# He Descended to the Dead — and That Changes Everything

A man in my congregation told me he'd stopped saying the Apostles' Creed. Not because he'd lost his faith, but because of one line: "He descended into hell." He couldn't picture Jesus in some underground cavern with demons, and frankly neither could I. But when I asked him what he thought the line actually meant, we both realised we were arguing against a story neither of us had properly read.

We sat with our coffees in a noisy café off Old Street, and within ten minutes had drawn diagrams on a napkin, swapped Bible apps, and concluded that the problem wasn't the creed. The problem was the picture our minds had been handed long before we ever opened a Bible. He went away muttering about Dante. I went away muttering about how often I'd let a congregation recite a line I'd never properly preached on. This piece is, in part, my apology.

## The line everyone stumbles over

The Apostles' Creed is not actually apostolic in the sense of being written by the apostles — it took its mature form over several centuries — but it is one of the oldest summaries of Christian belief we have, and the descent clause is one of its strangest features. The Latin reads descendit ad inferos, "he descended to the lower regions," and earlier Greek forms speak of katelthonta eis ta katōtata, "descended to the lowest parts." The English translation "he descended into hell" is later, and it carries a freight of medieval imagery that the original phrase did not.

The clause appears in some early forms of the creed and not others. The fourth-century Aquileian creed has it; the original Roman creed seems not to have. Various theologians across history have read it in flatly contradictory ways — as a literal harrowing of hell, as the spiritual torment of Christ on the cross, as a poetic way of saying Jesus was genuinely dead and buried. Calvin called the various interpretations "a useful and not-to-be-despised mystery of the most important benefit." The Westminster Larger Catechism essentially treats it as a way of saying Christ remained under the power of death until the third day.

This is not a bug in the tradition. It is a feature. The church has always fought over what death means for the deathless one, because the question is genuinely hard, and because every answer threatens to spill over into mythology on one side or evasion on the other. The clause stands like a sentry over a contested border. You cannot cross it without declaring which kind of saviour you think you have.

## What the word "hell" actually meant before Hollywood got there

The vocabulary here is a tangle, and most of our confusion is downstream of a translation choice.

In the Hebrew Bible, the place of the dead is Sheol. It is not a punishment chamber. It is the shadowy, undifferentiated state of all who have died — the righteous and the wicked alike. Jacob expects to go there mourning. The Psalms plead for rescue from it. It is closer to "the grave" or "the realm of the dead" than to anything we would call hell.

When the Hebrew Scriptures were translated into Greek, Sheol became Hades — a word the translators borrowed from Greek mythology but stripped of its pagan furniture. Hades in the Septuagint just means the state of the dead.

Then there is Gehenna, which Jesus himself uses repeatedly in the Gospels. Gehenna is a different word entirely. It comes from the Valley of Hinnom, a real place outside Jerusalem associated with child sacrifice in the Old Testament and, in Jesus' day, with rubbish and fire. When Jesus warns of being thrown into Gehenna, he is talking about final judgement, the place of punishment for the wicked. This is what English readers usually mean when they say "hell."

English translators, working with a flatter vocabulary, smashed Sheol, Hades and Gehenna together under the single word "hell." And so the creed's claim that Christ "descended into hell" gets read as if Jesus took a detour through Gehenna — the place of final judgement — when what it actually says is that he descended ad inferos, to the realm of the dead, to Sheol, to Hades.

That distinction is not a piece of pedantry. It is the difference between two completely different stories.

## Peter at Pentecost knew his Psalms

The clearest New Testament theology of the descent is not in some shadowy corner of 1 Peter or in the apocrypha. It is in Acts 2, in the first Christian sermon ever preached, by a fisherman who had just been filled with the Holy Spirit and was standing in front of a Jerusalem crowd.

Peter quotes Psalm 16:

"For you will not abandon my soul to Hades,
or let your Holy One see corruption."

And then he does something extraordinary. He treats this Psalm as a piece of prophetic exegesis. David, he says, "foresaw and spoke about the resurrection of the Christ, that he was not abandoned to Hades, nor did his flesh see corruption" (Acts 2:31).

