MetaCatholic

The more I look at translations of Romans 3:25, the more I feel that you would need a fairly full understanding of Reformation teaching to make much sense of the English. (I’m only focusing on the initial part of the verse.) But consider first the very literal (not optimal) HCSB:

God presented Him as a propitiation through faith in His blood

This is echoed by others:

[Jesus] whom God set forth as an expiation, through faith, by his blood (NAB)
God presented him as a sacrifice of atonement, through faith in his blood.(NIV)

I submit that this doesn’t make sense as English: grammatically faith here can either refer back to God or to Jesus (hold on to that thought), yet the translators of these versions would be clear it was the faith of those who believed in Jesus. Some translations decide to spell it out a little further.

[Jesus] whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood, to be received by faith. (ESV)
[Jesus] whom God put forward as a sacrifice of atonement by his blood, effective through faith. (NRSV)
God presented Christ as a sacrifice of atonement, through the shedding of his blood—to be received by faith (TNIV)

These are slightly clearer in English, but have achieved that at the cost of loading a single preposition – διὰ (dia) – with a theological theory. I say slightly clearer, but ESV could unfortunately be easily read out of context as us, recognising what God has done, receiving his propitiation of us! I’m also not at all sure of the NRSV implication that God’s work only becomes “effective” through faith, though supporters of limited atonement will no doubt rejoice that this liberal translation is so Calvinist.

With all these difficulties the NET plumps for one particular theory and some very specific translation choices, and paraphrases completely:

God publicly displayed him at his death as the mercy seat accessible through faith

This (and it has several footnotes) has the merit of being clear English. It does depend on buying in to a particular theory of the meaning of ἱλαστήριον (hilasterion), which while it has arguments in its favour, is by no means assured of full acceptance.

I would note, however, that this is one of those places where (at least if you don’t buy the NET theories, and even to some extent if you do) there is a fairly clear argument  for going with the idea that here we are actually talking about Christ’s faithfulness rather than human faith. Then, instead of all these contortions with English we have a relatively clear meaning:

ὃν προέθετο ὁ θεὸς ἱλαστήριον διὰ [τῆς] πίστεως ἐν τῷ αὐτοῦ αἵματι
[Jesus] whom God put forward as a means of atonement on account of his being faithful to death.

The thought is not a million miles away from that embedded in Philippians 2:6-11.