The Fifth Article – The Victory of the Christ

 

In our discussion of the fourth Article of the Creed we noted that the Creed speaks only to the what of the Son of God’s suffering, crucifixion, death, and burial for us, and not the question of how this accomplished our salvation.  We looked at the controversies that arose over this question long after the period which gave us the Apostles’ and Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creeds.    I mentioned that the late Eastern Orthodox Metropolitan Kallistos Ware had offered a number of helpful questions for evaluating the different theories or models proposed to answer this question and applied the first of those questions, “does in envision a change in God or us?” to the Anselmic model of satisfaction and subsequent models derived from Anselm’s such as the Reformation model of penal substitution and observed that the Metropolitan’s question shows us how far to take the language of analogy employed by these models.    Metropolitan Ware’s third question was “does it isolate the Cross from the Incarnation and the Resurrection?”    It is a weakness in the model if it does this and so it is good to observe again that in the Greek and Latin original texts of both Creeds the third, fourth, and fifth Articles are part of the same sentence.

 

That the Cross should not be isolated from the Resurrection is of particular importance when it comes to the subject of the Victory of the Christ.   The Cross should never be thought to have been a lost battle before a final victory.  In both the Cross and the Resurrection Jesus Christ is Victor.   On the Cross Christ’s victory was accomplished but concealed, in the Resurrection Christ’s victory is openly revealed.

 

It is important to keep this in mind when we consider the fifth Article of the Creed.   In the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed this Article reads καὶ ἀναστάντα τῇ τρίτῃ ἡμέρᾳ κατὰ τὰς γραφάς which is rendered in the English of the Book of Common Prayer as “and the third day he rose again according to the Scriptures”.   The phrase κατὰ τὰς γραφάς or “according to the Scriptures”, taken from St. Paul’s summary of the Gospel he preached in 1 Corinthians 15 was not present in the original Nicene Creed but was added by the Council of Constantinople.   The Apostles’ Creed does not include this phrase and it begins with a phrase not found in the conciliar Creed.   The Latin text of the Apostles’ Creed is descendit ad inferos, tertia die resurrexit a mortuis which in the English of the Book of Common Prayer is “He descended into hell. The third day he rose again from the dead.”    

 

While there are some who think that the traditional division of the Articles is mistaken in assigning descendit ad inferos to the fifth Article with the Resurrection rather than the fourth with the suffering, Crucifixion, death and burial, this viewpoint is wrong.   The descent belongs with the Resurrection as part of the open revelation of the victory of Christ.   We shall address this at length momentarily.   First, however, the Modern controversy over the descent clause and its translation needs to be addressed.

 

The traditional English translation of descendit ad inferos as we have seen is “He descended into hell”.   Squeamish Moderns dislike this translation and have suggested such alternatives as “He descended to the dead”.   While this would not be a mistranslation of the clause taken in isolation from what precedes and follows it, it is not a good translation of the clause in its context.    When, later in the clause “the dead” is incontrovertibly used to denote those from among whom He rose again, it is a mortuis in Latin, not ab inferorum.   This is the ordinary way of saying “the dead” in Latin.   The adjective inferus means “lower” or “below”, and the masculine plural when used as a substantive as it is in the Creed literally means “those below”.   This was understood by Latin speakers to mean the souls of the dead who were “those below” because they were in the underworld.    While it was more common to use the neuter plural to indicate the place and the masculine plural to indicate its inhabitants the one implied the other.   The traditional translation of “hell” is better than “the dead” here because following “was crucified, dead, and buried” and preceding “The third day he rose again from the dead”, “He descended to the dead” does not really say anything in English that is not already affirmed in these other clauses.