Read that slowly. Peter's argument for the resurrection is not that Jesus skipped death. It is that Jesus entered Hades — the state of the dead — and was not left there. The descent is the premise of the rising. The argument runs: David died and his tomb is with us to this day; David's body saw corruption; therefore David was not the one the Psalm was ultimately about. Jesus, by contrast, entered Hades and was not abandoned to it, and his body did not see corruption, because God raised him up.

This is the New Testament's own theology of descent, and it is striking how unspectacular it is. There is no battle scene, no liberation of patriarchs — just the bare, weighty claim that the Son of God entered the realm of the dead, actually entered it, and that God brought him out.

The descent in Acts 2 is not a side-trip. It is the precondition of Easter.

## The story people actually believe (and why it isn't there)

If you ask the average church-going Christian — and I have, what they think happened between Good Friday and Easter Sunday, you will usually get some version of the following: Jesus went down to hell, fought Satan in his own territory, broke down the gates, and led the souls of the Old Testament saints out in triumph. Some versions add that he preached a second chance to those who had died before his coming.

It is a magnificent story. It has inspired wonderful art, from Eastern Orthodox icons of the harrowing of hell to medieval mystery plays in which Christ literally kicks down a set of wooden doors. It is just not, in any straightforward sense, in the Bible.

The biblical foothold for this story is mostly two verses in 1 Peter:

"He was put to death in the flesh but made alive in the spirit, in which he went and proclaimed to the spirits in prison, because they formerly did not obey, when God's patience waited in the days of Noah, while the ark was being prepared" (1 Peter 3:18,20).

This is one of the hardest passages in the New Testament. Augustine threw up his hands and said it was probably not about a literal post-mortem journey. Calvin agreed. The most plausible readings today, and there are several, include that the "spirits in prison" are fallen angels, not human souls; that the "proclamation" is one of victory, not evangelism offering a second chance; and that Peter is drawing an analogy between the days of Noah and the days of the church, not narrating Christ's itinerary on Holy Saturday.

Whatever 1 Peter 3 is doing, it is doing something far stranger than the popular story suggests. It is not the proof text for a dramatic rescue mission. It is a hard, dense passage that has confused readers for two thousand years, and to build an entire eschatology of Holy Saturday on it is to put too much weight on a verse that cannot bear it.

The harrowing of hell, as a vivid dramatic narrative, comes to us largely through the apocryphal Gospel of Nicodemus and the medieval mystery plays. It is beautiful. It is moving. It is also, more or less, theological fan fiction.

## What Calvin got right and what he threw out too fast

John Calvin found the popular story unbearable and unbiblical, and he tried to rescue the creed by giving the descent clause an entirely different meaning. The descent, he argued, was not a literal journey after death. It was the spiritual agony of Christ on the cross, the forsakenness of Psalm 22, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?", the experience of bearing the full weight of divine wrath. The descent into hell happened on Good Friday, not on Holy Saturday, and it happened in Christ's soul, not in some subterranean geography.

There is real theological power in this move. It takes the cross with maximum seriousness. It refuses to let Holy Saturday become a spectacle. It honours the cry of dereliction. And it cuts the legs from under the mythological retellings.

But it also throws something out that we should not have lost. Calvin's reading collapses the descent into the crucifixion, which means it loses the genuine, physical, time-taking fact of Christ's death. The body in the tomb stops being a theological datum. Saturday becomes a kind of empty page between two real events. And the creed's order, "was crucified, dead, and buried; he descended into hell; the third day he rose again from the dead", becomes a strange piece of repetition rather than a sequence.

Calvin was right to insist that the popular story isn't there in scripture. He was wrong to assume that what was there could only be a metaphor. The simpler reading, that the descent refers to Christ's real entry into the state of the dead, his being among the dead during the time between his death and his resurrection, is closer to what Peter is doing in Acts 2, and closer to what the creed seems to mean by ad inferos.

## He really died, and that is the point

Here, I think, is the deepest function of the descent clause: it guards the full reality of Christ's death.

