The thought in the OT sacrifices and in the NT fulfillment, is that Christ completely satisfied the just demands of the Holy Father for judgment on sin, by his death at Calvary (Hebrews 7:26–28).
[3] God, in view of the cross, is declared righteous in having been able to justify sins in the OT period, as well as in being able to forgive sinners under the New Covenant (Romans 3:25,26; cf.
[4] Writing in Harper's Bible Dictionary (1952), Methodist theologian Edwin Lewis summarizes Paul's teaching in Romans 3 that God's attitude toward sin is revealed "through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus" (Rom.
However, in the Episcopal Church's 1979 Book of Common Prayer, in the Rite One form, "propitiation" was changed to read "perfect offering," and with the rest of verse 2 added: "and not for ours only, but for the sins of the whole world.
"[6] The case for translating hilasterion as "expiation" instead of "propitiation" was put forward by British scholar C. H. Dodd in 1935 and at first gained wide support.
[13] Writing in the New Bible Dictionary, Morris states that "Propitiation is a reminder that God is implacably opposed to everything that is evil, that his opposition may properly be described as 'wrath', and that this wrath is put away only by the atoning work of Christ.
"[14] Presbyterian scholar Henry S. Gehman of Princeton Theological Seminary in his New Westminster Bible Dictionary (1970) argued that for hilasterion in Romans 3:25 and hilasmos in 1 John 2:2 and 4:10, "In these cases RSV more properly has 'expiation,' which means the extinguishing of guilt by suffering a penalty or offering a sacrifice as an equivalent.
"[15] Likewise, the Anglican theologian and biblical scholar Reginald H. Fuller, writing in The Oxford Companion to the Bible, has noted that while the precise meaning of hilasterion is disputed, and while some translate it as "propitiation", this, he says, "suggests appeasing or placating an angry deity-- a notion hardly compatible with biblical thought and rarely occurring in that sense in the Hebrew Bible.
"[16] In his semantic study of hilasterion David Hill, of the University of Sheffield, claims that Dodd leaves out several Septuagint references to propitiation, and cites apocryphal sources.
"'The doctrine of the propitiation is precisely this that God loved the objects of His wrath so much that He gave His own Son to the end that He by His blood should make provision for the removal of this wrath... (John Murray, The Atonement, p. 15)'"[26] The Latin Vulgate translates hilasterion in Romans 3:25, and hilasmos in 1 John 4:10, as propitiationem, and this is carried over to the Douay-Rheims Bible as "propitiation".
However the promulgation of the encyclical Divino Afflante Spiritu in 1943, and the Second Vatican Council document Dei verbum in 1965, led to increased engagement with biblical manuscripts in the original languages, and ecumenical cooperation in Bible translation.
And an imprimatur was granted in 1966 to the Oxford Annotated Bible with the Apocrypha by Richard Cardinal Cushing of Boston.
The NAB includes a note on the use of "expiation" in Romans 3:25, explaining that "this rendering is preferable to 'propitiation,' which suggests hostility on the part of God toward sinners.
"[29] Raymond E. Brown in the New Jerome Biblical Commentary argues that in the NT sacrifice (hilasterion) does not appease God's wrath but is best expressed from its Jewish roots (76.89–95) as atonement or expiation (82.73).
[30] Recent Catholic studies[31] have depended heavily on the Trinitarian perspective presented by Jesuit theologian Edward J. Kilmartin: Sacrifice is not, in the first place, an activity of human beings directed to God and, in the second place, something that reaches its goal in the response of divine acceptance and bestowal of divine blessing on the cultic community.
[33][34] The French Jesuit theologian and biblical scholar Stanislas Lyonnet has explained the Johannine usage of the term, "When St. John in two different places alludes first to the heavenly intercession of Christ before the Father (1 John 2.2), and then to the work accomplished here below by His death and resurrection (1 Jn 4.10), he declares that He is or that the Father has made Him a 'hilasmos for our sins.'
Greek (Vulgate Ps 130.4) and which the Latin word propitiatio also always conveys in the liturgy: through Christ and in Christ, the Father achieves the plan of His eternal love (1 Jn 4.8) in 'showing Himself propitious,' that is in 'pardoning' men, by an efficacious pardon which really destroys sins, which 'purifies' man and communicates to him God's own life (1 Jn 4.9).
Kasper points out that Gregory of Nyssa and Augustine of Hippo, working out of the New Testament, speak of a God who can freely choose to feel compassion, which implies suffering.
"[36][1] Currently, however, some scripture scholars contend that using the word "propitiation" was a mistranslation by Jerome from the Greek hilastērion into the Latin Vulgate,[37] and is misleading for describing the sacrifice of Jesus and its Eucharistic remembrance.