Theological Term of the Week: Propitiation

propitiation
the appeasement of God’s just 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.

• 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 Cross of Christ by John Stott, page 171:

[T]he reason why a propitation 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 evil alone. The wrath of God … is his steady, unrelenting, unremitting, uncompromising antagonism to evil in all its forms and manifestations. 

Learn more:

1. Got Questions: What is propitiation?
2. Simply Put: Propitiation
3. ESV Study Bible: Propitation in Romans 3:25
4. Sinclair Ferguson: What does “propitiation” mean?
5. Ligon Duncan: Propitiation
6. Kevin DeYoung: Salvation by Propitiation
7. L. Michael Morales: Expiation and Propitiation

Related terms:

• Day of Atonement
• definite atonement
• reconciliation
• redemption
• substitutionary atonement
• wrath (of God)

Filed under Salvation

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