The Devil's Mousetrap: Redemption and Colonial American Literature. - Review - book review

Criticism, Fall, 1999 by Jennifer Jordan Baker

The Devil's Mousetrap: Redemption and Colonial American Literature by Linda Munk. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Pp. xii 144. $35.00.

In The Devil's Mousetrap: Redemption and Colonial American Literature, Linda Munk excavates the influences of Judaism and the early Church Fathers on the works of three American Puritan theologians: Increase Mather, Edward Taylor, and Jonathan Edwards. Her study is aimed both at revising our understanding of colonial typological approaches to the Christian Bible and at explicating how such approaches were directed by millennial hopes and antiCatholic polemics.

A Christian method of biblical exegesis, typology views the Hebrew Bible not as a complete document in itself but rather as a prophetic foreshadowing of the New Testament. Specific historical episodes of the Old Testament are interpreted as "types" or prefigurations that are fully revealed in the "antitypes" or events of Christ's life, death, and resurrection in the New Testament. Literary scholars have long maintained that an understanding of typology is essential to a reading of New England Puritan texts. They have shown that typology informed the American Puritan view of history, since the New England community considered its own exile to the New World as itself an antitypical fulfillment--a historical event adumbrated by the Israelites' exodus from Egypt. This exegetical method, scholars tell us, also accounts for the analogical nature of Puritan poetics. Although conservative exegetes of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries insisted on the historicity of Old Testament types, more liberal exegetes or "spiritualizers" viewed the type as a metaphoric vehicle for its New Testament tenor, a figure made literal and, as a result, abrogated in the New; typology, then, provided a paradigm for the Puritan understanding of literal and figurative meaning. Munk argues, however, that colonial Puritan writers did not, as scholars have readily assumed, view the Old Testament types simply as figures to be fulfilled in the New; rather, she holds that these theologians, drawing from both Jewish and Christian exegetical traditions, actually understood such types to coexist with, and partake of, the fulfillment they foreshadowed. These theologians discerned the very presence of Christ in the events of the Old Testament.

Munk grounds her argument in a study of the typological theories of early Church Fathers that influenced colonial theologians but have, she argues, been ignored or simplified by twentieth-century scholars. Using two well-known types, the Passover sacrifice and the binding of Isaac, she explicates the Patristic tradition of exegesis. The lamb sacrificed to redeem the Israelites was a standard type for the sacrifice of Christ (himself the paschal lamb of God) for the redemption of humanity. Likewise, the binding of Isaac was understood to foreshadow the crucifixion: Isaac carrying the wood for his own sacrifice prefigures Christ bearing the cross, and the thicket that catches the ram prefigures Christ's crown of thorns (though she focuses on Christian typology, Munk also points out that Jewish midrashic tradition also conflates the saving blood of the paschal lamb with the blood of circumcision and the ram's blood at the binding of Isaac). In her analysis of these two types, Munk emphasizes that Church Fathers, such as Chrysostom and Melito, considered Christ to be implicit in and coincident with the types themselves: the divine pragma revealed at the crucifixion was assumed to exist in a less disclosed form at both Old Testament events. Melito, in particular, contended that the saving efficacy of the lamb's blood depended upon Christ's crucifixion and that Christ's redemption necessarily influenced the historical event in Egypt. Although Church Fathers attributed the Old Testament events to a historical moment that preceded the crucifixion, they posited an omnipresent Christ that stood outside linear temporality and existed before the incarnation. After the Fall at Eden, according to Patristic christology, God would have nothing to do with humanity except through Christ's mediation; therefore, the Church Fathers assumed, every divine revelation to Israel in the Old Testament was necessarily a revelation of Christ that differed only in degree from the incarnation itself.

Munk argues that the colonial Puritan exegete, influenced by this Patristic tradition, often read the presence of Christ back into the Old Testament. Christ was a divinity veiled in humanity (and, as Munk's title reminds us, that frail humanity was a decoy to bait and trap Satan), and this divine incarnation provides a "model of reading" the Old and New Testaments in relation to each other. In the Old Testament, Cotton Mather wrote, Christ is veiled in types. The letter of the type, Munk elaborates, is a veil of flesh, an incarnation that hides a spiritual meaning that exists in the Old Testament but is not unveiled until the New (97).

In his History of the Work of Redemption, a series of thirty sermons preached in 1739, Jonathan Edwards employed such a typology in his radical interpretation of the story of Moses and burning bush. The bush that burned but was not consumed was a traditional type for the crucifixion in which Christ suffered but was not exterminated (in other exegetical accounts, it is taken as a foreshadowing of Mary's inexhaustible virginity). In Edwards' interpretation of the story, however, the angel that appears before Moses is, in fact, the Messiah. Munk argues that Edwards uses figuration "to prove that Christ, as the angel of the Lord and in `human form,' was already present and active in the Old Testament" (27).