The earliest Christological heresies were not, mostly, denials of Christ's divinity. They were denials of his humanity. Docetism, from the Greek dokeō, "to seem", held that Christ only appeared to suffer, only appeared to die, because real suffering and real death were unworthy of God. The Gnostic gospels are full of this. Some of them have the divine Christ leaving Jesus' body before the crucifixion, so that the man on the cross dies but the Son of God does not. It is the oldest evasion in Christian history, and it is still with us, in less obvious forms.

The descent clause is a fence against this. It says: Jesus did not skim across the surface of death. He went down into it. He was among the dead. He was not on a rescue mission; he was a corpse in a tomb. The Word who spoke worlds into being was, for those hours, silent in the dark.

This matters pastorally in ways that abstract doctrine often fails to. I have sat with people in hospices and at gravesides and in counselling rooms where the question they are asking, sometimes in words, sometimes not, is whether God has the slightest idea what death feels like from the inside. The descent clause is the church's answer. He does. He has been there. Whatever death is, in its loneliness and its silence, he has entered it: not as a tourist, not as a special-forces operative breaking in and breaking out, but as one of the dead.

A saviour who merely appears to die cannot be the one we trust when our own time comes. A saviour who skips through death on a tactical mission cannot meet us in the long Saturday of grief. The creed insists on a saviour who really died, and that is the only kind of saviour worth having when you are the one who is dying.

## The resurrection is only news if the grave was real

Notice what Peter does with this in Acts 2. He does not argue from a flashy supernatural Saturday to a triumphant Sunday. He argues from a real grave to a real rising. David, he says, "both died and was buried, and his tomb is with us to this day" (Acts 2:29). David is in his grave. Jesus is not. That is the news.

If the descent becomes a dramatic battle scene, then the resurrection becomes the final act of a story that was already in motion. If the descent is simply Christ being dead, then the resurrection is the unprecedented intrusion of God into a closed and final reality. Death does not normally release its captives. Tombs do not normally open. Hades does not normally lose those it has taken. The flatness of Saturday is what makes Sunday vertiginous.

I pastor in a city that does not, on the whole, like to think about death. London is good at distraction. The Tube is full of advertisements promising better skin, better savings, better holidays, better selves, very few of them mention dying, though everyone on the train will do it. The gospel we preach in a city like this has to be a gospel that takes death with full seriousness, because the people we are preaching to are, underneath everything, afraid of it.

A theatrical descent doesn't help us here. A creed that quietly insists that the Son of God truly died, lay in the realm of the dead, and was raised by the Father, that creed has something to say to a city of frightened mortals. It says that the worst thing has been entered and overcome. Not avoided. Not finessed. Entered.

## So should we keep saying it?

I told my friend that I thought he should start saying the line again. Not because the medieval picture is right, it isn't, but because the line, properly understood, is one of the most important things the church confesses. Drop it and you lose the fence against docetism. Drop it and Saturday goes blank. Drop it and the resurrection becomes a flourish rather than a hinge.

There is a wider temptation in churches like mine, in cities like mine, to quietly retire the bits of the faith that make us uncomfortable: the descent, the judgement, the bodily resurrection, the exclusive claims. We tell ourselves that we are being pastorally sensitive, or culturally intelligent, or evangelistically strategic. Sometimes we are. Often we are simply embarrassed, and we have mistaken our embarrassment for discernment.

The descent clause is a good test case. It is strange. It is contested. It carries centuries of bad art and worse exegesis on its back. And it is also, when you sit with it long enough, one of the deepest things the church has ever said about who Jesus is and what he has done. He really died. He really was among the dead. He was not abandoned to Hades, nor did his flesh see corruption. He was raised.

We should say it more, not less, with our eyes open, knowing the medieval pictures are pictures, knowing Calvin had a point we cannot fully take, knowing the verse in 1 Peter is harder than we thought. We should say it because it is true, and because the people sitting next to us in the pew, and the people walking past the church on their way to brunch, need a saviour who has been to the bottom of the thing they are most afraid of.

"You will not abandon my soul to Hades, or let your Holy One see corruption" (Acts 2:27).