DESCENT OF CHRIST INTO HELL.
New Testament Data (§ 1). The Older Church Doctrine (§ 2). The Protestant Doctrine (§ 3). Conclusion (§4).
The sentence " He descended into heU " (Lat. descendit ad inferna or ad inferos), expressing a christological fact following the death and burial of Jesus, is found in the Apostles' Creed and the Athanasian Creed, but is lacking in the Niceno- Constantinopolitan Creed and the Old Roman Symbol. Its first official statement, as far as a date can be assigned, was formulated in 359 and 360 at synods at Sirmium in Pannonia, Nicte in Thrace, and Constantinople, held under homoiousian influence. A few decades later it formed, according to the testimony of Rufinus {Expositio symboli Aquileiensis, xviii.), a part of the confession of the Church of Aquileia (see Aqxjileian Creed). But it was taught much earlier by the most various writers of the Church. The older assertion that it was received into the confession to combat the Apollinarian heresy has long been refuted. It is simply the crystallization of an old unassailed Christian tradition.
The New Testament tells only that the soul of Jesus was for a time subject to the realm of the dead like that of any other man. According to Acts ii. 27, 31, the characteristic feature is not that he descended into Hades, but that he I. New Tes- soon returned from it by his resurrec-
tament tion. Paul also assumes probably, in Data. Rom. x. 7, Christ's real presence in the intermediate place of the deceased since he sp(>:iks of the " deep " (Gk. abyssos) in connection with the awakening of Christ. In Luke xxiii. 43 Ciirist assures the thief on the cross that he shall be with him in paradise, thus adding,
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Descent of Christ into Hell
according to the meaning of the word paradeisos in the current usage of the Jews, a further testimony that the soul of Jesus w&s in the realm of the dead, more particularly in that part of it which was destined for the just. But it must be observed that in these passages a descent into hell is not expressly taught, but is presupposed as something which naturally follows death.
Concerning the activity of Christ in Hades, the First Epistle of Peter (iii. 18 sqq. and iv. 6) has occasioned great dispute. According as the " spirits " (Gk. ■pneumata) have been understood to be the souls of deceased men or real spirits (i.e., fallen angels), and according as Christ, who descended to them, has been thought of as incarnate or preexisting, this passage has been interpreted in four different ways: (1) Christ preached after his death to the departed souls of the unbelieving contemporaries of Noah. Origen, Bengel, Konig, Gilder, Usteri, and others assumed that the purpose of Christ's preaching in Hades was of a redeeming nature, while since Flacius and Calovius many Lutheran interpreters and dogmaticians have looked upon it as a damnatory manifestation of judgment against the rejected, in the evident effort to adopt the text of the Bible to the churchly conception of the descent as a triumph of Christ over the power of Satan. (2) Following Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Beza, and many Reformed theologians after him, especially A. Schweizer, interpreted the passage as a sermon of Christ before his incarnation, which proceeded either from the mouth of Noah, the " preacher of righteousness " (II Pet. ii. 5), or coincides with the " long suffering of God " expressed in iii. 20. (3) Spitta tried to solve the problem by assuming that the Messiah before his incarnation, in the time before the flood, preached to the fallen angels, who, according to Gen. vi. 1 sqq., Enoch vi.-viii., united with the daughters of men and corrupted mankind. His words, according to Spitta, were identical with the announcement of punishment with which Enoch was entrusted according to the book bearing his name (xii. seq.), since in pre-Christian Judaism the representations of Enoch and the Messiah were frequently confused. (4) F. C. Baur shares the view of Spitta that Christ announced condemnation to the fallen angels, but not until after his awakening from the death on the cross. The fruit of the innocent suffering of Christ consists in the victory over these corrupting beings by which man is brought to God (I Pet. iii. 18).
It may, however, be proved from history that the passage 1 Pet. iii. 18 sqq. has not formed the basis for the development of the church 2. The doctrine of the saving activity of Older Christ in Hades. Among early Chris- Church tian writers it is cited only by Origen,
Boctrine. and, in very incidental manner, by Hilary of Poitiers, while other Old and New Testament passages are brought forward in great number. It is evident from Matt, xxvii. 52- 53 that, in consequence of the death of Jesus and his descent into Hades which followed as a natural consequence, many departed saints were delivered from the bonds of death. There was a general belief in the old Church that the salvation accom-
plished by Christ was made available for the prophets and the pious men of the Old Testament in the time between Christ's death and his resurrection. Since the soul of Jesus with its inseparable divinity appeared in Hades, Satan was deprived of the sovereignty which he had exercised hitherto in an unlimited way in the nether world. There was a difference between the Occidentals and Orientals in regard to the question to whom the announcement of salvation referred. The Occidental Church confined it strictly to the patriarchs, prophets, and other believers of the Old Testament, while in the Oriental Church a more universalistic tendency made itself felt. The scholastics of the Middle Ages emphasized again and again that the salvation which Christ brought to Hades referred simply to the limbus patrum, and not to any persons who had died without faith or to the limbus infantium. According to the Catechismus Romanus, the soul of Christ descended into Hades while his body lay in the grave, not because he was subject to the law of man, as the older Church taught, but of his own will, in order to conquer the demons.
The Protestants rejected, with purgatory, also the Limbus (q.v.),andretainedonlytwo conditions after death; hence originated the tendency to identify Hades with hell; i.e., the place or condi- 3. The Prot- tion of condemnation. The Lutheran estant Church adopted the thought of Lu- Doctrine. ther, contained in his Torgau sermon (1533), according to which Christ in his whole personality, God and man, body and soul, really and truly descended into the hell of the damned and conquered the devil. The Formula of Concord stood on the same ground. Christ descended on the early morning of the resurrection, just before his appearance as the risen one on the earth. The interval between the crucifixion and the descent he had spent in paradise. The descent of Christ is considered the first stage in his exaltation (see Jesus Christ, Twofold State of), since then for the first time he made an unlimited use of his divine idiomata by triumphing over the power of Satan.
The Reformed theologians regarded the descent into hell as a figurative expression for the unutterable sufferings of Christ's human soul, which he endured in the last moments of his vicarious dying (Calvin," Institutes," bk. ii., chap, xvi., §§8-21). It was a part of his humiliation, not, as in the Lutheran view, the first stage of his exalted state. Beside this view, others have been held concerning the meaning of the clause. It was only another way of saying that Christ was buried (Beza, Drusius, and others) or denoted the state of death regarded as an ignominious one for the Prince of Life (Piscator, Arminius, and others).
It was only in the period of the Enlightenment that the text in I Peter iii. attracted new attention in an exegetical respect. It was held that it implied a sermon of glad tidings to persons who had died without salvation. The rationalists looked upon it as well as upon the descent into Hades as a passing Jewish conception, while dogmaticians like De Wette, Marheineke, and Hase discovered in it as in a myth a permanent Christian idea.
Descent of Christ into Hell D6vay