Satisfying the devil
Satisfying the devil
The notion that it was the devil who made the cross necessary was widespread in the early church.1 To be sure, Jesus and his apostles did speak of the cross as the means of the devil’s overthrow (as we shall consider in a later chapter). But some of the early Fathers were extremely injudicious in the ways in which they represented both the devil’s power and how the cross deprived him of it. They all recognized that since the Fall, and on account of it, mankind has been in captivity not only to sin and guilt but to the devil. They thought of him as the lord of sin and death, and as the major tyrant from whom Jesus came to liberate us.
But with the benefit of hindsight we may say that they made three mistakes. First, they credited the devil with more power than he has. Even though they portrayed him as a rebel, a robber and a usurper, they tended to speak as if he had acquired certain ‘rights’ over man which even God himself was under obligation to satisfy honourably. Gregory of Nazianzus in the fourth century was one of the few early theologians who vigorously repudiated this idea. He called it an ‘outrage’.2
Secondly, they therefore tended to think of the cross as a divine transaction with the devil; it was the ransom-price demanded by him for the release of his captives, and paid to him in settlement of his rights. This was a very popular belief in the early centuries of the church.
Thirdly, some went further and represented the transaction in terms of a deception. Theologically, they pictured the devil as having over-reached himself. Although in the case of us sinners he ‘holds the power of death’ (Heb. 2:14), he had no such authority over the sinless Jesus, and in hounding him to death he shed innocent blood. Therefore, having thus abused his power, he was deprived of it. Some Fathers added at this point that he did not altogether realize what he was doing, either because he did not recognize who Jesus was, or because, seeing Godhead in human form, he thought he now had a unique opportunity to overpower him. But he was deceived. Origen was the first to teach unequivocally that the death of Jesus was both the ransom-price paid to the devil and the means of his deception and overthrow. Gregory of Nyssa, a shy Cappadocian scholar of the fourth century, further developed these ideas in his Great Catechism or Catechetical Oration, using vivid imagery:
God,...in order to secure that the ransom in our behalf might be easily accepted by him (sc. the devil) who required it...was hidden under the veil of our nature, that so, as with ravenous fish, the hook of the Deity might be gulped down along with the bait of flesh, and thus, life being introduced into the house of death,...(the devil) might vanish.3
To us the analogy of the fish-hook is grotesque, as is also Augustine’s sermonic use of mousetrap imagery. Peter Lombard was to use it centuries later, affirming that ‘the cross was a mousetrap (muscipula) baited with the blood of Christ’.4 To be sure, these theologians may well have developed such pictures as a concession to the popular mind, and the early Fathers saw a certain justice in the idea that he who had deceived the human race into disobedience should himself be deceived into defeat. But to attribute fraudulent action to God is unworthy of him.
What is of permanent value in these theories is first that they took seriously the reality, malevolence and power of the devil (the ‘strong man, fully armed’ of Luke 11:21), and secondly that they proclaimed his decisive, objective defeat at the cross for our liberation (by the ‘someone stronger’ who attacked and overpowered him, Luke 11:22).5 Nevertheless, R. W. Dale was not exaggerating when he dubbed them ‘intolerable, monstrous and profane’.6 We deny that the devil has any rights over us which God is obliged to satisfy. Consequently, any notion of Christ’s death as a necessary transaction with, let alone deception of, the devil is ruled out.