As Christ died for us, and was buried, so also is it to be believed, that he went down into Hell.
by the Rev. Dr. Will Levanway
Article III is in many ways unremarkable and uncontroversial. It simply states what was late included in the Apostle’s Creed that Christ ‘was crucified, dead, and buried: He descended into hell’ without additional interpretation beyond the ‘for us.’ The bluntness and the brevity of the article allows its interpretation to serve as an indicator of theological decisions and commitments made elsewhere about the economy of salvation. Necessary attention to that economy of salvation does not allow us to retreat into abstract or speculative meditation on doctrine but presses our nose to the grindstone of dogmatic work. What we think about the descent into hell shows us, whether we have thought them through or not, what decisions we have made about the nature, extent, and effects of Christ’s work.
Our current version of the article forces interpretive work upon us unlike the earlier version that offered a Scriptural citation: ‘As Christ died, and was buried for us: so also it is to be believed, that he went down into Hell. For the body lay in the Sepulchre, until his resurrection: but his Ghost departing from him, was with the Ghosts that were in prison, or in Hell, and did preach to the same, as the place of St. Peter doth testify.’ The current form of the article does not link the descent to hell to any particular passage of Scripture so that, as Pearson has it, ‘we may with the greater liberty pass on to find out the true meaning of this Article, and to give our particular judgment in it, so far as a matter of so much obscurity and variety will permit.’
To say that Christ descended into hell does not immediately make matters clear. Hell translates the Greek hades and the Latin inferi, but these words can take on a number of meanings ‘both in scripture and other writings’ signifying either a neutral place where departed spirits dwell or ‘the place of the damned.’ Christ’s descent can either be into the state enjoyed by all who die or it can be into a place of torment peculiar to the wicked. Where Christ goes is in fact inextricably tied up with what he does following his death. If he simply endures the separation of soul from body, for instance, then there is no need for him to descend into the place of punishment. However, if the descent into hell forms a part of his atoning work then he will need to endure the place of punishment as part of his salvific suffering.
Following Pearson’s lead, we can establish the limits imposed on our interpretation of the article by referring to a larger range of Scripture. The primary concern will be to see where he goes and what work he does there.
Four passages of Scripture need to be considered.
Ephesians 4.9: The apostle’s emphasis in this passage is on the ascent of Christ making the descent the necessary prelude to that ascension. The precise meaning of the phrase ‘lower parts of the earth’ is ambiguous and may simply refer to the earth itself without any reference to Christ’s state after his death. If it is taken to refer to Christ’s descent following his death, as Fleming Rutledge proposes, then the descent here should be taken as a triumphal defeat of the forces of hell by Christ before his ascent inaugurating his session. The passage is patient of such a reading but does not seem to require it.
Acts 2.25-31(Psalm 16.8-10): Peter quotes Psalm 16 to prove and to describe Christ’s resurrection from the dead. Unlike the passage from Ephesians, the reference here is clearly to Christ’s descent into hell after his death and before his resurrection. Peter does not give any insight into what it is Christ does there just that he does in fact go there. Litton puts the matter clearly: ‘If Christ’s soul was not left in hell, it must have gone thither.’ The parallel passage Acts 13.34-35 states the same fact—Christ does not stay dead—without providing information about what happens in the caesura between death and resurrection.
1 Peter 3.18-19: Here, at least, Peter does not simply locate Christ after his death. He describes what it is Christ does: ‘he went and preached unto the spirits in prison.’ While the preaching clearly takes place after his death, the proclamation does not clearly come before his resurrection. The proclamation to the spirits in prison takes place through the agency of the Spirit that makes Christ alive. The logic of the passage requires that the Spirit that gives life has in fact made Christ alive so that he can, in the power of the same Spirit, preach to those in prison. The passage clearly assumes some movement of Christ to the dead for the purpose of proclamation but does not clearly define the time when that preaching takes place.
1 Peter 4.4-6: Bicknell says of this passage and the one previous that ‘they leave very little room for doubt as to St. Peter’s meaning. He teaches that at the moment of death our Lord’s human spirit went to Hades, and during His stay there preached salvation ‘to the spirits in prison’, i.e., the souls of dead men, in a like mode of existence to his own.’ This interpretation presents a problem. The ‘dead’ in this passage may in fact be those who have given themselves over to the ‘excesses of dissipation.’ The gospel was preached to them so that judgment could take place, ‘that they might be judge according to men in the flesh.’ The proclamation here may be to the dead in either a literal or a metaphorical sense. Or it may simply point to the fact that this preaching and judgment took place when ‘in the Spirit Christ preached through Noah to disobedient that lived before the flood, who were spirits in prison when Peter wrote, and could therefore be designated as such.’ Who are the dead in this passage? Perhaps everyone in the afterlife, perhaps those given over to riotous living before the flood, or perhaps those contemporaries of Peter who were ‘dead’ in their sins.
The limits of our interpretation of the article, if we are stay within the bounds of Scripture, are that Christ did indeed descend into hell and that if he was active there it was in proclamation. What is clearly ruled out is any interpretation of Christ’s descent into hell where he endures punishment in that place. Christ enters hell after the victory of the cross, as one who comes to announce and to apply the power of that finished work.
