Theological Term of the Week

David Kjos pointed out to me this week that my glossary was missing this term, so I’m taking a slight detour before returning to the terms dealing specifically with Christ’s work.

soteriology
the study of the doctrine of salvation; the branch of theology that answers the question “How are we saved?” It includes teachings of “God’s purpose to save, the Person and work of the Redeemer, and the application of redemption by the work of the Holy Spirit in the hearts and lives of men.”1

• A summary statement of soteriology from scripture:
  

  But when the goodness and loving kindness of God our Savior appeared, he saved us, not because of works done by us in righteousness, but according to his own mercy, by the washing of regeneration and renewal of the Holy Spirit, whom he poured out on us richly through Jesus Christ our Savior, so that being justified by his grace we might become heirs according to the hope of eternal life. (Titus 3:4-7 ESV)
  

• A summary statement of soteriology from J. I Packer’s classic introduction to John Owen’s The Death of Death in the Death of Christ:

  …God saves sinners. God - the Triune Jehovah, Father, Son and Spirit; three Persons working together in sovereign wisdom, power and love to achieve the salvation of a chosen people, the Father electing, the Son fulfilling the Father’s will by redeeming, the Spirit executing the purpose of Father and Son by renewing. Saves - does everything, first to last, that is involved in bringing man from death in sin to life in glory: plans, achieves and communicates redemption, calls and keeps, justifies, sanctifies, glorifies. Sinners - men as God finds them, guilty, vile, helpless, powerless, blind, unable to lift a finger to do God’s will or better their spiritual lot. God saves sinners - and the force of this confession may not be weakened by disrupting the unity of the work of the Trinity, or by dividing the achievement of salvation between God and man and making the decisive part man’s own, or by soft-pedaling the sinner’s inability as to allow him to share the praise of his salvation with his Savior. …[S]inners do not save themselves in any sense at all, but … salvation, first and last, whole and entire, past, present and future, is of the Lord, to whom be glory for ever; amen!

• From Systematic Theology by Louis Berkhof, page 415:

  Soteriology deals with the communication of the blessings of salvation to the sinner and his restoration to divine favor and to a life in intimate communion with God. It presupposes knowledge of God as the all-sufficient source of the life, the strength, and the happiness of mankind, and of man’s utter dependence on Him for the present and the future. Since it deals with restoration, redemption and renewal, it can only be understood properly in the light of the original condition of man as created in the image of God, and the subsequent disturbance of the proper relationship between man and his God by the entrance of sin into the world. Moreover, since it treats of the salvation of the sinner wholly as a work of God, known to Him from all eternity, it naturally carries our thoughts back to the eternal counsel of peace and the covenant of grace, in which provision was made for the redemption of fallen men. It proceeds on the assumption of the completed work of Christ as the Mediator of redemption. There is the closest possible connection between Christology and Soteriology. Some, as, for instance, Hodge, treat of both under the common heading “Soteriology.” In defining the contents of Soteriology, it is better to say that it deals with the application of the work of redemption than to say that it treats of the appropriation of salvation. The matter should be studied theologically rather than anthropologically. The work of God rather than the work of man is definitely in the foreground.
  

Learn more:

1. GotQuestions.org: What is Soteriology?
2. Bible.org: Soteriology: Salvation by Greg Herrick
3. Standford Murrell: Soteriology: The Study of Salvation
4. Charles Hodge: Download the Soteriology section from Systematic Theology
5. SolidFood: Soteriology, Part 1: Introduction; Union with Christ (mp3) by R. W. Glenn. (More mp3s—parts 2-13—in this series on soteriology)

1 From Soteriology: The Study of Salvation by Stanford Murrell.

Do you have a a theological term you’d like to see featured here as a Theological Term of the Week? If you email it to me, I’ll seriously consider using it, giving you credit for the suggestion, and linking back to your blog when I do.

Clicking on the Theological Term graphic at the top of this post will take you to a list of all the previous theological terms in alphabetical order.

Theological Term of the Week

Moving on to terms having to do with Christ’s work.

propitiation
a sacrifice that satisfies the wrath of God and thus averts God’s wrath toward sinners.

• From scripture:
  

  …God put [Christ] forward as a propitiation by his blood, to be received by faith. (Romans 3:25 ESV)
  

• From the Belgic Confession, Article 21:
  

  We believe that Jesus Christ is a high priest forever according to the order of Melchizedek— made such by an oath— and that he presented himself in our name before his Father, to appease his wrath with full satisfaction by offering himself on the tree of the cross and pouring out his precious blood for the cleansing of our sins, as the prophets had predicted.

  For it is written that “the chastisement of our peace” was placed on the Son of God and that “we are healed by his wounds.” He was “led to death as a lamb”; he was “numbered among sinners” and condemned as a criminal by Pontius Pilate, though Pilate had declared that he was innocent.

• From The Atonement: Its Meaning and Significance by Leon Morris, page 151:
  

  The trouble is that nobody seems to have been able to make propitiation simple. To most of us the term is just plain incomprehensible. Accordingly, it does not seem to matter much what it means and the result is a pronounced disinclination to make the effort needed to see whether anything much is at stake. But there is in fact quite a lot at stake; the concept is important for biblical religion. So, if we are serious about our Christianity, we must at least make the effort to attempt to understand it.

  …[I]f we speak of propitiation, we are thinking of a personal process. We are saying that God is angry when people sin and that, if thay are to be forgiven, something must be done about that anger. We are saying further that the death of Christ is the means of removing the divine wrath from sinners. The issue is far from being superficial.

