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S i d e b a r
CAN WE EXPIATE OUR SINS - AND WHAT DOES "EXPIATE" MEAN ANYWAY?
By James Akin
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This Rock
Volume 5, Number 11
 November 1994 
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Some criticize indulgences, saying they involve
our making "expiation" for our sins, something which only
Christ can do. While this sounds like a noble defense of Christ's
sufficiency, this criticism is misfounded, and most who make it do
not know what the word "expiation" means or how indulgences
work.
Protestant Scripture scholar Leon Morris comments
on the confusion around the word "expiate": "[M]ost
of us . . . don't understand `expiation' very well . . . [E]xpiation
is . . . the making amends for a wrong. . . . Expiation is an impersonal
word; one expiates a sin or a crime" (The Atonement [Downers
Grove: InterVarsity, 1983], 151).Leon Morris, The Atonement (Downers
Grove, Ill.: IVP, 1983), 151. The Wycliff Bible Encyclopedia
gives a similar definition: "The basic idea of expiation has
to do with reparation for a wrong, the satisfaction of the demands
of justice through paying a penalty."
The terms used in these definitions--expiation,
satisfaction, amends, reparation--mean basically the same thing.
To make expiation or satisfaction for a sin is to make amends or reparation
for it. When someone makes reparations, he tries to repair the situation
caused by his sin.
Certainly when it comes to the eternal effects
of our sins, only Christ can make amends or reparation. Only he was
able to pay the infinite price necessary to cover our sins. We are
completely unable to do so not only because we are finite creatures
incapable of making an infinite satisfaction (or an infinite anything),
but because everything we have was given to us by God. For us to try
to satisfy God's eternal justice would be like using money we had
borrowed from someone to repay what we had stolen from him. No actual
satisfaction would be made (cf. Ps. 49:7-9, Job 41:11, Rom. 11:35).
This does not mean we can't make amends or reparation for the temporal
effects of our sins. If someone steals an item, he can return it.
If someone damages another's reputation, he can publicly correct the
slander. When someone destroys a piece of property, he can compensate
the owner for its loss. All these are ways in which one can make at
least partial amends (expiation) for what he has done.
They are ways in which we are expected to make
compensation, as even the sharpest critics of indulgences admit. If
I have wronged another person, then, quite aside from being put right
with God, I must make it up, or at least try to make it up, to the
person I have wronged. To make full reparation it is necessary not
only to restore what was taken or damaged, but also to compensate
the owner for the time the thing was gone or injured. In financial
cases this is done by paying interest.
Excellent biblical illustrations of this principle
are given in Leviticus 6:1-7 and Numbers 5:5-8, which tell us that
in the Old Testament a penitent had to pay an extra twenty percent
in addition to the value of the thing he took or damaged. (This applied
to a penitent who voluntarily made compensation; a captured thief
had to pay back double the value of the item taken [Ex. 22:1-9].)
Sometimes strict reparation for a sin is impossible; for
example, if one destroys an irreplaceable item. In many situations
the best one can do is make a gesture expressing a desire to repair
the damage one's sin has done.
Scripture is forthright in stating the ability of humans
to make amends for their sins. Proverbs 16:6 states, "By kindness
and piety guilt is expiated, and by the fear of the LORD man avoids
evil" (NAB; RSV has "atoned for" instead of "expiated").
Scripture even uses the stronger term "atonement"
and indicates humans can make temporal atonement for themselves (see
Exodus 30:15-16, Leviticus 17:11, Numbers 31:50).
The claim that only Christ can atone for or expiate our sins
arises from a confusion about whether the temporal or the eternal
dimension of our sins is being discussed. Only Christ can provide
eternal satisfaction for our sins, but we can make temporal amends
or reparations for them.
Even our ability to make temporal amends to God and our neighbor
is given to us by God's grace, as are all of our abilities (for example,
see Deut. 8:17-18). His grace produces our reparations. He is the
ultimate ground of all expiation, even the relative, temporal reparations
he empowers us to perform.
This is something we all need to take seriously because,
as Paul VI explained, "All men who walk this earth commit at
least venial and so-called daily sins. All, therefore, need God's
mercy to set them free from sin's penal consequences" (ID 3).
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