In my lengthy review of The Christ Who Heals by Terryl and Fiona Givens I discuss, among many other things, the issue of expiation, propitiation, and the wrath of God, unpopular concepts that are downplayed in many circles these days, notwithstanding their appearance in biblical and uniquely Latter-day Saint Scriptures:
In his The Mediator, Emil Brunner wrote the following which is rather apropos as he argues against the claim, popularized by C.H. Dodd in The Bible and the Greeks (1935) that God having a wrath and the need for appeasement thereof is opposed to the witness of the Bible and is derived from fickle pagan deities who had to be propitiated by their followers:
The God who is really angry, really loves. To reject the idea of the wrath of God also means to reject His Love. Then all that is left, both negatively and positively, is the abstract idea of law. The idea that God is angry is no more anthropopathic than the thought that God loves. The reason why the idea of the divine anger is always exposed to misunderstanding is because among men anger is ethically wrong. And yet, even among men do we not speak of a “righteous anger”? And does not the flame of righteous anger show that love also is truly personal? To banish all emotions from the sphere of the Divine Good is not the work of Christian thought but of “Greek-modern,” that is, rational thought.
God is angry because He is personal, because He really loves. The Bible speaks so naturally about the divine wrath, even in the New Testament, because it is so full of the thought of the personal love of God, which is something quite different from the “rational moral purposive will.” Once again, this is not a relic of primitive thought . . . God is angry. What does that mean to the man who knows this? That a disaster is hanging over him which he cannot avert. He knows the cause: his unfaithfulness. But along with this sense of impending disaster goes also the sense of his impotence to avert this disaster by any merely interior or ethical means. The nearest approach to such an attempt would be an inward transformation at the very centre of the disturbance, which is indeed the personal relation, that is, to return to the original personal relationship. Ah! if only this were possible! But the way to this possibility is blocked by a double barrier: inability to achieve this, and also the feeling that it would not be permitted; in other words, sin which cannot be rooted out, and guilt which can never be made good. If ever the way to God is to be reopened and the normal relationship restored, something else will have to take place. This process would be expiation.
In the ancient rites and ideas of expiation something of this vital truth still lives; otherwise it scarcely exists anywhere else—in mysticism least of all. Of course, we are aware of the primitive nature and the inadequacy of all these religious means of expiation. But it is more than doubtful whether the rejection of these ideas in favour of a non-ritual religious ethic brings us any nearer to the truth than the practice of these rites. It is difficult to say which of these two is nearer to the truth: rational moralism, or primitive religion with its propitiatory rites; for both have preserved one element of truth and have lost another. Rational moralism recognizes the insufficiency of all human means of expiation; sacrificial religion recognizes the need for the expiatory sacrifice. Hence the truth resides in that expiatory sacrifice which is not offered by man but by God, and therefore, because it is a divine transaction, has been offered once for all. (Emil Brunner, The Mediator: A Study of the Central Doctrine of the Christian Faith [trans. Olive Wyon; London: The Lutterworth Press, 1934], 478-79)
