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.

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.