’ and ‘propitiation’ (the placating of wrath) go together. It is when the wrath is purged of unworthy ideas that the propitiation is thereby purged. The opposite is also true. It is those who cannot come to terms with any concept of the wrath of God who repudiate any concept of propitiation. Here, for example, is Professor A. T. Hanson: ‘If you think of the wrath as an attitude of God, you cannot avoid some theory of propitiation. But the wrath in the New Testament is never spoken of as being propitiated, because it is not conceived of as being an attitude of God.’1
It is this discomfort with the doctrines of wrath and propitiation, which has led some theologians to re-examine the biblical vocabulary. They have concentrated on a particular word-group which the Authorized Version translated in ‘propitiatory’ terms, namely the noun hilasmos (1 John 2:2; 4:10), the adjective hilastērios (Rom. 3:25, where it may be used as a noun) and the verb hilaskomai (Heb. 2:17; also Luke 18:13 in the passive, which should perhaps be rendered ‘be propitiated – or propitious – to me, a sinner’). The crucial question is whether the object of the atoning action is God or man. If the former, then the right word is ‘propitiation’ (appeasing God); if the latter, the right word is ‘expiation’ (dealing with sin and guilt).
The British theologian who led the way in this attempted reinterpretation was C. H. Dodd.2 Here is his comment on Romans 3:25: ‘the meaning conveyed...is that of expiation, not that of propitiation. Most translators and commentators are wrong.’3 He expresses a similar opinion in relation to 1 John 2:2, namely that the translation ‘propitiation for our sins’ is ‘illegitimate here as elsewhere’.4 Since C. H. Dodd was director of the panels which produced the New English Bible (New Testament 1961), it is not surprising that his view was reflected in its rendering of the verses just referred to. Romans 3:25 is translated ‘God designed him to be the means of expiating sin by his sacrificial death’, while in 1 John 2:2 and 4:10 the key phrase is rendered ‘he is himself the remedy for the defilement of our sins’. The RSV, whose New Testament was published a few years earlier (1946), has ‘expiation’ in all three verses.
C. H. Dodd’s argument, developed with his customary erudition, was linguistic. He acknowledged that in pagan Greek (both classical and popular) the regular meaning of the verb hilaskomai was to ‘propitiate’ or ‘placate’ an offended person, especially a deity. But he denied that this was its meaning either in Hellenistic Judaism, as evidenced in the Septuagint (LXX), or, on that account, in the New Testament. He argued that in the LXX kipper (the Hebrew verb for ‘atone’) was sometimes translated by Greek words other than hilaskomai, which mean to ‘purify’ or ‘cancel’; that hilaskomai in the LXX sometimes translates other Hebrew words than kipper, which mean to ‘cleanse’ or ‘forgive’; and that when hilaskomai does translate kipper the meaning is expiation or the removal of defilement. This is how he sums up: ‘Hellenistic Judaism, as represented by the LXX, does not regard the cultus as a means of pacifying the displeasure of the Deity, but as a means of delivering man from sin.’5 Indeed, it was generally believed in antiquity that ‘the performance of prescribed rituals...had the value, so to speak, of a powerful disinfectant’.6 Therefore, he concludes, the New Testament occurrences of the hilaskomai word-group should be interpreted in the same way. By his cross Jesus Christ expiated sin; he did not propitiate God.