 

Some evangelical teachers have rejected this clause and the doctrine of the Descent into Hell for reasons other than the Modern squeamishness referred to in the previous paragraph.   Wayne Grudem, past president of the Evangelical Theological Society and the author of a very popular one-volume Systematic Theology, has said that this clause should be removed from the Apostles’ Creed.   John Piper has said that he omits the phrase when reciting the Creed.   Both claim that the doctrine lacks Scriptural attestation, a position that can only be taken by those who assert that “Hell” can only refer to the punishment of those who finally reject their redemption in Jesus Christ and should not be used of the Hebrew שְׁאוֹל‎ (Sheol) or the Greek Ἅιδης (Hades), i.e., the underworld, the land of the dead.   This is an untenable and absurd position for many reasons.  For one thing, in Old English the word Hell had the same meaning as its Danish, Germanic, and Norse cognates which all derived it from their common proto-Germanic root, and that meaning was identical to that of the Hebrew Sheol and the Greek Hades.   For another, it retained this meaning after it came to be also used for what the Book of Revelation calls the Lake of Fire, and continues to have both meanings in the general culture to this day.  Finally, the concepts of Hades and the Lake of Fire while distinct are not so unrelated that a common term cannot serve for both.   Hades is the realm of the dead and death throughout the Scriptures is the punishment for sin (Gen. 2:17, Ez. 18:20, Rom. 6:23).   After the Book of Revelation describes Death and Hades as being cast into the Lake of Fire it says that the Lake of Fire is the Second Death.   That Jesus was in Hades between His death and Resurrection is a fact found in the very first Gospel sermon preached by St. Peter after the Holy Spirit descended upon the Apostles on Pentecost (Acts 2:24-31).

 

Grudem and Piper are both Reformed in their theology, that is to say, adherents of the version of Protestant theology enshrined in the canons of the Synod of Dort.   This type of theology is often called Calvinist, although it arguably owes more to Theodore Beza’s interpretation of John Calvin than to John Calvin himself.   Beza was an early proponent of excising the Descent clause from the Apostles’ Creed.   Calvin was not himself in favour of this, but his interpretation of the clause was very different from the traditional understanding.   He understood the Descent into Hell to refer to Christ’s suffering the penalty for sin as man’s substitute.   Interpreted in this manner, it must either a) refer to Christ’s sufferings on the Cross up to and including but completed by His death or b) mean that the payment for man’s sin was not complete when Jesus died and had to be completed in Hell.   The second of these is so obviously unacceptable that the only person I can think of who actually taught it was a very heretical televangelist.  Calvin understood it the first way.   If this is what “He descended into hell” means, however, then it is rather conspicuous for being the only item in a long list of otherwise consecutive events not to chronologically follow what preceded it.   Calvin’s fundamental error here was that he, with his lawyer’s mind, focused solely on Hell as a legal penalty for sin and so read the Descent into Hell as part of Christ’s Passion, His voluntary submission to suffering and death for us.   In a long tradition going back to the Fathers, however, the ancient Churches – including the ones that do not make liturgical use of the Apostles’ Creed – have understood it to be the first step in Christ’s Exaltation rather than the last in His Humiliation, as part of His Resurrection rather than His Passion.

 

To understand the traditional view of the Descent, it is best to personalize death, that is to say, to think of Death as a person.   Since St. Paul does this in 1 Corinthians 15 (vv. 26 and 55) and St. John does this in the Apocalypse (6:8) there should be no objections to this on Scriptural grounds.   Then think of Hell – in the sense of Hades, the underworld, as Death’s kingdom.   To be more precise, think of Hell as one of Death’s two kingdoms, the other being the Grave.   In the Grave Death holds the bodies of men captive, in Hell he holds captive their souls.  God decreed to man in his Innocence that if he disobeyed God he would die.   Thus Death has a claim on the bodies and souls of all who sin.   Adam sinned and passed sin on to his descendants so that Death claimed them all (Rom. 5:12ff – another passage in which Death is personalized).      Then the Son of God became Incarnate as a man.   Born of a Virgin, He was the promised Seed of the woman (Gen. 3:15), Who inherited human nature but not Adam’s sin, nor did He, although He endured Temptation (Matt. 4:1-11, Lk. 4:1-13, Mk. 1:13), sin Himself (Heb. 4:15).   Death, therefore, had no claim on Him.   He, however, Who was without sin, allowed the sins of the world to be placed upon Him (2 Cor. 5:21, I Peter. 2:24) and voluntarily submitted to arrest, trial, scourging, crucifixion, and death.   That His submission was voluntary is stressed in the Scriptures – the Prophet Isaiah declaring in prophecy that He would be led like a Lamb to the slaughter and open not His mouth (Isaiah 53:7) and He Himself told St. Peter in Gethsemane that He could call upon His Father to send more than twelve legions of angels to His rescue (Matt. 26:53).   This is important because, again, the Passion of the Christ was not a temporary defeat before the final victory, although it had that outer appearance.   The Passion was Christ’s Victory.  By voluntarily submitting to all this injustice He forced Death to claim the body and soul of Someone over Whom Death had no claim – and Who, being God as well as Man, Death could not possibly keep captive.   When Death claimed Him, he forfeited his claim on anybody else.   So when Christ entered Hell, Death’s kingdom, it was not as captive but Conqueror.   He had already defeated Death, and was now revealing that victory, first of all to those whom Death had held captive in Hell and whose liberty He had just secured.

