Descended into Hell?

Descended into Hell?

What does this strange phrase mean in the Apostles Creed?Deut. 29:29 (NIV)
The secret things belong to the LORD our God, but the things revealed belong to us and to our children forever, that we may follow all the words of this law.

In biblical doctrine it is always good to keep this scriptural principle in mind, that there are many secret things concerning God’s work of redemption we do not know. But God has fully declared to us what we need to know in the Holy Bible. We shall not venture where angles fear to tread.


Creeds are statements of what Christians believe about our redemption in Christ. They are very biblical and we even find them in the Scriptures. Here is an early one in Paul’s letter to the Corinthians. It may be the core of what was later to become the Apostles’ Creed.

1 Cor. 15:3-7 (ESV)
For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, [4] that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures, [5] and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. [6] Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have fallen asleep. [7] Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles.


Hell or Hades?

We must first assert that most of the struggle with this phrase in the Creed comes from our inadequate vocabulary in the English language. The biblical uses reflect a variety of words that mean different things for our one word. Sometimes the Creed has been modernized by saying “He descended into the dead”. This is closer to the original meaning, but even then I find it less satisfactory, because many today have an unbiblical view of death. Some wonder if it is a real place, or is it some sort of soul-sleep? It think it best to retain the older word and help change our misinformation and keep the Creed as it is.

The Creed uses a word that means “place of the dead” conveyed in the Hebrew as Sheol and in Greek as Hades. It is not our common understanding of hell as the place of eternal torment referred to as the “second death”.




Hell as Eternal Punishment

When hell is described as the final judgment of the lost that are without Christ in the New Testament it uses the word Gehenna. This was a real place outside Jerusalem where rubbish was burned and was the place where Isaiah envisioned burning corpses (Isa. 66:24). It was also the site of pagan child sacrifice where babies were burned alive (2 Kings. 16:3). When Jesus taught about hell in his parables he used this term most frequently, hence the idea of eternal torment that comes in the final judgment comes from Christ himself.

But, we must be careful not to read this understanding of hell into the other words the Bible describes as either Hades or Sheol – which is an interim place of the dead, until Christ changed Hades with his death and resurrection.

Ephes. 4:8 (ESV)
Therefore it says,
"When he ascended on high he led a host of captives,
and he gave gifts to men."

1 Peter 3:18-20 (ESV)
For Christ also suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh but made alive in the spirit, [19] in which he went and proclaimed to the spirits in prison, [20] because they formerly did not obey, when God's patience waited in the days of Noah, while the ark was being prepared, in which a few, that is, eight persons, were brought safely through water.




4 Views on Christ descent into Hell

1). Figurative Sense. The phrase is only understood figuratively to underscore the previous statement that Christ suffered, died and was buried. The understanding is that Christ truly “tasted death” for us and fully experienced the pains of death for us. Passages that indicate Jesus entering into prison to preach to spirits (ie. 1 Peter 3:19, Eph. 4:8) are to be understood as the gospel being proclaimed by the Spirit through the Old Testament prophets. They see 2 Peter 2:4 as saying that Noah preached the gospel to those before the Flood, so that they did not die as in some sort of innocence. (This is to counter the view we see later where some take these passages as saying Christ was preaching the gospel to souls in Hades to give them some sort of second chance.) Many good Reformed, Evangelical scholars hold to this view and even among some Presbyterian churches this part of the Creed is troublesome and is left out while reciting it in public worship. That is not to say that those who take a more figurative stance are against leaving it in the Creed.

