God-Eater: In Defense of the Fish-Hook Theory of Atonement, Sort Of (Part One - Biblical Precedent)

[Part Two: Patristic Contexts]

Near the beginning of his recent and incredibly helpful volume Atonement: A Guide for the Perplexed, Adam Johnson notes “the question of orthodoxy [of theories of atonement] are complicated by a lack of creedal specificity … [and] beyond that, the diversity of the biblical and historical material makes orthodoxy difficult to discern.”[1] “There are,” as David Congdon has recently put it, “almost as many soteriologies as there are theologians to espouse them.”[2]

With one eye on this rule, it seems rehabilitating maligned or forgotten concepts of atonement, or coming up with new interpretations, has become a booming industry. Such attempts at generousness have nonetheless mostly passed by the so-called “Fish-hook” theory of atonement, and this despite the fact that it is technically one of the many “mechanisms” of atonement taken up in Gustav Aulen’s seminal work Christus Victor spotlighting the motif of Christ’s victory over Satan in the early church. Aulen himself noted he found this specific variation “highly objectionable, disgusting, and grotesque.”[3] Indeed, even as generous and capacious an interpreter as Fleming Rutledge in her beautiful work The Crucifixion: Understanding the Death of Jesus Christ gives the so-called “Fish-hook” theory nary a mention.[4]

Nicholas Constas, in “The Last Temptation of Satan,” a remarkable and perceptive essay to which we will be returning in a moment, notes wryly: “this theory … has not been kindly received in contemporary scholarship.”[5] Our goal here will be to change that opinion – or, less ambitiously at least, understand the original contexts which give it more sense than it seems to have for us today.

So, what is the “fish-hook” theory? In essence, it describes Christ’s atonement as “deceiving” the Devil: God the Son takes on human form and lures the Devil (or Death) to “eat” him. As God incarnate, however, Christ is a meal Death hardly has the capacity to contain, and so is burst from within like a sort of sanctified “Geiger’s Alien.”[6] Take Gregory of Nyssa’s description:

For since … it was not in the nature of the [devil] to come in contact with the undiluted presence of God, and to undergo his unclouded manifestation, therefore, in order to secure that the ransom on our behalf might be easily accepted by him who required it, the Deity 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, and light shining in the darkness, that which is diametrically opposed to light and life might vanish; for it is not in the nature of darkness to remain when light is present, or of death to exist when life is active.[7]

Irenaeus further details that “wherefore he who had led man captive [the Devil], was justly captured in his turn by God.”[8] Or, as Ephesians 4:8 says: “when He ascended on high, He led captivity captive” (cf. Col. 2:15; Ps. 68:18; Jg. 5:12) mimicking, one might think, the imprisoned fishhook drawing up the fish that thought it swallowed its prey. In fact Nyssa calls here on Job:

“Omnipotent Wisdom" (παντοδύναμος σοφία, Wis 7:23; 1 Cor 1:24), coming into the "heart of the earth" (Matt 12:40), was able to make "utterly foolish" (καταμωραναι, compare Rom 1:22; 1 Cor 1:18) that great "Mind" (compare Isa 10:12) which dwells in it, turning his counsel to folly, and catching the wise one (σοφός) in his cunning (πανουργία) and turning back upon him his clever devices (σοφά εγχειρήματα). For this reason, having swallowed the bait (δέλεαρ) of the flesh, he was pierced with the fishhook (αγκιστρον) of deity, and so the dragon (δράκων) was caught with the fishhook, just as it is said in the book of Job, "You shall catch the dragon with a fishhook" (Job 40:25).[9]

His friend Gregory Nazianzus makes a similar claim:

The ‘Light shines in the darkness’ (John 1:5) of this life and in this weak flesh, and though persecuted by the darkness it is not overtaken by it (John 1:5)—I mean the opposing power which shamelessly assailed the visible (τω φαινομένω) Adam, but instead encountered God and was defeated... . For since the specious advocate (σοφιστής) of evil baited us with the promise of divinity (compare Gen 3:6), he was himself baited by the snare (πρόβλημα) of the flesh. In attacking [the new] Adam, he encountered God, and the condemnation of the flesh was abolished (Rom 5:16, 18), death being put to death by the flesh.[10]

So, first before turning to understanding its contexts, what are some objections?

I.a. Demons Know Christ.

