Dealing With Wrath

Frances Young argues in her Use of Sacrificial Ideas in Greek Christian Writers that the cross is primarily expiatory: It is God’s way of dealing with sin. It is not propitiatory in the ancient Greek sense of placating an angry God. How could it be, she asks, since the cross was God’s idea and action.

But then the recognition that the New Testament teaches that “the wrath of God is real and serious” brings her up short, and she concludes from the LXX usage of hilaskesthae that “the [OT] rites, and the death of Christ, were propitiatory in the sense of turning aside God’s wrath.”

How does this work? “God himself removes his wrath, and . . . the rites were ordained by God for the purpose of effecting this. Since it is agreed that sin is the problem, and God is active in dealing with it, we certainly do not have here a crude picture of an angry and capricious deity being bribed to stop an arbitrary punishment by the offerings of a sacrifice. Whether we speak of God propitiating himself or of God dealing with the sin that requires his judgement, we are clearly confronted with a totally different conception than placation. The linguistic arguments for interpreting hilaskesthai as expiation seem convincing, but the insistence on the reality of God’s judgement against sin seems more consistent with both the Old and New testaments than the view that the wrath was merely a matter of cause and effect” (163-4).

Origen worked this out by insisting (at times) that the cross rectified human nature, removing the cause of God’s wrath and thus indirectly propitiating Him. Christ doesn’t effect a change in God, but in humanity. God makes men acceptable, and then He doesn’t have to be angry at them anymore (177). 

Origen pursued this explanation in part to preserve the changelessness of God: If He could be turned from wrath to compassion, He was not immutable. It’s not clear that Origen accomplished this aim, though, since even on his account God is wrathful and then He isn’t. The indirection of the causation doesn’t alter the fact that God’s attitude altered.

In any case, for all of Young’s efforts to avoid “crude” notions of propitiation, she is right to recognize that wrath can’t be written out of Christian theology, or the event of the cross.