 

This is the understanding of this event that can be found throughout the pages of the Patristic writings and in artistic depictions in Church buildings around the world.   The typical portrayal of the “Harrowing of Hell” in art features the Gates of Hell smashed to pieces, on top of a figure who may be either the personalized Death or the devil, with Christ, often standing on the smashed Gates, extending His arms to a procession of the captives He has liberated, led by Adam and Eve.

 

The next step in the revelation of Christ’s Victory was the Resurrection itself, linked with the Descent into Hell in the Apostles’ Creed, and the sole event mentioned in the fifth Article of the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed.   Unlike the Descent, historically controversy over the Resurrection had been between believers and unbelievers, over whether or not the event took place, rather than between believers over the interpretation of the event.   In the last century or so liberals have re-interpreted the Resurrection by saying that it meant that Jesus lived on in the hearts of His followers while His body remained in the Tomb but this too is a controversy between believers and unbelievers, since such liberals are not believers, but unbelievers trying to disguise their unbelief as faith.   If you do not believe that after Jesus literally died on the Cross, and was buried in the Tomb of Joseph of Arimathea, on the third day His spirit and body were re-united, His body was restored to life, and He left the Tomb empty of all but His grave clothes, you do not believe in the Resurrection.

 

In the Resurrection, Jesus was raised from the dead in His body, but not merely to the same state in which He was prior to His death.  His body also underwent a transformation.   The same will be true of everybody else in the Final Resurrection on the Last Day.   St. Paul in the fifteenth chapter of 1 Corinthians explains this in terms of the analogy of a grain planted as a seed.   The grain “dies” when it is planted, and springs to new life as a plant.   The Scriptures do not spell out all the details of the difference between pre-death and post-Resurrection life.  In His encounters with His followers after the Resurrection Jesus was recognizable, although in some instances, such as with Mary Magdalene in the garden outside the Tomb (Jn. 20:14-16) and the disciples on the road to Emmaus (Lk. 24:13-31) the recognition was not immediate.   This could indicate that His outward appearance was altered in some way, although the nail prints in His hands and the spear wound in His side remained (Jn. 20:27).   The most important difference is that prior to His death His body was mortal, after His Resurrection it was incorruptible, no longer subject to disease, decay and death.

 

Like the Creation of the world, the Resurrection is represented in Scripture as an act in which the entire Trinity was involved.   While most often the Scriptures speak of God the Father as the Agent Who raised Jesus His Son from the dead, Jesus did speak of actively raising Himself from the dead (most obviously John 10:17-18 but this is also the import of His saying that He would raise the Temple in three days), and St. Peter speaks of the Holy Spirit as the Agent in the Resurrection (1 Pet. 3:18).   St. Paul also speaks of the Holy Spirit in connection with the Resurrection in Romans and his wording may suggest that the Spirit’s role was instrumental in a way similar to that of the Son in Creation.

