If you’ve ever attended a liturgical church during Holy Week, you’ve likely recited the Apostles’ Creed—a confession that affirms the climactic events of Jesus’ life.
At the center of this confession, between the phrases “was crucified, died, and was buried” and “on the third day he rose again from the dead,” you’ll find the mysterious (and a few might say pesky) phrase “he descended into Hell.”
Although it’s largely missed in evangelical churches, dwarfed by the giants of Good Friday and Resurrection Sunday, Holy Saturday within the liturgical calendar commemorates the day when Jesus’ body laid dead within the grave. But it also honors the “Harrowing of Hell”—an concept that traces back to a handful of verses within the New Testament referring to Jesus’ debated descent into the netherworld:
After all, one verse reads, “What does ‘he ascended’ mean except that he also descended to the lower, earthly regions?” (Eph. 4:9). For “After being made alive, [Christ] went and made proclamation to the imprisoned spirits—to those that were disobedient way back when God waited patiently in the times of Noah while the ark was being built” (1 Pet. 3:18–20). Later, Peter adds, “For because of this the gospel was preached even to those that are dead, that though judged within the flesh the way in which individuals are, they could live within the spirit the way in which God does” (1 Pet. 4:6, ESV).
That these (and other) verses imply that Christ descended into hell is an interpretation discarded by various respected Christian thinkers including Wayne Grudem and John Piper, who argues there’s “no textual basis” for it. Such dissenters either dismiss the road altogether or align themselves with John Calvin, who believed “the descent clause refers to Jesus’ physical and spiritual torment on the cross on Good Friday.”
Even amongst those that do imagine in a literal descent, there’s a large spectrum of views. Some people think Christ “raided hell to ransom the righteous of the Old Testament”—a view Scott McKnight says in a CT article is the “classical theology of Holy Saturday.” Others imagine the above verses as a substitute signal “a proclamation that Jesus’ victory extends all of the method to the bottom regions within the place of the dead.”
Still others, particularly within the Eastern Orthodox tradition, see the Harrowing of Hell as a part of the larger biblical narrative that Christ the conqueror defeats death completely and rescues many (or all) of the inhabitants of a now-dismantled Sheol. But this view has never been incorporated into the church’s official doctrine, since it could possibly invite universalist interpretations—for example, if the imprisoned spirits of 1 Peter 3 got a second probability, might others too?
To unpack all of the ins and outs of theological debate over the centuries is beyond the scope of this text. But no matter what you suspect in regards to the specifics of Christ’s descent, every confessing Christian believes that Christ was, in truth, dead within the grave. And this single biblically verifiable truth has just as much to say to those of us who still find ourselves within the land of the living.
Few (if any) mysteries have held more sway on the human imagination than the enigma of what follows our final breath on earth. What’s beyond the flat line of asystole—and to where do the departed depart? And while some today might feign a secular indifference, a fast look through the oldest myths shows the near-universal concern our remotest ancestors had with understanding and preparing for death and the world of the dead.
But first, it’s vital to notice that the word hell has a confusing etymology—at the same time as it has captivated the imaginations of individuals and literature throughout history.
Image: WikiMedia Commons
Part of an ancient Egyptian funerary text called, Book of the Dead.
Image: WikiMedia Commons
Painted pottery depicting Hades, the Greek god of the dead, abducting Persephone, the daughter of Zeus.
Most ancient Near Eastern people groups left detailed accounts of their underworlds, including the Sumerians’ The Descent of Inanna, the Egyptians’ Book of the Dead, and the Greeks’ grim vision of Hades. By contrast, the one Hebrew word the Israelites had for hell was Sheol, which vaguely refers to a shadowy dwelling place for the dead. It shows up only 66 times within the Old Testament and is translated variously in our English Bibles as “the pit,” “the grave,” “the abyss,” and even “hell.” Sheol was translated to Hades within the Greek Septuagint, versus Gehenna, the Greek word for a distinct compartment of the underworld seen as a spot of judgment and destruction.
Epic poems like Dante’s Inferno (based on the Roman poet Virgil’s account of Aeneas’s descent into the underworld) famously paints a Christianized tackle the Greco-Roman vision of Hades, which informed medieval plays and other depictions of the Harrowing of Hell. Christ’s descent echoes the mythic pattern of a heroic figure whose journey takes him into the underworld to find a life-changing truth or to perform an not possible task—equivalent to rescuing a dead beloved soul or setting captives free—and to return alive and victorious.
You can see this ancient narrative pattern (or “mytheme,” as comparative mythologists would say) in all varieties of different stories today, from The Matrix to Harry Potter. The ubiquitous presence of the mythic hero theme has been utilized by mental opponents of Christianity to diminish the distinctiveness and significance of our faith claims about Jesus Christ.
