Theopedia

Leon Morris

Overview

Leon Morris (1914-2006) was an Australian evangelical Anglican New Testament scholar. He argued that Paul’s language of hilastērion means propitiation, the turning aside of God’s wrath, against C. H. Dodd’s rendering of the term as mere “expiation.”1 He wrote widely used commentaries in the Tyndale, Pillar, and New International Commentary series.2

Life and Ministry

Morris was born 15 March 1914 in Lithgow, New South Wales, and died 24 July 2006 in Kew, Melbourne.2 He was ordained in the Anglican ministry in 1938, earned a Bachelor of Divinity with first class honors and a Master of Theology from the University of London as an external student, and completed a PhD at the University of Cambridge.2 He served as Warden of Tyndale House, Cambridge, from 1960 to 1964, then as principal of Ridley College in Melbourne from 1964 until his retirement in 1979, after which he served as a visiting professor of New Testament at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School.2

Theological Contribution

Propitiation and the meaning of hilastērion

One strand of Morris’s scholarship concerns the meaning of Paul’s hilastērion in Romans 3:25, a word usually translated “propitiation” or “expiation.” Philip Chase Sears’s dissertation on Romans states the debate directly: the word’s translation has been argued “either as ‘expiation,’” following C. H. Dodd’s 1931 philological study, “or ‘propitiation,’” following Morris’s 1955 article on the same question, with a range of major commentators lining up on each side.1 The distinction matters because “expiation” implies only the removal of sin’s defiling effect, while “propitiation” implies that God’s own wrath toward sin is turned aside; Morris made the case for the latter in both the 1955 article and his earlier book-length treatment of the cross.1

Exegetical method

Morris’s commentaries continue to be quoted directly, not just cited in passing, by later evangelical scholarship working through the same biblical texts. On Romans 1:25’s “they exchanged the truth about God for a lie,” Jared Moore’s dissertation quotes Morris’s comment in full:

Most versions read “a lie” (NIV, KJV, RSV, etc.), but Paul uses the definite article. He is not thinking of idolatry as no more than one falsehood among many. It is the lie… To exchange the worship of God for the lie is the final disaster.3

Moore builds on this reading directly, describing it as capturing the “black and white” nature of Paul’s contrast between the true God and paganism.3 Similarly, on Paul’s statement in 1 Corinthians 2:11 that only God’s own Spirit knows the things of God, John Thomas English’s dissertation quotes Morris’s comment that “nobody outside God can know what takes place within God, nobody but the Spirit of God. The Spirit knows God from the inside,” and reasons from it in turn.4

Historical Significance

Kenneth Stewart’s historical survey of the twentieth-century evangelical Calvinist resurgence names Morris’s contribution of the Gospel of John volume to the New International Commentary on the New Testament (commenced 1953 under general editor Ned B. Stonehouse) as one of the “well-known volumes” through which the range of Reformed evangelical scholarship became “visible in numbers” during that period, alongside contributors such as F. F. Bruce and William Lane.5

Related Doctrines

References

  1. Philip Chase Sears, “The Mystery Schema of Romans,” in “Mysterion and the Salvation of ‘All Israel’ in Romans 9-11” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2019), 79-80n60, citing C. H. Dodd, “ΙΛΑΣΚΕΣΘΑΙ, its Cognates, Derivatives, and Synonyms, in the Septuagint,” The Journal of Theological Studies 32 (1931): 352-60, and Leon Morris, “The Meaning of Hilastērion in Romans 3:25,” New Testament Studies 2, no. 1 (1955): 33-43, and Leon Morris, The Apostolic Preaching of the Cross, 3rd ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1965). ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  2. Wikipedia, s.v. “Leon Morris,” accessed September 10, 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leon_Morris. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4

  3. Leon Morris, The Epistle to the Romans (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995), 90, quoted in Jared Heath Moore, A Biblical and Historical Appraisal of Concupiscence with Special Attention to Same-Sex Attraction (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2019), 177-78. ↩ ↩2

  4. Leon L. Morris, 1 Corinthians, Tyndale New Testament Commentaries (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2008), 57, quoted in John Thomas English III, “The Procession of the Spirit and the Authority of Scripture,” in “Thus Says the Lord: A Trinitarian Account of the Authority of Scripture” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2014), 159. ↩

  5. Kenneth J. Stewart, “Hardier than Supposed: The Resurgence of Calvinism Across the 20th Century,” Themelios 50, no. 2 (2025): 301-2n102. ↩