Colin Gunton gives the objection that in Scripture, demons seem to have no doubt about the Lord’s true identity—making the basic presupposition of deception absurd (Mark 1:25, 34; 3:11; et. al.).[11]

            I.b. God Owes Satan Nothing.

John of Damascus objects quite forcefully to ransom in regards to the Devil: “God forbid that the blood of the Lord should be offered to a tyrant!”[12] The classic Biblical text here would be Romans 9, while Calvinists (without being monolithic) often proclaim that since all have sinned and fallen short of God’s glory (Rom. 3:23), salvation is gratis and a perfectly free, superadded gift dependent on no mechanism or condition other than God’s own council.[13] While this objection is typically leveled at the Ransom Theory, it fits here too: why must Satan be “fed” for atonement to function?

            I.c. God Cannot Lie.

This is explicit in scripture several times (Num. 23:9; 1 Sam. 15:29; Heb. 6:18) and is amplified even further in the Augustinian tradition, which allows no shade of gray in this area.[14] Lying evinces a lack of imagination; there is always another way out. God, as infinitely creative, never needs to deceive.

            Biblical Contexts

Though one hardly finds this type of fishhook or deception theory in modern literature, it was quite abundant early on. Constas notes that “dozens of writers from the mid-Fourth to the Seventh century and beyond,” use the image,[15] while Latin writers from Augustine on use a similar image of a mousetrap baited with Christ’s blood.[16]

We will turn to the Patristic contexts in a moment. Biblically it is also not without precedent. While there is no strict “proof-text” for the Fish-hook theory, it does fairly seamlessly combine a number of Biblical images and motifs into a single narrative. Satan is of course likened to Serpent and Dragon (Gen. 3:1; Rev. 12:2, 20:9), and (though now in the figure of a Lion) roams about looking for things to devour (1 Peter 5:8). This lends itself readily to the description of God in Job as dangling the Leviathan from a fish-hook (Job 41:1-2). Moreover, the underworld of death, Sheol, is described as an insatiable devourer (Num. 16:30; Ps. 141:7; Prov. 27:20, 30:15-16; Is. 5:14; Hab. 2:5). While not specifically linked to the Fish-hook theory of atonement, these combinations of images carried on as they mixed with European culture to create the unsettling concept of the Hell-Mouth[17] as famously associated with the art of Hieronymus Bosch. In Nordic countries as well, Sheol as Devourer bled into the Fenrir and Midgardsormr of legend [the Wolf and the World-Serpent].

And what of the bait? Here the LXX of Ps. 21:6 was a centerpiece: “I am a worm [skwlhx] and not a man.” This was especially so because of how interpreters tied Ps. 21 into Ps. 22 – namely the cry that echoes from Christ’s mouth on the cross: “My God, My God, why have You forsaken me?” On the cross, Christ is the worm waiting to be devoured.

            The Sign of Jonah

Even further, the idea of Christ’s death and resurrection as the “sign of Jonah” plays a heavy role organizing the glissando of images into a picture of Christ baiting Satan. In fact, as the sign of Jonah, Christ is not only “swallowed,” but the sign (when taken in total canonical context) is a theory of deception: God uses death against itself.

It is interesting to note that prior to this entire discussion of the sign of Jonah, Matthew has already made an allusion to Jesus in terms of the Jonah story in Mt. 8:23-27 where Jesus calms the storm.[18]  William Lane has argued that the similarities are merely coincidental, and are “dictated by the circumstances of describing a severe storm,” and its affect on the crew.[19]  

Certainly while some of the descriptions are part of the exigencies of describing similar scenes, the parallels are of such a nature as to grab one’s attention.  Indeed some agreeing parallels, such as both journeys across the water going from Jewish to Gentile territory, are difficult to dismiss as circumstantial.  As in Jonah (1:5), while on a boat a great storm begins to rage, and Jesus, like Jonah, is asleep below deck (8:24).  Like the crew aboard Jonah’s boat, Jesus’ disciples become incredibly distressed and wake Jesus (“Lord save us, we are perishing!”) just as the captain wakes Jonah, “so God will save us and we will not perish.”  Jonah tells the men to toss him into the sea because God is angry with him.  They reluctantly do this and “the waves stood from their raging” (Jon. 1:15).  

Here there is an interesting difference-within-similarity.  Jesus, obviously, does not jump overboard but merely commands the storm to be quiet.  When in Jonah the storm stills, the (Gentile!) crew praise God; when the storm is stilled in Matthew the disciples ask the very loaded question, “what sort of man is this that even the wind and the waves obey him?” (Mt. 8:27).