Professor Dodd’s reconstruction, although accepted by many of his contemporaries and successors, was subjected to a rigorous critique by others, in particular by Dr Leon Morris7 and Dr Roger Nicole.8 Both showed that his conclusions rested on either incomplete evidence or questionable deductions. For example, his assessment of the meaning of the hilaskomai group in Hellenistic Judaism makes no reference either (1) to the books of the Maccabees, although they belong to the LXX and contain several passages which speak of ‘the wrath of the Almighty’ being averted, or (2) to the writings of Josephus and Philo, although in them, as Friedrich Büchsel shows, the meaning to ‘placate’ prevails.9 As for the New Testament understanding of these words, F. Büchsel points out what C. H. Dodd overlooks, that in both Clement’s First Letter (end of the first century) and the Shepherd of Hermas (beginning of the second) hilaskomai is plainly used of propitiating God. So then, for C. H. Dodd’s theory about the LXX and New Testament usage to be correct, he would have to maintain that they ‘form a sort of linguistic island with little precedent in former times, little confirmation from the contemporaries, and no following in after years!’.10
But we have to declare his thesis incorrect. Even in the Old Testament canon itself there are numerous instances in which kipper and hilaskomai are used of propitiating the anger either of men (like Jacob pacifying Esau with gifts and a wise man appeasing a king’s wrath11) or of God (like Aaron and Phinehas who turned God’s anger away from the Israelites12). Even in passages where the natural translation is to ‘make atonement for sin’, the context often contains explicit mention of God’s wrath, which implies that the human sin can be atoned for only by the divine anger being turned away.13 These instances, Roger Nicole points out, are consistent with ‘the predominant use in classical and koinē Greek, in Josephus and Philo, in patristic writers and in the Maccabees’.14 Leon Morris’ conclusion in regard to the Old Testament is that, although hilaskomai is ‘a complex word’, yet ‘the averting of anger seems to represent a stubborn substratum of meaning from which all the usages can be naturally explained’.15
The same is true of the New Testament occurrences. The description of Jesus as the hilasmos in relation to our sins (1 John 2:2; 4:10) could be understood as meaning simply that he took them away or cancelled them. But he is also named our ‘advocate with the Father’ (2:1), which implies the displeasure of the One before whom he pleads our cause. As for the passage in Romans 3, the context is determinative. Whether we translate hilastērion in verse 25 ‘the place of propitiation’ (i.e. the mercy-seat, as in Heb. 9:5) or ‘the means of propitiation’ (i.e. a propitiatory sacrifice), the Jesus who is so described is set forth by God as the remedy for universal human guilt under his wrath, which Paul has taken two and a half chapters to demonstrate. As Leon Morris justly comments, ‘wrath has occupied such an important place in the argument leading up to this section that we are justified in looking for some expression indicative of its cancellation in the process which brings about salvation.’16 It is true that in Hebrews 2:17 hilaskomai is a transitive verb, with ‘the sins of the people’ as its object. It could therefore be translated ‘expiate’ (NEB) or ‘make atonement for’ (NIV). This meaning is not indubitable, however. The NIV margin renders it ‘that he might turn aside God’s wrath, taking away’ the people’s sins.
If we grant that C. H. Dodd’s linguistic argument has been lost, or at the very least that his case is ‘not proven’, and that the hilaskomai word-group means ‘propitiation’ not ‘expiation’, we still have to decide how to portray God’s anger and its averting. It would be easy to caricature them in such a way as to dismiss them with ridicule. This William Neil has done in the following passage:
It is worth noting that the ‘fire and brimstone’ school of theology who revel in ideas such as that Christ was made a sacrifice to appease an angry God, or that the cross was a legal transaction in which an innocent victim was made to pay the penalty for the crimes of others, a propitiation of a stern God, find no support in Paul. These notions came into Christian theology by way of the legalistic minds of the medieval churchmen; they are not biblical Christianity.17
But of course this is neither the Christianity of the Bible in general, nor of Paul in particular. It is doubtful if anybody has ever believed such a crude construction. For these are pagan notions of propitiation with but a very thin Christian veneer. If we are to develop a truly biblical doctrine of propitiation, it will be necessary to distinguish it from pagan ideas at three crucial points, relating to why a propitiation is necessary, who made it and what it was.
First, the reason why a propitiation is necessary is that sin arouses the wrath of God. This does not mean (as animists fear) that he is likely to fly off the handle at the most trivial provocation, still less that he loses his temper for no apparent reason at all. For there is nothing capricious or arbitrary about the holy God. Nor is he ever irascible, malicious, spiteful or vindictive. His anger is neither mysterious nor irrational. It is never unpredictable, but always predictable, because it is provoked by evil and by evil alone. The wrath of God, as we considered more fully in chapter 4, is his steady, unrelenting, unremitting, uncompromising antagonism to evil in all its forms and manifestations. In short, God’s anger is poles apart from ours. What provokes our anger (injured vanity) never provokes his; what provokes his anger (evil) seldom provokes ours.