What remains an open question is when he applies that finished work. One Reformed view of the when maintains that Christ comes to preach to the dead in the power of his resurrected and ascended body, ‘a rich, triumphant, and powerful preaching to the spirits in prison.’ This view avoids problems created by Christ’s activity when his body and soul and separated: how precisely does a disembodied spirit preach? is Christ himself without his body? Christ’s saving power is tied very closely to his particular human presence on this reading. The virtue of Christ’s passion follows on from the resurrection withholding its immediate effects during Holy Saturday. Thomas Aquinas, relying on a more fulsome set of divisions in the afterlife, draws a distinction between different ways Christ was present to those in hell. Christ was present to the entirety of hell and to all those who had died through the effects of the cross although this took different forms to different people. Some people, in hell ‘for unbelief and wickedness’ were put to shame, those in purgatory given hope, and those simply with original sin received ‘the light of glory everlasting.’ Christ’s soul, his essential presence, went into that part of hell meant for the just. He was present to them in the place through his soul and present in their hearts through his Godhead. Thomas draws a parallel between these various modes of Christ’s presence in his death and Christ’s ability to suffer in one part of the world while delivering the whole world. Thomas’s account maintains the Scriptural scope of the application of Christ’s work but may lessen the sense in which it is ‘proclamation.’
Both accounts are attempting to work out an account of the atonement that is in Schleiermacher’s terms mystical. A mystical view of salvation is one where Christ uses ‘effective speech’ to communicate his life to others and assume ‘them into the fellowship of that life.’ A mystical view of salvation is unlike a magical one that attributes salvation ‘to an influence not mediated by anything natural, yet attributed to a person’ or an empirical one that ‘admits a redemptive activity on the part of Christ, but one which is held to consist only in bringing about an increasing perfection in us.’ The magical view disconnects redemption form Christ’s human presence rendering the incarnation ‘a superfluous adjunct’ to a distant decree. The empirical view focusses on Christ’s human life without any communication of grace from Jesus. The mystical view, however, sees the life of Jesus of Nazareth within history as the specific place where grace is communicated: this man mediates God’s life to all. The focus is on the continued power of Christ’s human life in its infinite applicability to situations and places he is remote from. The Reformed view creates a means whereby he visits, and so ceases to be remote from, hell while Thomas describes a specific kind of causality effective despite the remoteness of a part of his humanity. The push for a mystical view of Christ’s work undergirds the accounts of the application of Christ’s work to the dead by creating means of contact. An account of Christ’s work among the dead is necessary, moreover, unless one consigns the dead before Christ to destruction or reserves judgment on all until some future date.
Christ’s descent into hell, then, raises a host of questions about the scope, mode, and power of Christ’s work upon the cross as well as its application. The effects of the work, however precisely we navigate the received tradition, clearly are not limited to this earthly life if the dead can be patient of his righteousness. The communication of that righteousness could be made distinct from the presence of some aspect of his human presence such as his soul, as in Thomas, if we are willing to separate the righteousness achieved in his human life from his humanity in order that it can be conveyed by his divinity. Richard Hooker makes precisely this move when he links predestination and baptism: ’Predestination bringeth not to life, without the grace of externall vocation, wherein our baptisme is implied. For as wee are not naturallie men without birth, so neither are wee Christian men in the eye of the Church of God but by new birth, nor accordinge to the manifest ordinarie course of divine dispensation new borne, but by that baptisme which both declareth and maketh us Christians.’ Hooker’s explanation links redemption in baptism to a specific willed act of Christ’s person effecting the communication to a specific person and their eternal predestination. Eternal predestination to redemption or destruction manifests itself in a history mediating that redemption or destruction. Christ’s work in hell follows when this link between eternal election and external vocation is maintained. If one severs the link between eternal and external vocation the incarnation becomes superfluous. The calling of the dead to redemption may take place in the descent or as part of Christ’s session at the right hand, but it flows out of the one man, Jesus of Nazareth, in his communication to those dead.
A pertinent example of Christ’s communication are his words on the cross: ‘And Jesus said unto him, Verily I say unto thee, Today shalt thou be with me in paradise.’ (Luke 23.43) Like his companion, Christ dies and descends into hell. Even in the place of death he does not lack his relationship to Father. He still includes others in that relationship of the Son to the Father at every point precisely because death does not break it. The repentant thief as repentant knows his conscious communion with Jesus to be paradise. Christ gives his blessedness to those who can receive wherever he is encountered even in hell. Origen describes this: ‘His only-begotten Son, for the salvation of the world, descended even to the lower regions and brought from thence our first parent. For know that the words to the robber ‘To-day shalt thou be with Me in paradise,’ were spoken, not only to him, but also to all the holy ones for whom He descended into the lower regions.’
If salvation comes through this man, Jesus of Nazareth, Christ must in fact do his work in hell. Anything else is just magic unable to make any real difference. We may have some difficulty explaining the mechanism for this redeeming work or of locating it explicitly in Scripture but it forms an integral part of Christian confession that maintains, as Hans Frei put it, that all reality ‘imaginable and unimaginable, good and evil, is referred to Jesus, God’s own Word, whose life and death on our behalf are adequate to protect us from the abyss.’ The fact that Jesus of Nazareth does this work of redemption, and the scope of this redemptive work is potentially infinite, is the suppositum that these various interpretations are accounting for in their descriptions of the descent into hell. To speak of the specific mechanics may be too much for us at this present time, as Brooke Westcott reminds us: ‘We are sure that the fruits of Christ’s work are made available for every man: we are sure that He crowned every act of faith in patriarch or king or prophet or saint with perfect joy: but how and when we know not, and, as far as appears, we have no faculty for knowing. Meanwhile we cling to the truth which our Creed teaches us.’
Will Levanway is a priest in the Church of England and curate at All Saints, Fulham. He received his PhD from King’s College London in Systematic Theology focusing on Richard Hooker and Friedrich Schleiermacher.