In 1890, for example, anthropologist and folklorist James George Frazer published the primary edition of The Golden Bough, which captivated readers along with his comparative retellings of myths. He claimed Jesus was just one other example of the dying-and-rising-god myth to emerge from the mists of ancient pagan religion. And while scholars have long since dismissed most of Frazer’s speculative conclusions, his concepts survive within the works of Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell, and plenty of other secular thinkers influenced by this archetype.
Even today, modern skeptics of Christianity will use this rationale to reinterpret Jesus’ death and resurrection as nothing greater than imitative elements of those ancient stories. Such parallels, they imagine, negate the exclusivity of truth that Christians profess. And yet, at the identical time, the similarities between pre-Christ myths and the story of Christ have also inspired the intellects and imaginations of a number of the biggest Christian thinkers and storytellers of the twentieth century.
In fact, in an infamous conversation on Addison’s Walk at Oxford’s Magdalen College, one agnostic-turned-theist named Jack (also often known as C. S.) Lewis discussed these mythic connections with two believing friends, J. R. R. Tolkien and Hugo Dyson. Lewis realized that believing within the person of Jesus didn’t mean throwing away the old myths of ancient civilizations but reasonably finding in Christ the true and supreme achievement of those myths. He later wrote:
Now the story of Christ is solely a real myth: a myth working on us in the identical way because the others, but with this tremendous difference that it really happened: and one should be content to just accept it in the identical way, remembering that it’s God’s myth where the others are men’s myths: i.e., the Pagan stories are God expressing Himself through the minds of poets, using such images as He found there, while Christianity is God expressing Himself through what we call ‘real things.’
This conviction pulsates through the writings of the Inklings, the group to which Lewis, Tolkien, Dyson, and a couple of others of the identical ilk belonged. Like Dante, their works are crammed with allusions to their mythological preoccupations, not least the “journey within the underworld” and “rescuing king” mythemes.
Think of the scene in Tolkien’s The Return of the King, where Aragorn, heir to the throne of Gondor, must enter “the Paths of the Dead” through gates inscribed with an eerie warning: “The way is shut. It was made by those that are Dead. And the Dead keep it, until the time comes. The way is shut” (emphasis added). There, the Dead Men are cursed to stay trapped under a mountain for his or her grave sin of oath breaking—waiting until the king returns to offer them a second probability to satisfy their oath.
Image: WikiMedia Commons
Jesus Descending into Hell by Markos Bathas
Then, after all, there’s Lewis’s own The Great Divorce, where the narrator is driven from hell to heaven by a bus driver named George MacDonald—named after the Nineteenth-century Scottish poet and novelist who profoundly shaped Lewis’ theology and storytelling, like Virgil did for Dante. Charles Williams, one other (lesser-known) Inkling, even wrote a novel titled Descent into Hell—which brings us back to the Apostles’ Creed and the dying and rising pattern of Jesus Christ.
One difference within the “true myth” of Christ is that he calls his followers to mimic his pattern of dying and rising. Jesus tells his followers to disclaim themselves and take up their very own crosses (Luke 9:23), or instruments of death, and Paul says to “Count yourselves dead to sin but alive to God in Christ Jesus” (Rom. 6:11). But like Christ’s death, ours shouldn’t be without purpose. As Jesus said, “Very truly I inform you, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the bottom and dies, it stays only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds” (John 12:24).
A more theological word for “dying to self” is mortification, as symbolized within the sacrament of baptism. A believer who’s plunged into the waters symbolically dies with Christ while also dying to the sinful state of the flesh. Much like being “born again” (John 3:3), the Christian emerges from the waters, symbolically rising again in Christ’s conquering victory over sin and death. Thus begins the technique of vivification, because the lifetime of a believer is renewed in and for God.
In baptism, we reenact the trail Jesus himself paved for us in his descent and return from the underworld through our own immersion and resurfacing. Jesus pierced the very belly of the beast of death in his journey from the grave to the best hand of God—traveling from the bed of Sheol to the heavens (Ps.139:8). With a like to match the scope of his heroic task, Christ tore the curtain of the temple in order that the holiness of God could dwell in and amongst us through the church because the body of Christ.
The Harrowing of Hell reminds us of our Savior’s willingness to go before us as a seed, dying to bring forth an otherwise not possible fruit. But as we imitate and follow him, we encounter what could be the toughest a part of the mortification and vivication process: patience. Just as as seeds can often lay dormant within the soil for months and even years before sprouting, the technique of growing in sanctification involves waiting on God’s promise to make all things recent (Rev. 21:5).
While God didn’t spell out for us the specifics of Jesus’ itinerary in hell, we are able to take heart as we face our own journeys into the valley of the shadow of death (Ps. 23:4), that Jesus, our true epic hero, has already gone before us and overcome the world (John 16:33). Christ alone is the true myth of human history—the dying and rising God incarnate who embodies every story’s truest thread. And in his faithfulness we are able to find, because the old hymn goes, “strength for today and shiny hope for tomorrow.”
Raed Truett Gilliam is associate producer with CT media.
