At the church I pastor, New Life Ithaca, we say the Apostles’ Creed every week. I also say it a couple of more times a week when I pray the daily office. All told, I’ve recited the Apostles’ Creed thousands of times.
I still remember the first time I said it. I grew up Pentecostal. We didn’t say creeds. I heard more than one preacher say, “No creed but Christ.” But that is itself a creed isn’t it? And we had a declaration of faith, which is a creed as well. But I digress.
The first time I ever said the Apostles’ Creed was at an African Methodist Episcopal Church. The mother of my high school friend Carl had tragically died at a young age and a group of us went to the funeral to support him. The funeral was a traditional liturgical service, as I know now, but very foreign to me then. As a part of the service we recited the Apostles’ Creed. I remember scrutinizing it in my head, especially the parts about believing in the catholic church and that Jesus descended into hell.
I’ve written quite a bit about Catholicity. But what of the descent clause? Did Jesus go to hell?
This Holy Saturday, I thought it appropriate to share a bit of what I’ve learned about this over the years. Holy Saturday commemorates the time between Jesus’ death and resurrection. It has historically been a time that emphasized rest and stillness. But at the same time, it has been seen as the time period when Jesus was “harrowing hell.” According to this ancient view, while Jesus’ body rested in the tomb, his spirit entered hell to declare his victory over Satan and to lead out the host of righteous dead from sheol/hades into heaven. We see in this ancient view, that Jesus did not enter the hell of fiery torment in order to suffer for our sins. He entered victoriously and “led a host of captives in his train.”[1]
While this harrowing of hell, or something like it, may have happened, the Bible does not explicitly say so. The only text that even mentions Holy Saturday is a half a verse at the end of Luke 23:56, “On the Sabbath they rested according to the commandment.” Psalm 68:18 and Ephesians 4:8 seem to allude to this harrowing, and some take Ephesians 4:9 to refer to Jesus’ descent into hell, the Latin even using a version of the word “inferno”.[2] Peter’s Pentecost sermon in Acts 2:27 and 2:31 also refer to Christ in hell, using the Greek word “hades” and the Latin word “inferno.” Further, 1 Peter 3:19 states that Christ preached to the spirits in prison. In context this refers to some declaration to the unrighteous regarding his lordship and victory. Psalm 107:16 and Zechariah 9:11 are also mentioned in support of this view as they seem to allude to Christ releasing captives from a deep pit.[3] But none of these explicitly say that Christ entered hell and plundered Satan on Holy Saturday. Again, it may have happened, and I tend to think that it did, but the Bible is not explicit about it.
The phrase in the Apostle’s Creed seems to be modeled after the Latin of Ephesians 4:9, but this is not certain. The Latin for this verse is, “descendit primum in inferiores partes terrae,” while the original Latin for the Apostles’ Creed is, “descendit ad infernos.” Notice that while the word “descended” is the same, the Vulgate uses the preposition “in” while the Creed uses “ad” and the Vulgate uses the word “inferiores” while the Creed uses “inferno”. These words are very similar, but not identical.
For this reason there have been varying opinions of the meaning of the phrase “descendit at infernos” through the centuries. One view is based on what I’ve been describing, the harrowing of hell. This view was taught by several ancient fathers as well as medieval scholastics like Thomas Aquinas. Calvin’s view was that the phrase refers to the spiritual torment that Christ underwent on the cross (Institutes II:XVI:10). While this view is attractive, we have to admit that it is novel and not obvious from the Latin text of the creed. Luther’s view was that Christ literally entered into Hell, and many modern Lutherans share that view.
Calvin and later Berkhof point out that the phrase was included later on (Berkhof says that it appeared c. 390, which would date its appearance after even the creation of the Nicene Creed). Berkhof states that Christ could not have descended triumphantly into hell because his victorious resurrection hadn’t occurred yet and because that would contradict the period of rest that Christ’s statement “into your hands I commit my spirit,” implies. Berkhoff takes a view similar to Calvin’s, adding that the descent clause teaches the deepest humiliation of Christ in his death (Systematic Theology, 340-343). The Westminster Larger Catechism, question 50, takes a similar view, stating that the descent clause means that Christ truly died and remained under the power of death until the third day in his state of humiliation.
There is a marked difference between the Reformed view (Westminster and Berkhof) and the traditional view in that the traditional view presents Christ as already victorious while the Reformed view presents him still in a state of humiliation. The Reformed view has merit, as it asks the question, “How could Christ’s soul be victorious in hell while his body lay dead in humiliation?” I think that’s a valid question to raise.
Now to my view. My goal here is not to articulate another version or perhaps a synthesis of the above views, but to present a linguistic point. When we see the word “inferno” in the 21st century, we think of fire. That’s what the word means in English after all. So when we see the phrase, “He descended into hell,” we naturally think of the hell of fire. However, in the Latin usage of the time when the Creed was written the word inferno did not mean that yet. According to the standard Latin lexicon by Lewis and Short, the word meant, “underground, belonging to the Lower Regions.” Thus, “inferno” literally means “underworld”. What would be the biblical analog to this in Greek or Hebrew? It would be the Hebrew word “sheol,” or “place of the dead,” for which the Greek “hades” is used as a translation. None of these refer to a fiery place of the damned, but a place where even righteous souls rest when they die.
OK, so why not say that then? Why not say, “He descended to the place of the dead?” Well, we are saying that. You see the word “hell” did not have the connotation of a fiery place of the damned until it gained an additional Christian meaning. The Germanic word “helle” simply meant the same as inferno: the underworld or place of the dead. You can see this in the Germanic word for paradise: Valhalla– “-halla” referring to the place of the dead.[4] Thus the English word “hell” in pre-Christian times meant just that: the place of the dead, with no connotation of fire or damnation. With this in mind, we really are saying, “he descended to the place of the dead” when we say “he descended to hell.” And what we mean by that is that Christ really died, i.e. his soul was separated from his body, and while his body lay in the tomb his soul visited the saints in sheol.
As for the rest, whether he harrowed hell, proclaimed his victory to the damned, and led a host of captives out to heaven, there are scriptures that allude to this. But did it happen on Holy Saturday? I do not know. But I do know this. We will be able to ask him about it someday.
[1] Psalm 68:18 and Ephesians 4:8.
[2] But this translation relies on a dubious textual variant that Metzger, et al. rate as “C”, meaning the originality of the word “regions” is highly suspect and is more likely an explanatory gloss.
[3] John Calvin notes this and argues that Psalm 107 is referring to Israel’s captivity in Babylon and that Zechariah 9 is referencing a release from spiritual prison, Institutes II:XVI:9.
[4] See the entry for “hell” in the Oxford English Dictionary. That entry has a trove of information about the etymology and prior usage of the word. Significant is that in the earliest translations of the Bible into English, the Hebrew word “Sheol” was translated “hell,” meaning the place of the righteous dead.
Vita pastoralis 