In an attempt to rid the atonement of any sense of propitiation and the reality of God’s wrath against sin, C.H. Dodd argued that expressions such as "the day of God's wrath" (Rom 2:5); "the law brings wrath" (Rom 4:15) and "we will be saved from the coming wrath" (Rom 5:9) does "not describe the attitude of God to man, but to describe the inevitable process of cause and effect in a moral sense" (The Epistle to the Romans, pp. 21-23). A.T. Hanson, following Dodd, argued that "There can be little doubt that for Paul the impersonal character of the wrath was important; it relived him of the necessity of attributing wrath directly to God" and "If you think of the wrath as an attitude of God, you cannot avoid some theory of propitiation But the wrath in the New Testament is never spoken of as being propitiated, because it is not conceived as being an attitude of God" (The Wrath of the Lamb, pp. 69, 192).
While I disagree with the central thesis of his book (and have written many articles against it [i.e., the Mass as a propitiatory sacrifice and Transubstantiation]), Robert Sungenis, in Not by Bread Alone: The Biblical and Historical Evidence for the Eucharistic Sacrifice, refuted Dodd and Hanson rather soundly on this issue. As Sungenis notes:
1) The New Testament contains instances in which God’s anger and wrath (Greek: οργη) are personalized in the active voice, e.g., “God, the one inflicting wrath” (Rm 3:5); “God wishing to show forth His wrath” (Rm 9:22). The former is one of four references to God’s present wrath (Rm 1:18; 2:5, 8; 3:5), which immediately precedes the reference in Rm 3:25 to Christ being the “propitiation” sent by God for man’s sin, thus showing the connection between God’s wrath and the propitiation of that wrath.
2) Similar to “wrath” and “anger,” the New Testament uses words such as “grace” without personalizing them or specifying their origin, e.g., “grace multiplied” (Rm 5:20); “the election of grace” (Rm 11:5).
3) The statement “So I declared an oath in my anger, they shall never enter my rest in Hb 3:11; 4:3 is a quote from Ps 95:11, whose contexts refers to God’s personal anger against the Israelites in the desert, some of which Moses had propitiated (e.g., Exodus 32-33; Numbers 14). The writer of Hebrews reminds the Christians of his day that the same anger of God rests upon those who now “turn away from the living God” (Hb 3:12).
4) The LXX, using the Greek ιλασκομαι (hilaskomai) and its derivatives – although sometimes referring to the “propitiation of sins” rather than propitiation of God’s wrath – the wrath, which the Old Testament clearly envisions as an attitude of God, is included in the context (e.g., Ps 78:38-40: “God...is propitiated for their sins...how often did they provoke him in the wilderness and anger him in a dry land”; Lm 3:42-43: “we have sinned, we have transgressed, and you have not been propitious...You have visited us in wrath, and driven us away” cf. Ps 25:11; 79:9). Similarly, Nm 16:46 explicitly states that the propitiation is for the purpose of averting God’s anger. All in all, however, instances in the Old Testament in which propitiation and anger appear in the same context are as rare as they are in the New Testament, and thus Hanson’s claims have no merit. (Robert A. Sungenis, Not by Bread Alone: the Biblical and Historical Evidence for the Eucharistic Sacrifice [2d ed.; Catholic Apologetics International Publishing, Inc., 2009], 291-92)
For more on the topics of expiation, propitiation, and the wrath of God and its relationship the atonement, see, for e.g.:
