Explaining Christ's Descent Into Hell

Between the articles about our Lord’s death and His resurrection in the Apostles Creed stands the confession that Jesus Christ descended into hell. To properly understand what the Church actually means when she says Christ descended into hell, two things must be clarified.

First, Jesus does not go to the place many modern people associate with the word hell. In his book Classic Christianity, Thomas Oden says, “the place of descent is not specified as gehenna (the place of punishment) but Hades (the abode of the dead).”(1) In Jewish thought, the abode of the dead, also called the limbo of the fathers, consisted of two distinct places. One was a place set aside for the righteous who lived before the age of the messiah, such as the poor man Lazarus (Luke 16:22). The other was a place set aside for the wicked, such as the rich man who neglected Lazarus (Luke 16:23). But neither of these two places was the soul's final destination. The abode of the dead was a temporary place of waiting, and those who went there were those who lived before Christ’s death and resurrection.

Second, Jesus did not suffer in the limbo of the fathers as though he had to crawl through an unbearable valley of fire and brimstone. Instead, Christ descended into hell as a conquering savior, proclaiming the good news to the spirits imprisoned there, and then, in the same breath, sets those spirits free.(2) But this deliverance is not without distinction. Christ proclaims his victory over death and the devil to all the departed dead, but he does not rescue all of the departed dead. The Catechism of the Catholic Church says:

“Scripture calls the abode of the dead, to which the dead Christ went down, "hell" - Sheol in Hebrew or Hades in Greek - because those who are there are deprived of the vision of God. Such is the case for all the dead, whether evil or righteous, while they await the Redeemer: which does not mean that their lot is identical, as Jesus shows through the parable of the poor man Lazarus who was received into "Abraham's bosom":"It is precisely these holy souls, who awaited their Saviour in Abraham's bosom, whom Christ the Lord delivered when he descended into hell." Jesus did not descend into hell to deliver the damned, nor to destroy the hell of damnation, but to free the just who had gone before him.”(3)

It is the righteous alone who lived faithfully before the time of Christ, who are released from Abraham’s bosom and taken up to heaven. To say otherwise would be like saying those who died in sin before Christ were actually better off than those who died in sin after Christ.

Third, the righteous dead were not forced to suffer in the limbo of the fathers while they waited for Christ’s victory over sin and death. We can see from the parable of the rich man and Lazarus that even though all those who died before Christ were deprived of the vision of God, not all were forced to suffer. The rich man who lived his life in luxury while ignoring the cries of his impoverished neighbor finds himself in a place of suffering. In contrast, the man he ignored (Lazarus) finds himself in a place that is described as “comfortable” (Luke 16:25). In short, all we know for certain is that the place of paradise located in the land of the dead was not a place of perfect happiness because it lacked the vision of God, but it was still a place of great comfort. In the end, those who were waiting for the messiah in the land of the dead were not all suffering as though God just dumped everyone, regardless of how they lived their life into hell until Jesus came.

A Protestant Objection

While most Protestants who recite the Apostles' Creed or at least assent to its content are in agreement with the Catholic Church about the meaning of Christ’s descent into hell, some do not. The most notable among them is the view that Christ’s descent into hell simply meant his burial. This view was held by the reformers Martin Bucer (1491-1551) and Theodore Beza (1519-1605). There are two notable problems with this view. First, it is not in harmony with the interpretive consensus held by the earliest Christians. St. Irenaeus of Lyon (130-200), who lived so close to the time of Christ he was actually mentored by a man (St. Polycarp) who was taught by St. John the Apostle, said “the Lord observed the law of the dead, that He might become the first begotten from the dead and tarried until the third day in the lower parts of the earth.”(4) Another early Christian, Tertullian, writing only a few decades after Irenaeus, wrote that Christ remained “in Hades in the form and condition of a dead man; nor did he ascend into the heights of heaven before descending into the lower parts of the earth, that he might there make the patriarchs and prophets partakers of himself.”(5) These writers clearly show that the earliest Christians believed Jesus actually went to the land of the dead, rather than just sitting in his tomb waiting to be resurrected.

Another reason this view doesn’t hold up is that the creed itself makes it unlikely. The Roman Catechism put it this way, 

“It is to be observed that by the word hell is not here meant the sepulchre [tomb] as some have not less impiously than ignorantly imagined: for in the preceding Article we learned that Christ the Lord was buried, and there was no reason why the Apostles, in delivering an Article of faith, should repeat the same thing in other and more obscure terms.”(6)

Now, as many may be aware, the apostolic origins of the Apostles' Creed have been brought under scrutiny in recent times, but this does not in any way undermine the argument above. Regardless of how the Apostles' Creed came together, it is still extremely unlikely that it would present the same article of faith back-to-back in different words. Jesus died and was buried, and then he descended into hell, and these two articles of faith do not mean the same thing.

1.  Thomas Oden, Classic Christianity (Harper One, 1992), 450.

2.  Catechism of the Catholic Church, 632.

3.  CCC, 633.

4. Irenaeus, Against Heresies 5.31.2, in Ante Nicene Fathers Vol 1, ed. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson, trans. Rev. M. Dods (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1994), 560.

5. Tertullian, On the Soul 55, in Ante Nicene Fathers Vol 3, ed. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson, trans. Rev. S. Thelwall (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1994), 231.

6. St. Pius V, The Roman Catechism (Tan Books, 2017), 64-65.