Skip to content
QuotesFromBible.com

What does the Bible mean by…

about 3 min read

“reconciliation”

Greek New Testament 2 Corinthians 5:18

Katallagē describes relationship restoration — restoring a broken friendship, ending a quarrel, re-establishing trust. Paul uses it for the restoration of the God-human relationship. Paul overlaps katallagē with commercial and legal metaphors elsewhere in his letters (debt, verdict, ransom), so the boundaries between these domains are not as clean as they might appear in isolation. Katallagē itself is primarily relational; the wider Pauline picture brings relational, legal, and commercial registers together.

The word itself

καταλλαγή katallagē

Lexicon citation

BDAG s.v. καταλλαγή: the reestablishment of an interrupted or broken relationship, reconciliation. From kata (down, thoroughly) + allassō (to change, exchange). The verb katallassō covers both ordinary human reconciliation (1 Cor 7:11) and divine-human reconciliation (Romans 5:10).

The word’s ordinary use

Katallagē (καταλλαγή) names the kind of thing that happens when a broken relationship is restored. The verb katallassō — “to reconcile” — appears in 1 Corinthians 7:11 of an estranged wife being reconciled to her husband. The same verb covers ordinary human reconciliation (between people who have quarrelled) and the cosmic-scale reconciliation of God and humanity.

BDAG s.v. katallagē: “the reestablishment of an interrupted or broken relationship, reconciliation.”

The word is built from kata (down, thoroughly) + allassō (to change, exchange). The underlying image is exchange — one state (estrangement) being exchanged for another (reconciliation).

The Pauline use

The major Pauline passages on reconciliation:

2 Corinthians 5:18-21 (BSB) — the most extensive:

All this is from God, who reconciled us to Himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation: that God was reconciling the world to Himself in Christ, not counting men’s trespasses against them. And He has committed to us the message of reconciliation. […] God made Him who knew no sin to be sin on our behalf, so that in Him we might become the righteousness of God.

Romans 5:10-11 (BSB):

For if, when we were enemies of God, we were reconciled to Him through the death of His Son, how much more, having been reconciled, shall we be saved through His life! And not only that, but we also rejoice in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received reconciliation.

In both passages, the relational image is primary. The state to be exchanged is enmity / alienation; the new state is restored relationship.

Mutual or one-directional?

In ordinary Greek usage, reconciliation is mutual — both parties change. Paul uses katallagē in a way that appears one-directional: God reconciling humanity to himself. Whether God is also “reconciled” to humanity is a significant theological question. Some passages (Romans 5:10 — “while we were enemies”) suggest the relationship was broken from the human side; the divine response is consistent throughout. Other readings argue God’s posture also changes.

Different theological traditions handle this differently. Penal-substitution readings emphasise the change in God’s posture (wrath being satisfied). Relational/Christus-victor readings emphasise the change in the human side and the cosmic situation. The word katallagē does not adjudicate.

What this site does not do

We do not resolve the theology of how reconciliation works. We document what the word does at the lexical level: it names the restoration of an interrupted or broken relationship, drawn from the vocabulary of ordinary human life. The mechanism by which the reconciliation is accomplished — what the cross did, how God’s posture and humanity’s situation are both addressed — is the work of theological reflection on multiple New Testament passages, not on this one word.