 

When St. Paul wrote “That if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved” (Rom. 10: 9) he summarized the Gospel with the Resurrection.   The Resurrection is the one Gospel truth that contains all the others.   That God raised Jesus from the dead necessarily means that Jesus had to have died, and for Him to have died means that He had to have come down from Heaven and become Incarnate as a Man.   As well as encapsulating the entire Christian faith in a single truth, the Resurrection is the evidence of the truth of the faith.   When Jesus was asked for a sign to prove His claims for Himself and His authority to do the things He did it was the Resurrection to which He pointed when He spoke of Himself building up the Temple after three days and the sign of the prophet Jonah.   As the evidence for the truth of the Christian faith as a whole, the Resurrection remains one of the best attested facts of history being attested not only by an abundance of evidence of the legal-historical type – such as the eyewitness testimony summarized by St. Paul in 1 Corinthians 15  - but by nature itself.   The Resurrection took place on the third day after the Crucifixion, and the Crucifixion took place on the Jewish Passover, which falls on the Ides of the month the Hebrews originally called Aviv – spring.   Spring is the season in which the trees bud and grow leaves, the flowers bloom and the grass turns green, the birds come back and animals awake out of hibernation after winter, the season of coldness, barrenness, death and decay.   While rationalistic skeptics have tried to write the Resurrection off as another myth symbolizing the renewal of life and fertility in spring after the barrenness of winter, they got this exactly backwards.   The Resurrection of Jesus Christ is a historical event that occurred at a known time, in a known place, in a province of the largest empire of the civilized ancient world.  Therefore the natural renewal of life in springtime to which countless pagan myths point must itself have been made by nature’s Creator, God, to point to the Resurrection of His Son. (1)

 

The Resurrection of Jesus Christ is the basis of our hope as believers.   To the ancient pagans Hell – the underworld – was the final destiny of all people, the wicked and the just alike, after death.   In Homer’s Odyssey, Ulysses, visiting the underworld before death, encounters the other Greek heroes of the Trojan War, including Achilles, the greatest of the Greek heroes, who gloomily tells him that it is “better to serve on earth than rule in hell”.   The hope of the pagans, such as it was with this gloomy worldview, was to achieve glory that would survive them in this world.  In the Old Testament, Hell – Sheol –similarly awaits all after death, but there are passages that indicate that this is only a temporary destination.   Job expresses the hope that he will be raised from the dead, King David expresses similar hope in several of the Psalms, and Daniel spells out clearly that at the end of time the dead will be raised to either everlasting joy or everlasting shame depending on the outcome of the Last Judgement.   In Christianity, the Old Testament hope of resurrection was made solid and certain by the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, the first fruit of the Final Resurrection.   In the closing chapters of the Apocalypse St. John gives his vision of a new heaven – the heaven visible to the eye – and a new earth, that will replace the old heaven and earth, to which the New Jerusalem, the City of God, which is basically the same thing as the heaven that is invisible to the eye, i.e., the location of God’s throne, the place of His immediate presence, will descend to the earth, and so heaven and earth will be one Kingdom of God.   The hope of the believer is not bliss in a disembodied state but to be raised bodily to live in this Kingdom of God on the New Earth, or, as N. T. Wright puts it, not life after death, but life after life-after-death.   The Resurrection of Jesus Christ is the pledge to the believer of his certain hope to participate in this resurrection.   Indeed, even in this life we are told to consider ourselves, who have been baptized into Christ’s death, to be raised with Him into newness of life, and so His Resurrection is the basis of the faith in which we walk, as well as of our ultimate hope.

 

(1)    The realization of this is what brought C. S. Lewis to his conversion to Christian faith.

