1-2-2 Satan In The Thought Of Irenaeus And Tertullian

Wrestling yet further with the problem they'd created, the "fathers" then had to deal with the issue of how the death of Christ could destroy or damage satan. Origen, Irenaeus and Tertullian created the idea that was developed and popularized later in novels and art- that God somehow tricked satan. The reasoning went that satan demanded the blood of Jesus, and so he made Jesus die- but unknown to satan, Jesus was [supposedly] God, and He rose from the grave. Not only is Jesus never defined as 'God' in a trinitarian sense in the Bible; but the whole suggestion is purely fictional. The blood of Jesus was not "paid" to anyone. And an almighty God doesn't need to trick satan in order to win a game. Again we see that our view of God affects our view of satan, and vice versa. And we see too that a forced, unnatural and unBiblical view of the atonement affects our view of satan too. Gnostic and other criticism of 'Christianity' focused easily and powerfully on these contradictions and begged questions; and the "fathers" had to dig themselves yet deeper into a tortuous and contradictory theology. They were pushed on the point of whether satan and his angels sinned at the same time and got thrown out of Heaven together; and whether in fact satan and his angels committed the same sin, or different ones. Tertullian's answer was that satan sinned by envy, and was thrown out of Heaven for this. He then adjusted his view to say that satan was given some period of grace between his sin and his expulsion, during which he corrupted some of the angels, and then they were thrown out after him. Clement, by contrast, insisted satan and the angels fell together, at the same time. The answers of the "fathers" were totally fictional and not tied in at all to any Biblical statements. And yet these desperate men insisted they were guided to their views by God, and many generations of Christendom has blindly followed them. Tertullian likewise was pushed on the issue of whether satan was an Angel, or another kind of being- as the earlier church fathers had claimed. Tertullian ammended the party line to claim that actually, satan was an Angel after all. He was then pushed on the issue of how exactly satan and the angels got down to earth from Heaven. Seeing they had to travel through the air, Tertullian claimed [Apol. 22] that the devil and his angels had wings. Instead of recognizing that these were all merely suggestions, Tertullian went on to insist that at baptism, the candidate must rebuke satan (1). Effectively, Tertullian [later supported in this by Hippolytus] were making their view of satan a fundamental part of the Christian faith; without accepting it, a person couldn't be baptized into the Christian faith. The candidate had to state: "I renounce you, Satan, and your angels". This was a far cry to the New Testament accounts of men and women confessing their sins and being baptized into Christ for the forgiveness of them. This kind of thinking was taken to its ultimate term when much later, in 1668, Joseph Glanvill (a Fellow of the Royal Society) claimed that to deny belief in a personal devil was logically to deny a belief in God, and was thus tantamount to atheism. This is how far dualism leads- if the God of love is matched by a god of evil, then to deny the god of evil is to deny the existence of the God of love, the God and Father of the Lord Jesus. The Calvinist John Edwards, in his 1695 publication Some thoughts concerning the several causes and occasions of atheism, claimed that denying of the devil and demons' existence is a cause of atheism. This is all so sad, and such a tragic perversion of Biblical Christianity- those of us who deny the existence of a personal satan as a result of careful Biblical and historical research, those who believe in the ultimate almightiness of the one God, believing this to such an extent that we see no room left for a personal devil to exist- are framed as effective atheists. And this isn't a thing of the past- we hear of contemporary Christian leaders claiming that those who deny the existence of a personal devil are denying the very essence of the Christian faith, and must be considered cult members rather than Christians (3). This was just the kind of scaremongering demonization of the theological opposition that began with the church fathers, and continued through to Lutherans like August Pfeiffer, who in 1695 claimed that a growing disbelief in the devil would lead to the moral breakdown of society (4). Yet a purely Biblical understanding of the devil surely promotes spirituality in morality- for the New Testament idea that the real 'enemy' is our own internal human thinking and temptation leads to a far fiercer private struggle against immorality in the deepest heart of those who know what the Christian's real enemy actually is.

Notes

(1) J.N.D. Kelly, Early Christian Creeds (London: Longmans, 1972) pp. 31-38, 44, 399-409. See too H.A. Kelly, The Devil At Baptism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985).

(2) Joseph Glanvill's paper, A Blow At Modern Sadducism, is reviewed in Moody E. Prior, "Joseph Glanvill, witchcraft, and seventeenth-century science", Modern Philology Vol. 30 pp. 167-193.

(3) See, e.g., statements from the Christian Apologetics And Research Ministry, widespread on the internet.

(4) As quoted in Jonathan Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650-1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 395.

(3)