The relevance of this story comes to the fore when we analyze the “sign of Jonah.”  As the story goes, Jonah is tossed overboard to still the storm on behalf of the crew, to appease God’s anger.  The immediate parallel that comes to mind is obviously Christ’s death for our sins.  Yet this similarity itself has a unique wrinkle.  In speaking of the “sign of Jonah,” Christ refers to himself as the Son of Man.
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It is in fact “the Son of Man” that will be in the “heart of the earth” for three days and three nights. 

It would be impossible to go over the nuances of this term “Son of Man,”[20] for our purposes we can allude to the fact that this apocalyptic figure (e.g. in Daniel 7) became associated as the agent of the coming judgment (e.g. Mat. 19:28; c.f. Luke 12:8).  The uniqueness of this is that if Jonah was the anti-type of “sacrificial death” (to a certain degree) Jesus, as the Son of Man now typified through this sign of Jonah, something along the lines of Barth’s “the Judge who is Judged,” on behalf of others appears. 

In the Matthew 8:27 (and parallels), Jesus has already established that He holds the authority that God did in Jonah to still the storm.  He does what God does.  Yet now also, in the very specific sense of dying to save others (ignoring Jonah’s petulant attitude and the fact he caused the mess in the first place) Jesus also is now seen to do what Jonah does.  And he does this specifically by combining the sign of Jonah with the figure of the Son of Man.  The Judge is taking judgment upon himself.  Lessing notices this theme within the original context of Jonah itself.  Commenting on the Hebrew he writes: “If the phrase…’but YHWH provided’ [a great fish] indicates that Jonah is receiving salvation from God, then what the great fish does with Jonah indicates that the prophet is also paradoxically placed under judgment by YHWH’s judgment.  The Hebrew term ‘to swallow’ is never used in a positive context in the Old Testament…always a destructive one.”[21]  This is the first movement of the dramatic context of the sign of Jonah, ripe with the paradox of judgment and salvation, and indeed sacrificial death.

The second movement, obviously still being along the same trajectory as the first, is the Son of Man being “in the heart of the earth,” for three days and three nights.  The phrase kardia thV ghV  ßß does not merely mean “in his tomb,” or simply “dead.”  Much more specifically Gundry notes that: “[heart of the earth] means the realm of the dead (c.f. Sir. 51:5; Eph. 4:9),”[22] i.e. Sheol. (cf. the LXX of Jonah 2:3).  Here the parallel seems to be with Jonah’s phrase “the heart of the seas” in 2:4.  Lessing notes that “the land” in Jonah 2:7 is also strictly equivalent to Sheol (LXX: katebhn eiV ghn)

Richard Clifford records that these images in ancient Near-Eastern literature pair with the previous verb used of the fish, “to swallow.”  He writes that Mot, the lord of the underworld, is portrayed as a voracious monster into whose gullet one goes, only to descend further into the underworld.[23] Hence both the sea and the fish in some sense represent Sheol.  This parallelism of both the sea and the fish as Sheol is to be expected given the ancient Near-Eastern context of Jonah.

We must recall that it is precisely the Son of Man who will be in Sheol, that same Sheol which is located beyond God’s presence (Amos 9:2; Prov. 15:11; Ps. 139:8), an absolute and final end (Jer. 51:39; Job 14:12).  A place of captivity, with gates (Is. 38:10) and, in Jonah 2:7, bars.  A place of darkness (Lam. 3:6) and silence (Ps. 31:17-18).  It is these images that flesh out the concept of chaos seen above. “Jonah’s use of Sheol in 2:3 thus indicates that he is under God’s judgment,” writes Lessing.[24]  Yet the Son of Man, the one under judgment bearing the “sign of Jonah,” as we have seen, is also the judge.