  We may perhaps feel that ‘propitiation’ is not a good word. It is a long word, a word which most of us rarely use, which many of us do not understand…. It is natural that translators often feel that it should be replaced by something more intelligible. I go along with this, with the sole proviso that the essential meaning of the term must be preserved. My quarrel with almost all modern translations is that they do not retain the essential meaning; specifically, they adopt some rendering that glosses over the wrath of God. But this is a very important concept…, and it cannot be ignored in any satisfying understanding of the work of Christ.

• From The Atonement by John Murray:

  The disposition to deny or even underrate the doctrine of propitiation betrays a bias that is prejudicial to the atonement as such. The atonement means that Christ bore our sins and in bearing sin bore its judgment (cf. Isa. 53:5). Death itself is the judgment of God upon sin (cf. Rom. 5:12; 6:23). And Christ died for no other reason than that death is the wages of sin. But the epitome of the judgment of God upon sin is His wrath. If Jesus in our place met the whole judgment of God upon our sin, He must have endured that which constitutes the essence of this judgment How superficial is the notion that the vicarious endurance of wrath is incompatible with the immutable love of the Father to Him! Of course, the Father loved the Son with unchangeable and infinite love. And the discharge of the Father’s will in the extremities of Gethsemane’s agony and the abandonment of Calvary elicited the supreme delight of the Father (cf. John 10:17). But love and wrath are not contradictory; love and hatred are. It is only because Jesus was the Son, loved immutably as such and loved increasingly in His messianic capacity as He progressively fulfilled the demands of the Father’s commission, that He could bear the full stroke of judicial wrath. This is inscribed on the most mysterious utterance that ever ascended from earth to heaven, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” (Ps. 22:1; Matt. 27:46; Mark 15:34). God in our nature forsaken of God! Here is the wonder of the Father’s love and of the Son’s love, too. Eternity will not scale its heights or fathom its depths. How pitiable is the shortsightedness that blinds us to its grandeur and that fails to see the necessity and glory of the propitiation. “Herein is love,” John wrote, “not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son a propitiation for our sins” (I John 4:10). Christ is truly the propitiation for our sins because He propitiated the wrath which was our damnation. The language of propitiation may not be diluted; it bespeaks the essence of Calvary.

Learn more:

1. Theopedia: Propitiation
   
2. GotQuestions.org: What is Propitiation?
3. John Murray: The Atonement
4. Frederick S. Leahy: The Wrath of God in Relation to the Atonement
5. My old blog: Propitiation: What does it mean?
6. Mark Dever: Propitiation (mp3)

Do you have a a theological term you’d like to see featured here as a Theological Term of the Week? If you email it to me, I’ll seriously consider using it, giving you credit for the suggestion, and linking back to your blog when I do.

Clicking on the Theological Term graphic at the top of this post will take you to a list of all the previous theological terms in alphabetical order.

Theological Term of the Week

Arianism
The heretical teaching that the Son and the Holy Spirit are not full deity in the same sense that the Father is and are not co-eternal with the Father, but are, rather, created beings.

• From Jesus:
  

  I and the Father are one. (John 10:30 ESV)
  

• From the Nicene Creed:
  

  We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ,
  the only son of God,
  eternally begotten of the Father,
  God from God, Light from Light,
  true God from true God,
  begotten, not made,
  of one being with the Father.

• From T. C. Hammond in In Understanding Be Men, pages 55-56:
  

  Although holding that God was one, [Arius] placed so much emphasis on his teaching concerning the Persons of the Trinity that in effect he divided the Substance of the Godhead. This resulted chiefly from his definition of the Son and the Holy Spirit as being lesser, subordinate Beings whom the Father willed into existence for the Purpose of acting as His Agents in His dealings with the world and man. In effect, Arius reduced our Lord (and the Spirit) below the level of strict deity. He would admit his deity in a secondary sense, but denied His eternal Sonship, allowing that His being preceded the foundation of the world, but was not co-eternal with the Father. The disciples of Arius, by teaching that the Spirit was brought into existence by the Son, reduced Him to a relative form of deity (in a tertiary sense).
  
  In recent centuries there have been movements such as Unitarianism…and certain modern cults which, although varying in other respects, possess one opinion which is common to them all, that the Godhead consists in one single person, which necessitates assigning to our Lord and the Holy Spirit some nature and position less than that of true deity. This is one of the most important battle-grounds in the history of the church, and no true Christian should for one moment tolerate any description of our Master other than that which assigns to Hm the fullest deity, co-equal and co-eternal with the Father. While, at first sight, it may not seem so obvious, the Christian must equally contend for the full deity of the Holy Spirit.
  

Learn more:

1. Christian Apologetics and Research Ministry: Arianism
2. GotQuestions.org: What is Arianism?
3. Justin Holcomb: Arius: Know Your Heretics
4. Don Stewart: Is Jesus Lesser in Nature than God the Father?
5. Rev. Ronald Hanko: The Arian Controversy: Part 1, Part 2.
6. Phil Johnson: The History of Heresy: Five Errors that Refuse to Die (pdf), plus The Arians, part 1 and The Arians part 2 (mp3s)

Related terms:

• adoptionism
• deity of Christ
• hypostatic union

Do you have a a theological term you’d like to see featured here as a Theological Term of the Week? If you email it to me, I’ll seriously consider using it, giving you credit for the suggestion, and linking back to your blog when I do.

Clicking on the Theological Term graphic at the top of this post will take you to a list of all the previous theological terms in alphabetical order.