Secondly, who makes the propitiation? In a pagan context it is always human beings who seek to avert the divine anger either by the meticulous performance of rituals, or by the recitation of magic formulae, or by the offering of sacrifices (vegetable, animal or even human). Such practices are thought to placate the offended deity. But the gospel begins with the outspoken assertion that nothing we can do, say, offer or even contribute can compensate for our sins or turn away God’s anger. There is no possibility of persuading, cajoling or bribing God to forgive us, for we deserve nothing at his hands but judgment. Nor, as we have seen, has Christ by his sacrifice prevailed upon God to pardon us. No, the initiative has been taken by God himself in his sheer mercy and grace.
This was already clear in the Old Testament, in which the sacrifices were recognized not as human works but as divine gifts. They did not make God gracious; they were provided by a gracious God in order that he might act graciously towards his sinful people. ‘I have given it to you’, God said of the sacrificial blood, ‘to make atonement for yourselves on the altar’ (Lev. 17:11). And this truth is yet more plainly recognized in the New Testament, not least in the main texts about propitiation. God himself ‘presented’ (NIV) or ‘put forward’ (RSV) Jesus Christ as a propitiatory sacrifice (Rom. 3:25). It is not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as a propitiation for our sins (1 John 4:10). It cannot be emphasized too strongly that God’s love is the source, not the consequence, of the atonement. As P. T. Forsyth expressed it, ‘the atonement did not procure grace, it flowed from grace’.18 God does not love us because Christ died for us; Christ died for us because God loved us. If it is God’s wrath which needed to be propitiated, it is God’s love which did the propitiating. If it may be said that the propitiation ‘changed’ God, or that by it he changed himself, let us be clear he did not change from wrath to love, or from enmity to grace, since his character is unchanging. What the propitiation changed was his dealings with us. ‘The distinction I ask you to observe’, wrote P. T. Forsyth, ‘is between a change of feeling and a change of treatment....God’s feeling toward us never needed to be changed. But God’s treatment of us, God’s practical relation to us – that had to change.’19 He forgave us and welcomed us home.
Thirdly, what was the propitiatory sacrifice? It was neither an animal, nor a vegetable, nor a mineral. It was not a thing at all, but a person. And the person God offered was not somebody else, whether a human person or an angel or even his Son considered as somebody distinct from or external to himself. No, he offered himself. In giving his Son, he was giving himself. As Karl Barth wrote repeatedly, ‘it was the Son of God, i.e. God himself’. For example, ‘the fact that it was God’s Son, that it was God himself, who took our place on Golgotha and thereby freed us from the divine anger and judgment, reveals first the full implication of the wrath of God, of his condemning and punishing justice’. Again, ‘because it was the Son of God, i.e. God himself, who took our place on Good Friday, the substitution could be effectual and procure our reconciliation with the righteous God....Only God, our Lord and Creator, could stand surety for us, could take our place, could suffer eternal death in our stead as the consequence of our sin in such a way that it was finally suffered and overcome.’20 And all this, Barth makes clear, was an expression not only of God’s holiness and justice, but of ‘the perfections of the divine loving’, indeed of God’s ‘holy love’.
So then, God himself is at the heart of our answer to all three questions about the divine propitiation. It is God himself who in holy wrath needs to be propitiated, God himself who in holy love undertook to do the propitiating, and God himself who in the person of his Son died for the propitiation of our sins. Thus God took his own loving initiative to appease his own righteous anger by bearing it his own self in his own Son when he took our place and died for us. There is no crudity here to evoke our ridicule, only the profundity of holy love to evoke our worship.
In seeking thus to defend and reinstate the biblical doctrine of propitiation, we have no intention of denying the biblical doctrine of expiation. Although we must resist every attempt to replace propitiation by expiation, we welcome every attempt to see them as belonging together in salvation. Thus F. Büchsel wrote that ‘hilasmos...is the action in which God is propitiated and sin expiated’.21 Dr David Wells has elaborated this succinctly:
In Pauline thought, man is alienated from God by sin and God is alienated from man by wrath. It is in the substitutionary death of Christ that sin is overcome and wrath averted, so that God can look on man without displeasure and man can look on God without fear. Sin is expiated and God is propitiated.22