Regarding “three days and three nights”: in the ancient Near East “there was a common understanding that in some contexts ‘three days and three nights’ could refer to the time it took to travel to what we call ‘hell.’”[25]  This was quite frequent, for example, in both Sumerian and Egyptian mythology.  While again, this background is slightly tenuous, it does help make sense of Jonah’s somewhat strange psalm in chapter two.  Why would Jonah be praising God inside of a fish? Writes Lessing: “If this interpretation is correct, the ‘three days and three nights’ is the time it takes the great fish to take Jonah back from Sheol and the brink of death (2:3, 7) to life and the worship of YHWH (2:8-10).  This is not the time it took Jonah to sink to the depths of the nether region, as in the pagan myth of Inanna; rather, in this span, the great fish returns his passenger from Sheol to the dry land (2:11).”[26]  Even more, as the fish—the khtoV--though not the Leviathan per se, was itself the general image along with the seas of both chaos and Sheol, here the image of the great fish saving Jonah from Sheol at God’s behest is an image of God using chaos against itself.  Sheol has betrayed Sheol at the command of God.  That is: he uses death to overcome death, YHWH “kills and makes alive; casts down to Sheol and brings back up.” (1 Sam. 2:6).  One cannot help but to note for our purposes that “casts down and brings back up” is a fisherman’s action par excellence. Thus the Son of man being in the “heart of the earth” for three days and three nights is a sign of judgment, but also a movement toward resurrection.  “The Sign of Jonah,” is itself a gospel proclamation.

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[1] Adam Johnson, Atonement: A Guide for the Perplexed (New York: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2015), 29.

[2] David Congdon, The God Who Saves: A Dogmatic Sketch (Eugene: Cascade Books, 2016), 22.

[3] Gustav Aulen, Christus Victor: An Historical Study of the Three Main Types of the Idea of Atonement trans. A.G. Herbert (New York: Macmullen, 1969), 47.

[4] Fleming Rutledge, The Crucifixion: Understanding the Death of Jesus Christ (Grand Rapids: Eerdman’s Publishing, 2015). Tangentially she does deal with it, see: 494n.71.

[5] Nicholas Constas, “The Last Temptation of Satan: Divine Deception in Greek Patristic Interpretations of the Passion Narrative,” in Harvard Theological Review 97:2 (2004): 139-163 at145.

[6] H.R. Giger was a brilliant Swiss surrealist painter who created the alien used in the movie franchise Alien, where the creatures implant themselves into hosts so their young burst from the host’s insides. Of its many influences, this was worked as an explicit antichrist. On his work see his beautiful and unnerving illustrations in: H.R. Giger, H.R. Giger (Switzerland: Taaschen Press, 2007).

[7] Gregory of Nyssa, Catechetical Orations, § 24.

[8] Irenaeus, Adversus Haeresium, III.23

[9] Gregory of Nyssa, On the Three-Day Period between the Death and Resurrection of Christ; ed. Ernest Gebhardt (GNO 9; Leiden: Brill, 1967) 280-81, lines 16-18, 4-16.

[10] Gregory Nazianzus, Orations 39.3, 13.

[11] Colin Gunton, The Actuality of the Atonement: A Study of Metaphor, Rationality, and the Christian Tradition (Grand Rapids: Eerdman’s Publishing, 1989), 63.

[12] John of Damascus, An Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers 2^nd series trans. S.D.F. Salmond, (Massachusetts: Hendrickson, 1994), 9:72 (III:27).

[13] Here see the intricate work of Richard A. Muller, Christ and the Decree: Christology and Predestination in Reformed Theology from Calvin to Perkins (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2008).

[14] See the wonderfully sophisticated analysis of Paul J. Griffiths, Lying: An Augustinian Theology of Duplicity (Eugene: Wipf and Stock, 2004).

[15] Constas, “The Last Temptation of Satan,” 146.

[16] Daniel J. Saunders, “The Devil and the Divinity of Christ” Theological Studies 9 (1948): 536-553 provides a survey of this imagine from Augustine through Aquinas and Cajetan.

[17] E.g. Aleks Pluskowksi, “Apocalyptic Monsters: Animal Inspirations for the Iconography of Medieval North European Devourers,” in Bettina Bildhauer and Robert Mills, The Monstrous Middle Ages (Toronto: University of Toronto, 2003), 153-177.

[18] Reed Lessing, “Dying to Live: God’s Judgment of Jonah, Jesus, and the Baptised.” Concordia Journal no.1 (January 2007): 9-25.

[19] William Lane, The Gospel According to Mark (Grand Rapids: Eerdman’s Publishing, 1974), 176n.91.

[20] Cf. M. E. Osterhaven, “Son of Man,” in The Evangelical Dictionary of Theology, 1127-1130.

[21] Lessing, “Dying to Live,” 11.

[22] Gundry, Matthew, 244.

[23] Cited in Lessing, “Dying to Live,” 11.

[24] Ibid., 13.

[25] Lessing, “Dying to Live,” 14.

[26] Ibid., 14-15.