2. A Real Descent to Hades. John Calvin firmly held that this statement needed to be retained in the Creed to affirm the spiritual dimension of Christ’s suffering for us in his death. Christ did not just suffer physically on the Cross or in his death. He suffered the “Forsakenness of God” and the wrath of God’s judgment on sin. As Paul says, Christ “became sin for us.” (2 Cor.5:21) “Hence there is nothing strange in it being said that he descended to hell, seeing he endured the death which is inflicted on the wicked by an angry God…the Creed appropriately adds the invisible and incomprehensible judgment which he endured before God, to teach us that not only was the body of Christ given up as the price of redemption, but that there was a greater and more excellent price – that he bore in his soul the tortures of condemned and ruined man.” (Institutes, Book 2, Chapter 16;8) Along with Martin Luther, Calvin rejected the Medieval Roman Catholic view of the “harrowing of Hell” with its many intricate categories of hell with purgatory and limbo, where second chances are offered whereby creating a new system of salvation. But, Calvin did see passages such as 1 Peter 3:19 as signifying (not with perfect certainty) that Christ proclaimed his victory over hell to those awaiting their redemption in Paradise. So, it was not a preaching to the lost and condemned for a second chance but a seal to their damnation and a declaration that Satan’s kingdom was vanquished. As Calvin states, “Thus by engaging with the power of the devil, the fear of death, and the pains of hell, he gained the victory, and achieved a triumph, so that we now fear not in death those things which our Prince has destroyed.” Martin Luther writing in a sermon in 1533 asserted that in the descent of Christ into hell, “the Lord Christ – the entire person, God and man, with body and soul, undivided – had journeyed to Hell, and had in person demolished Hell(Hades) and bound the Devil.” (Bloesch, p. 147). (This is the view held by J.I. Packer, Sinclair Fergusen and C.S. Lewis and is one that I favor.)


These last two views are considered outside the scope of biblical teaching, but float around in various forms.

3. The Medieval View. The Roman Catholic Church at the time of the Reformation had developed a rather elaborate and detailed structure and doctrine of the afterlife that was clearly extra biblical. Even today the doctrine of Limbo (the place of innocents and unbaptized babies, similar yet distinct from Purgatory) is being reevaluated. Pope Benedict is saying that it is now no longer official teaching of the Church. It is impossible in one paragraph to explain in an adequate way the view of the Roman Catholic Church, except to say that they go far beyond what Calvin would affirm and assert that Christ’s descent was a proclamation of the Gospel to all mortals for a second chance. This is a simple way to see their principle behind their reason for praying for the dead and how they place the doctrine of Purgatory (only figuratively in Dante’s poem) in a prominent place in their theology. Evangelical believers along with Calvin must reject any such extra-biblical ideas that take us beyond what Scripture clearly and uniformly declare. After death there is judgment and only those who are in Christ receive eternal life and those are outside of Christ will be eternally lost and condemned to the lake of fire where death and Hades are thrown (Rev. 20:13-15).

4. The Word of Faith View. This is the view promoted by Kenneth Hagin and other prominent Word of Faith preachers. They hold that our salvation and redemption is secured by Christ’s actually going to hell – in the Gehenna sense, that is in the eternal torment and suffered that hell for us. The upshot of this teaching is that it discredits the atonement of Christ on the Cross by saying that it was not on the Cross where our atonement was made. Again, we can agree with Calvin that the full wrath of God was poured out on Christ and that he tasted hell for us in the judgment of God for our sins, but we cannot say that Christ was in Hell suffering and held in prison, so to speak by the Devil. It implies that when Jesus said it was finished, he was wrong because he had to suffer more in hell.

This is a heretical teaching and is not found in Scripture – and every heresy has a note of truth in it! The death and Cross of Jesus declared the victory of God over death and hell and that what Christ tasted for us in beyond our comprehension and enters into the area of Divine Mystery, but we must say that the Cross was totally sufficient to assuage the wrath of God and the purchase of our forgiveness.


Resources
J.I. Packer, I Want To Be A Christian. Tyndale House, 1977.

Donald Bloesch, The Last Things. IVP, 2004.

Richard Bewes, 100 Questions. Christian Focus, 2005.

Edmund Clowney, The Message of First Peter. IVP, 1988.