 

A Harrowing Experience

The Nicene Creed was drawn up at the Councils of Nicaea and Constantinople in the fourth century AD in response to various heresies that had been troubling the church. It has since served as the basic statement of orthodox Christian doctrine as well as the confession that is liturgically recited during the service of the Eucharist. The origins of the Apostles’ Creed are a bit more obscure, but it too is an ancient confession of Christian faith, from the days before schism divided the church and it has become the traditional confession for use in baptism. Thus these two creeds have for most of Christian history been connected with the two sacraments ordained as such by the Lord Himself. They have a similar structure and wording, and for the most part the differences consist of places where the Nicene Creed goes into more detail about what is stated more succinctly in the Apostles’ Creed. There are a couple of places, however, where the Apostles’ Creed contains something that is not present in the Nicene. The example that is of particular interest to us today, on Holy Saturday, is the phrase that occurs between “Was crucified, dead, and buried” and “The third day He rose again from the dead”, between Good Friday and Easter so to speak. That phrase, as rendered in the Book of Common Prayer, is “He descended into hell”.

More recent English renditions of the Apostles’ Creed usually substitute a phrase like “to the dead” for “into hell.” This might please squeamish people who don’t like talk about hell, but it makes this phrase redundant as it no longer expresses anything that was not already covered by the phrase immediately preceding it. Worse, it removes from the creed explicit reference to a doctrine hinted at by Scripture, required by sound theology, taught by the fathers of the church, medieval theologians, and the Reformers, traditionally part of the liturgy for Holy Saturday of both the Western and the Eastern churches, affirmed in the third of the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Anglican Church and which is a familiar image in medieval Western and Byzantine religious art. The traditional English name for this doctrine is the “harrowing of hell”.

The name of this doctrine requires some clarifying explanation otherwise it could be very misleading. Today the word harrow refers to a piece of farming equipment that is hitched to a tractor and pulled over a field to smooth out the soil. Where you would use a hoe and a rake on a small garden plot you use a harrow on a large field. As a verb to harrow now refers to the act of using this implement. This is not what “harrow” means in the harrowing of hell, however. The orthodox doctrine is not that Jesus went down to the underworld and prepared it to grow flowers and vegetables. In the older form of English that was used when this doctrine was given its name, to harrow meant to ravage, plunder, despoil, and lay waste. It described the actions of an invading army.

The word hell also needs to be explained. I do not mean that it needs to be explained away, as much modern theology tries to do. I mean that because Christian theology uses the word hell to describe two overlapping, but nonetheless quite distinct concepts pertaining to the afterlife, we need to be clear as to which one is meant. The first of these concepts is that of the place of punishment for the unredeemed wicked after death and the Last Judgment. Putting aside the question of whether the punishment referred to is everlasting conscious torment or annihilation as irrelevant to this discussion, this is the place Jesus refers to as Gehenna and which is described as a lake of fire burning with brimstone by St John in the Apocalypse. This is not what the creed is referring to when it says that Jesus “descended into hell”.

The other concept described by the word hell, and the one which the word’s etymology suggests, is that of a dark underworld, where the spirits of the dead go, regardless of their righteousness or wickedness. This is what the Hebrew word sheol that is used in the Old Testament referred to. It is what the Greek word hades refers to. The Greeks named the underworld after the deity they believed ruled it, Hades, whom the Romans called Pluto, and who won the underworld when he and his brothers Zeus and Poseidon overthrew the Titans and divided the universe between themselves. The Scandinavians and Germans had a similar concept of the land of the dead, and they too named it after the deity to whom they ascribed its rule. This was Hel, daughter of Loki. The English word hell is derived from the Norse word and just as the writers of the New Testament adapted the word hades as a Greek equivalent of sheol, so English Christians adapted the word hell. This is the hell to which Jesus descended between the cross and the Resurrection.

It is important that we be clear on this. Christ’s descent into hell was not, as some have mistakenly taught, for the purpose of submitting Himself to the torments of the damned. Christ did indeed suffer for our sins, the innocent for the guilty, but this was His work on the cross which He finished with His dying breath. His entrance into hell was that of a victorious conqueror ransacking a defeated foe and setting its captives free.

