My friend and Confessing Christ co-conspirator Willis Elliot, who is a polymath, Biblical language scholar, churchman, provocateur, nonagenarian, and a long-time interlocutor, is the guest poster today.
“ON TARGET, man! “Reconciliation is something that we need to do, and atonement is something only God does.”
Katallage – the word you mention as for both – had, as its street-meaning, money-exchange. No matter how high & wide a plant grows, it never loses the reality of its SOIL: no matter how diversified the meanings of a word (its “semantic domain”) become, it never loses its contact with the STREET (by which I mean its origin in common, earthly life).
Now, Rick, I’m probably about to tell you nothing you (an “atonement” scholar) don’t know. I’ll call it “How to access [enter into] a word.”
Back to the plant metaphor: first, I want to know the ROOT(s) of the word. Kat[a]-all-ag-e is the action (ag) of interchange (kata) with another (all-os). Second, I want to know the STREET meaning(s): (1) money-exchange, commerce, business; (2) the change from enmity to friendship; reconciliation, restoration. Finally, I want to know the CHURCH meaning(s) – “church” in the broad sense of special, particular.
2
The Greek general & Christian lexicons note a special Christian meaning of katallage: reconciliation with God through Christ, at the divine initiative (“by God alone,” & therefore “received” [*lamban-*] as a gift by believers – believing receivers). / But I found none using “atonement”: that technical word seems limited to Greek theological dictionaries. The Eng. wd. (says Mer.-Web. Online) – earliest, 1513 – meant “reconciliation” (now obsolete); means “the reconciliation of God and humankind through the sacrificial death of Jesus Christ”; & (3rd meaning), “reparation, satisfaction.”
3
Synonomies expand from verbal “semantic domains” to conceptual domains answering the question What word-group relates the word-meanings to what “central truth” (the phrase on p271 of R.C.Trench’s Synonyms of the NT (1854; my copy, 1906). In article lxxvii, he’s discussing apolytrosis/katallage/hilasmos– “three grand circles [or ‘families’] of images” of the Cross’ verbally “inestimable benefits.” “Scripture . . . approach(es) the central truth from different quarters,” which “supply the deficiences of one another.”
4
Trench’s article fights those who want so to translate these words as to delete “the wrath of God.” Today, we have to fight what you well call a “bloodless theology.” Not just “God is love,” but (as a Methodist pastor, a niece of mine, wrote me a few days ago), “God is only love” (her description of the theology of the BOM [Board of Ordained Ministry] on which she serves). Said she to me, “when [against that narrowness] I mentioned obedience, sacrifice, and accountability,” there was “only silence.” “Few speak on behalf of the Scriptures, . . . honoring the Lord, who has so graciously given them [the Scriptures] to us.” / If God is “only love,” he’s not fully personal, with the full moral sense & full range of emotions. Note how Trench (156 years ago!) insists that without God’s wrath, theology trivializes sin, which is no longer an enmity against God setting God in enmity against sinners.
(Thank you Willis. Used by his permission.)
>Having come to this post via Facebook(!), and with all due respect to you and Willis, let me ask, is it possible to provide a layman's explanation of all this?
>Martin,Willis was responding to a post of mine “Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Cross: The Bloodless Theology of the Mainline Church.” posted in March, which you may have seen. If not it is linked above in the second paragraph. He was affirming my points with some heavy scholarship, but mine should be more accessible to the layman, although I think you could work your way through this one as well with profit. It may take a couple of readings.-Rick
>This is very helpful to those of us laboring in the pastoral trenches. Thank you for ruminating and teaching us in the process.