The Descent

 I do not have a very high view of modern language liturgies.   In part this is because I object in general to the project of modernizing the liturgy.  It is one thing to translate the liturgy into the common tongue from another language altogether as was done in the Reformation.   It is another thing altogether to produce a new liturgy in the same language.     If the language had changed so much that it had become essentially a different language this might be warranted.   It is not warranted, in my opinion, just because the language of the liturgy sounds somewhat old-fashioned.   The English that Thomas Cranmer et al. used in the Book of Common Prayer is not that different from the English we speak today.   It is not the Old English of Beowulf.   It is not even the Middle English of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales.   It is, like the English of Shakespeare and the Authorized Bible, a slightly archaic form of our own English.   It might require some explanation, but modernization is not called for and does more harm than good.   I also have particular objections to specific examples of modernized liturgy and it is one of these that I wish to address today.

In the modernized English of the Book of Alternative Services we find in the translation of the Apostles' Creed the following line:

He descended to the dead.

I cringe every time I hear this recited.    

This translation fills the space  where the Book of Common Prayer has the translation:

He descended into hell.

The modern language translation is bad for a number of reasons.   One of these is that it strips these words of any meaning.   Preceding them, in the modern as well as the traditional translation, is the affirmation of Jesus' Crucifixion, Death, and Burial.  There is nothing in the words "He descended to the dead" that was not already affirmed in affirming His Death and Burial.  

The Latin text of the Apostles' Creed - I find the Reverend Dr. John Baron's arguments in The Greek Origin of the Apostles' Creed persuasive but since the Apostles' Creed has not been used in the Eastern Church since ancient times the Latin is the definitive text - reads "Descendit ad inferos".   Inferos is a form of  inferus, an adjective that means "low".   The comparative degree of this adjective - literally "lower" - has become our "inferior" in English.   It is being used substantively, that is to say, with the force of a noun, in the text of the Creed.   It is true, as defenders of the modern rendering are quick to point out that the masculine plural is used here indicating persons rather than a place. The flaw in their reasoning is that the colloquial connotations of this expression in the original tongue are quite different from those of "the dead" in English.    Discendit ad inferos was understood as meaning going down to the souls of the dead in their own place, i.e, the underworld, the place called Sheol in Hebrew and Hades in Greek.   Hell is the word for this place in English although it has also come to denote the place the New Testament calls the Lake of Fire and - in the Greek - Gehenna, the place that the Book of Revelation describes Hell being thrown into itself at the Last Judgement.    "Descended to the dead" is not ordinarily understood this way in English and, indeed, it is not an ordinary expression at all in contemporary English.    Someone hearing it for the first time in English would probably understand it in the sense of "went to the grave".   That is the result of centuries of rationalist, scientistic, demystification eroding our worldview into a materialistic one.   This meaning is covered by "buried" and is not the meaning of the phrase thus translated.    For this reason, "descended to the dead" is more literal but less accurate than "descended into hell".

Finally and most importantly the translation "He descended to the dead" is a concession to unbelief.    I don't mean just liberal unbelief in Hell in either its Hades (original) or its Gehenna  (relatively more recent) sense.    There is also an unbelief on the part of many Protestants who would consider themselves conservative theologically in a doctrine that the Church has affirmed since the days of the Church Fathers.   The Eastern and Western Churches understood its significance slightly differently but both affirmed it.    It would never have occurred to the Church Fathers to regard it as anything other than a part of the Gospel itself.    That is the doctrine that Jesus Christ, after His Death on the Cross, descended into Hell in the sense of the underworld.   Exactly what He did there is explained differently by different traditions in the Church but the consensus was that this was not the final stage of His Humiliation but the first of His Exaltation.   He entered the realm of death as a Triumphant Conqueror and set the spirits of the faithful free.   

The "conservative" theologians who don't accept this maintain that they cannot find it in the Bible.   it is there, however, and in plain sight.    You don't get a lengthy commentary on its significance, but that is true of several other truths as well.

The Descent into Hell - or Harrowing of Hell to give it the traditional name that stresses the conquering aspect of it - was taught by St. Peter.   I do not mean the controversial passages in the second and third chapters of his first epistle although I think these are best understood the traditional way.   I mean the very first Gospel sermon that he preached under the power of the Holy Ghost on the first Whitsunday.   In this sermon St. Peter stresses how the prophecies of the Old Testament had been fulfilled in Jesus Christ, His Death and Resurrection, and even the events taking place at that very moment on Pentecost.   When he gets to the Resurrection he declares:

Whom God hath raised up, having loosed the pains of death: because it was not possible that he should be holden of it.  For David speaketh concerning him, I foresaw the Lord always before my face, for he is on my right hand, that I should not be moved: Therefore did my heart rejoice, and my tongue was glad; moreover also my flesh shall rest in hope: Because thou wilt not leave my soul in hell, neither wilt thou suffer thine Holy One to see corruption.   Thou hast made known to me the ways of life; thou shalt make me full of joy with thy countenance.   Men and brethre, let me freely speak unto you of the patriarch David, that he is both dead and buried, and his sepulchre is with us unto this day.   Therefore being a prophet, and knowing that God had sworn an oath to him, that of the fruit of his loins, according to the flesh, he would raise up Christ to sit on his throne: He seeing this before spake of the resurrection of Christ, that his soul was not left in hell, neither his flesh did see corruption.   (Acts 2:24-31)

If the Resurrection is the fulfilment of David's prophecy that God would not leave Christ's soul in Hell that means that it was from Hell that He took Christ's soul in reuniting it with His uncorrupted flesh.    Thus St. Peter tied the Descent into Hell - Sheol/Hades - with the Resurrection, in a different way than how Patristic and Medieval writers and artists did to be sure, but one that complements rather than contradicts it.   

The Descent into Hell comes from St. Peter's first Gospel sermon - and the sixteenth Psalm that is his text here.    He preached it as part of the Gospel itself.   No wonder it found its way into the Apostles' Creed.   We ought not to remove it by changing it into more ambiguous language.