The way the doctrine was traditionally taught, the souls of the Old Testament saints and the souls of the damned alike went to hell (sheol/hades) where the souls of the saints awaited the coming of their Redeemer. Jesus, after defeating sin and death on the cross by taking the former upon Himself and embracing the later, descended into hell as a victor, breaking the gates into pieces and smashing the infernal stronghold, where he announced to the saints that the long awaited day of their release had come and brought them up out of hell, leaving only the devil and the damned behind. In art this is typically depicted in one of a number of ways, such as Jesus leading a procession of the redeemed out of the hellmouth, meeting Adam and Eve and other recognizable Old Testament saints in limbo, or standing with the gates of hell broken beneath His feet. (1)

This doctrine is not spelled out for us as such in the New Testament, although it is inferred in several passages, most notably that which the Book of Common Prayer assigns as the epistle reading for Holy Saturday, 1 Peter 3:17-22. This lack of explicit statement has led some modern Protestants to deny the doctrine, which denial, had the sixteenth century Reformers been able to foresee as the outcome of their teaching of Sola Scriptura, would undoubtedly have caused Martin Luther to throw an inkpot and curse profusely and John Calvin to burn someone at the stake. Sound Christology is incomplete without this doctrine.

The picture painted for us in the Scriptures of Christ’s activity beginning with His Incarnation in His miraculous conception by the Holy Ghost and culminating in His Ascension into heaven and sitting on the right hand of the Father is of a journey that takes Him from the highest place to the lowest, from the zenith to the nadir, and then back again. When Christ re-enters the highest place, the glory in heaven that He shared with His Father from eternity past He is crowned with even greater glory for having made the journey. The first part of the journey, the downward path is called His Humiliation. The second part of the journey, the upward path back to Heaven, is called His Exaltation. Both are explicitly taught and emphasized throughout the New Testament and this picture would not be complete had the journey not taken Him to the lowest place, possible, i.e., hell. Consider the words of St. Paul in the ninth verse of the fourth chapter of his epistle to the Ephesians. “Now that He ascended, what is it but that He also descended first into the lower parts of the earth.”

Paradoxically, the descent into hell has historically and traditionally, in the teachings of the church fathers, the medieval scholastics, the eastern and western churches, and the most orthodox of Protestant theologians, not been regarded as the final aspect of Christ’s Humiliation but as the first stage in His Exaltation. This does not negate what we just said about the descent being necessary to complete the picture of a journey from the highest place to the lowest and back again. The inclusion of the descent in the Exaltation, the upward part of the journey, rather than the Humiliation, the downward part of the journey to which it would seem more logical to place it, is due to the nature of Christ’s entrance into hell. Again, He did not enter hell in defeat to suffer the torments of the damned, but in victory, to break the stronghold of the enemies of God and man – sin, death, and the devil – which He had defeated on the cross, and to rescue from their clutches those of His own who had preceded Him there.

The descent into hell is needed not only to round off the picture of Christ’s downward and upward journeys but to present His saving work in its fullest, most heroic, aspect. When we speak of what Christ did for us in His sacrifice on the cross we speak of Him paying our debt of sin or of His bearing the judgement for our sins as our substitute. All of this is perfectly sound theology but the language of banks and courts cannot do aesthetic justice to Christ’s saving mission. For that we need the old doctrine of the harrowing of hell.

We should not be so quick to “update” the Creed to get rid of words and concepts that offend our modern sensibilities. They were put there for a reason and if, in this case, they are inferred from Scriptural references to Christ’s preaching to the spirits in prison or His statement that He would be in “the belly of the earth” for as long as Jonah was in the belly of the whale, they are good inferences. Their absence would leave a gaping hole in both Christian theology and Christian art and we would be the poorer for it.

(1) One of the most famous examples is the fourteenth century fresco by Andrea da Firenze on the north wall of the Spanish chapel in the Basilica of Santa Maria Novella in Florence. In this painting, Jesus is standing on the broken gate of hell, which has fallen on a devil and trapped him, while He reaches out His hands to an old man, presumably Adam, at the head of a crowd of haloes saints, while hiding in a cave in he corner the demons glare at Him.