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Propitiation or Expiation: The Debate Over Hilaskomai
In the New Testament there are four occurrences of the Greek word
(hilaskomai) or its derivatives, which relate to Christ's atoning work.1 Hebrews 2:17 asserts that Jesus Christ became “a merciful and faithful High Priest… to make propitiation for the sins of the people.” John twice writes in his first epistle that Jesus Christ is “the propitiation for our sins” (1 John 2:2; 4:10). The apostle Paul declares that God “set forth” Jesus Christ “to be a propitiation by his blood, through faith, to demonstrate his righteousness” (Rom 3:25). Since propitiation means the “turning away of the wrath of God by an offering,” its use in these passages entails a definite view of God's wrath, the purpose and effect of Christ's death, and, to a degree, the authority and inerrancy of Scripture.2
For this reason, its traditional understanding has not gone unchallenged. Beginning with the seminal work of C. H. Dodd, some modern scholars object to the traditional concept of propitiation. They insist that “expiation,” meaning “the cancellation of sin” or “the removal of sin from God's sight,”3 represents the more accurate rendering of the hilaskomai word group.4 On both sides of the debate there is agreement that in classical and koine Greek the hilaskomai word group meant “to propitiate,” “to placate,” or “to appease” an angry deity.5 L. Morris states, “Whatever may be the biblical usage there can be no doubts as to the prevailing use in all non-biblical writings.”6 Neither is there any dispute that hilaskomai underwent an important change in meaning when adapted from pagan sources for use in the Bible. Morris comments:
Among the heathen, propitiation was thought of as an activity whereby the worshipper was able himself to provide that which would induce a change of mind in the deity. In plain language he bribed his god to be favorable to him. … It has long been recognized that the use of the
word-group in the [Bible] is not the same as that in profane sources. … The Bible writers have nothing to do with pagan conceptions of a capricious and vindictive deity, inflicting arbitrary punishments on offending worshippers, who must then bribe him back to a good mood by the appropriate offerings. [C. H.] Dodd's important work makes this abundantly clear.7
On the matter of the extent of this change in meaning, agreement ends. Dodd and those who follow him want to eliminate completely from the biblical usage of hilaskomai and its derivatives all vestiges of divine wrath or propitiation, believing such concepts to be “crude” and “unworthy of the God of Israel.”8 Morris, while agreeing that “pagan ideas of wrath and propitiation are absent from the biblical view of God,” nevertheless asserts that those who conclude “all ideas of wrath and propitiation are absent from it” go too far.9 He replies:
When we reach the stage where we must say, “When the LXX [Septuagint] translators used “propitiation,” they did not mean “propitiation,” it is surely time to call a halt. No sensible man uses one word when he means another, and in view of the otherwise invariable Greek use it would seem impossible for anyone in the first century to have used one of the
group without conveying to his readers some idea of propitiation.10
Morris had this incongruity in mind when he asks, “If the LXX translators and the New Testament writers did not mean propitiation, why did they … use words which signify propitiation and are saturated with propitiatory associations?”11 D. Hill likewise cautions, “In so far as Dodd is concerned to maintain that ideas of celestial bribery and of capricious, vindictive anger on the part of Yahweh are absent from the [Bible], his work commands grateful agreement. But, this must not be taken to mean that all ideas of divine wrath are foreign to [the Bible].”12 J. Walvoord also rejects Dodd's conclusion, finding that the “Biblical terminology in both the Old and New Testaments … does not sustain a complete departure from the … concept of propitiation.”13
Behind this attempt to substitute “expiation” for “propitiation” lies a radical reinterpretation, if not an outright denial, of the biblical concept of God's wrath. Packer comments on the replacement of “propitiation” in Rom 3:25 with “expiation” in many modern translations, asserting that “the effect of this change is not to bring in a sacrificial motif that was previously absent, but to cut out a reference to quenching God's anger that was previously thought to be present.”14 To adopt “expiation” is to move away from a conception of wrath as a personal attitude of a holy God to one that treats wrath as an automatic, impersonal, and inexorable process of cause and effect. Hanson affirms this conclusion by declaring, “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.”15 Rather, “wrath” in the New Testament has been transformed “from an attribute of God into the name for a process, which sinners bring upon themselves.”16 Dodd also depersonalizes God's wrath. He claims, for example, that Paul has retained the concept of the wrath of God in Romans “not to describe the attitude of God to man, but to describe an inevitable process of cause and effect in a moral universe.”17 It is precisely this recasting of God's wrath that has opened the way to avoid an understanding of propitiation.18 After all, only an angry God needs propitiating.
J. R. W. Stott suggests that the “crucial question” dividing scholars over the proper interpretation of the hilaskomai word group “is whether the object of the atoning action is God or man.”19 If God is the intended object, “then the right word is ‘propitiation’ (appeasing God);” if, however, man is the intended object, then “the right word is ‘expiation’ (dealing with sin and guilt).”20 Dodd's view of God's wrath necessarily commits him to reject propitiation with its Godward focus (it being unnecessary to “propitiate” an impersonal force) in favor of expiation (which has a decidedly manward focus). Dodd believes the early church Fathers had “little inward sense for the Hebrew and biblical ideas that formed the atmosphere of Paul's thinking,” and they erred in translating hilaskomai as “propitiation.”21 The Reformers, on the other hand, labored under grievous cultural misconceptions and, consequently, could not help reading into the biblical text “current or traditional ideas” which effectively rendered words like hilaskomai “unintelligible” to them. Dodd offers “expiation,” not as a competing or a different interpretation of the hilaskomai word group, but as the correct and originally intended one that he has rescued from the errors of the past.
