Hooking Leviathan: Did Jesus Deceive Satan at the Cross?

(image: the right panel of the “Mérode Altarpiece,” (~1425) depicting Joseph building a “mouse trap”)

(a paper I wrote in seminary)

What happened to Satan at the cross? Was God playing “the ultimate April Fools’-style prank,” on Satan? As a common Easter sermon riff puts it, Satan thought he had Christ defeated on Friday, “but Sunday’s comin.’” The classic image of the deception of Satan at the cross is found in Gregory of Nyssa’s “fishhook” theory of the atonement. This image strikes many readers as very strange, even bizarre. Nicholas Constas assembles a litany of epithets against the fishhook theory: “childish and immoral,” “perverted and repulsive,” highly objectionable, disgusting and grotesque,” “self-contradictory, inconclusive and inappropriate,” “repellent,” and “a crude and distasteful trick.” Oliver Crisp calls the image “lurid.”

In addition to the strangeness of the picture, is the further difficulty: does such a scheme implicate God, “who cannot lie” (Titus 1:2), in deception? The question of the pia fraus, (“pious fraud”) has exercised theologians since the very beginning. This paper seeks to explore the idea of Christ’s death as “bait and trap,” with particular eye to the issue of the “divine deception” of Satan. It begins with detailed exploration of some early patristic depictions of this image, then offers some Biblical and theological critiques of some of the construals, before positing an account of in just what way the Devil was deceived, or rather, blinded to the work Christ was accomplishing on the cross.

This paper does not set out to articulate or defend any one theory of the atonement. The writer assumes some variety of Christus Victor through penal substitution. The focus here is more narrowly to evaluate “bait and trap” images that have been used historically in versions of Christus Victor (or “ransom”) theories of the atonement.

(read the rest of the paper here:

Daniel Kleven, “Hooking Leviathan” (2019)Download

Prejudice at Princeton: Francis Grimké and Hugh Browne vs. Alexander McGill (1878)

(image: McGill, Chester, Browne, Grimké)

Francis Grimké attended Princeton Theological Seminary from 1875 to 1878 studying under Charles Hodge, James Moffatt, Alexander McGill, and Charles Aiken, among others (see “The Seminary Years (1875 – 1878)” in Henry Justin Ferry, “Francis James Grimke: Portrait of a Black Puritan” (1971)). Grimké was one of four Black students at Princeton at the time, along with Matthew Anderson, Hugh Browne, and Daniel Culp (see Matthew Anderson, Presbyterianism; Its Relation to the Negro, 162–176). B. B. Warfield was also a student at Princeton from 1873–1876, and in 1878, during Grimké’s senior year, Warfield was appointed “Charles Hodge Professor of Didactic and Polemic Theology,” though it does not appear that Grimké took Warfield’s course (Biographical catalogue of Princeton Theological Seminary, 1815-1954; Catalogue of the Officers and Students of theTheological Seminary of the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. at Princeton, N.J., 1877–1878).

1878 was a flurry of transitions for Rev. F. J. Grimké. In April, he graduated from seminary; in May he transferred from the Presbytery of Philadelphia to the Presbytery of Washington City in order to be examined for ordination; in June he passed his examination in the Washington City Presbytery; in July he was officially installed as pastor in the nation’s capitol city at Fifteenth Street Presbyterian Church where he would serve for over fifty years.

But a dark cloud hung over that summer of 1878.

“The Dean of Negro Preachers”: William Henry Ferris on Francis Grimké

Henry Ferry opens his 1971 dissertation on Francis Grimké with this paragraph:

In 1912 William Ferris, the eccentric Negro militant wrote: 

“Twenty years ago, when I was a sophomore at Yale, men spoke the name, “Dr. Grimke,” with respect and reverence. And they do to-day… Since the deaths of Bishop Payne and Dr. Crummell, Dr. Grimke has remained the most potent figure in the Negro ecclesiastical world.”

Yet fifty years later his name was known but to a handful of scholars, black or white.

“Francis James Grimke: Portrait of a Black Puritan,” ii.

This is a fascinating contrast between Grimké’s reputation among fellow Black leaders and his obscurity just a generation later. William Ferris’s two volume magnum opus The African Abroad: Or, His Evolution in Western Civilization, Tracing His Development Under Caucasian Milieu (1913), from which that quote is taken, gives us glimpse just how much a giant Francis Grimké was considered to be in his own time.