He Descended Into Hell

April 9, 2014

            "Hell is a bar in Adams-Morgan, the colorful ethnic neighborhood at the intersection of Columbia Road and 18th Street Northwest in Washington, D.C.   Just above Hell and under the same management is a dance club called Heaven, where a six-foot bouncer in a pink leotard stands guard at the gate, wearing angel wings and a lopsided halo. It takes a good bit of courage to walk up the stairs and through the gate into Heaven, past that bouncer. It takes a good bit more to go down the basement stairs to Hell.   As your eyes adjust to the dim red lighting you see a banner over the bar that reads, “Welcome to Hell. Have a hell of a good time!” The walls are decorated with waxy masks and murals of grim reapers, skeletons, and doomsday scenes. A few tattered chairs and tables, complete with cigarette burns, are pushed to one side of the room. The mostly male patrons shoot pool and cackle above the gritty music blaring from the speakers. It is the owner’s vision of hell—and heaven—based on the most hackneyed clichés of each." (1)

            That's about all that's left of Hell in the modern world.  It's just a  bar in Adams-Morgan or a superlative used to emphasize a "Yes" or a "No" or  to describe a really good time!  But it didn't use to be that way.  As we make our way though the Lenten season it is fitting that we look again at how we have thought about the realm of the dead.  We'll look quickly at what the Old and New Testaments tell us about the place of the dead and, in particular, about a place of punishment in the afterlife and then remind ourselves of what people in the middle ages thought about these matters.  Excessive emphasis on punishment has given way in the last century to an awareness of God's grace toward which Jesus pointed us.  We'll end up with a few words about that shocking phrase in the Apostle's Creed that asserts, "He descended into Hell!" and ask what that has to do with God's grace. 

The Realm of the Dead in the Bible

            Just what does the Bible say about Hell or the realm of the dead?  Not much really.  In the Old Testament, whose texts span the thousand years before Jesus, the realm of the dead is usually called Sheol in Hebrew.  Sheol, in the minds of Old Testament people, was not a place of punishment.  It was just where one went after being  buried.  Sheol was "a region in the depths of the earth (Psalm 86:13) that is filled with darkness and gloom (Lamentations 3:6) and silence (Psalm 115: 17). Gates or bars prevent its prisoners from escaping (Isaiah 38:10; Job 17:16)."(2) The inhabitants of Sheol were thought of as "shades"--like faint carbon copies of the originals-- but not the complete person.  Even though Sheol was within the reach of God, they thought, the inhabitants of Sheol had no contact with God.  "In death there is no remembrance of thee; in Sheol who can give thee praise" (Psalm 6:5).  The unforgettable passage in Job stands out in the Old Testament because of its hopelessness: "Oh that thou wouldest hide me in Sheol...that thou wouldest appoint me a set time, and remember me," cries Job, only to conclude that "thou destroyest the hope of man" (Job 14:13-19).  

            But if the Old Testament figures had not yet come to an understanding that retribution could be administered after death, when did this concept of the realm of the dead as a place of punishment come into being?   Sometime after Malachi and before Jesus the old idea that retribution for good or evil would be visible in this life gave way to the belief that a distinction between good and bad people would be made after death.  There are just a few glimpses of this understanding in our Old Testament.  The book of Daniel says that "many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt" (Daniel 12:2).  "By the New Testament period, the idea of eternal punishment in Sheol had emerged.  Sheol had become an abode for the wicked dead only;  the righteous dead went immediately to heaven (or paradise, which is the restored Garden of Eden).  This developing concept of Sheol should not be confused with “Gehenna,” a term that appears eleven times in the Old Testament and literally refers to the valley of Hinnom (or, valley of the son of Hinnom), which is located south of Jerusalem (Joshua 15:8; 18:16; Nehemiah 11:30). The valley of Hinnom was infamous as a place of Baal worship (Jeremiah 32:35), but more so as a place of child sacrifice to the god Molech.... According to tradition, after Josiah desecrated the altar at the valley of Hinnom, or Gehenna, it became a continually burning garbage dump for the city of Jerusalem. ...As the idea of life after death continued to develop, Gehenna’s fires became a metaphor for the place of punishment for the wicked, which might occur either at death or after the resurrection and final judgment."(3)

The Realm of the Dead After the New Testament

            If we skip ahead some fifteen hundred years to the time of Martin Luther we know that the concept of Hell had become so vivid and frightening that travelling priests could scare people into buying "indulgences" from the church to get deceased loved ones out of Purgatory and on the way to Heaven.  Where did these vivid and explicit depictions of Hell come from if the New Testament did not provide them?  We can thank an author named Dante  and a painter named Boticelli for some of the details about Hell.  And we can thank a very modern author for making Dante a household name once again.

            In Dan Brown's latest book, Inferno (the Italian word for "Hell"), both the title and much of the imagery of the book are drawn from Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy.  The Divine Comedy is an allegory in three parts:  Inferno, Purgatory and Paradise.  The first part describes in detail Dante's descent through nine circles of Hell. Dante labelled the nine circles as:  Limbo, Lust, Gluttony, Greed, Anger, Heresy, Violence, Fraud and Treachery.  The nine circles of Hell represent a gradual increase in wickedness and culminate at the center of the earth, where Satan is held in bondage. Each circle's sinners are punished in a fashion fitting their crimes: each sinner is afflicted for all of eternity by the chief sin he committed. People who sinned but prayed for forgiveness before their deaths are found not in Hell but in Purgatory, where they labor to be free of their sins. Those in Hell are people who tried to justify their sins and are unrepentant. Along the way he describes the kinds of sinners who inhabit each level of Hell, often naming names with official titles!  Dante's guide is the Roman poet, Virgil, whom he admired and whose works he imitated.  After passing through Hell, the next two parts of the Divine Comedy follow Dante's ascent through Purgatory and into Paradise.  The book is most famous for its vivid description of Hell but, as the other two parts show, it is fundamentally an allegory about the soul's journey to God ending in Paradise. Published in the early 1300's, the poem has had a profound influence on Christian thinking about life after death. 

Even more influential, perhaps, have been the artists' depictions of the scenes Dante described.  One famous picture of Dante's "Hell,"  Boticelli's "Map of Hell," was painted in the late 1400's.(4) An amazingly detailed depiction of the sinners in each circle of Hell described by Dante, this picture fueled the imagination of devotional literature for centuries.  Even before Dante was translated into English, Jonathan Edwards became famous in America for his sermon "Sinners in the Hand of an Angry God" which brought imagery of Hell much like Dante's to our country.(5) Edwards conveyed frightening images throughout his sermon to convince his congregation that they were vulnerable to God's wrath. He continuously used images of pain and eternal damnation, such as going into detail about what Hell is like and what kind of tortures await sinners, in order to frighten those present into leaving their old ways and converting.  So "hellfire and brimstone" became staple items in revival preaching all across America in the nineteenth century.

If we move forward from Luther's time to today it is obvious that it is no longer commonplace to hear a sermon on hell or judgment.  Devotions emphasize the love of God.  Doubtless there is no one simple cause for this fundamental change in emphasis.  The modern emphasis on the individual and the advances of science have both affected our relationships to God and to our brothers and sisters across our planet.  While we are more conscious than ever of the truly evil actions of individuals and groups in our world, we are no longer comfortable making judgments about eternal salvation based on simple criteria.  We are also painfully aware that doctrines applied mechanically, as Job's friends, did may be sinful.  And in an Einstein world where time itself is a dimension, we are conscious of how complex an ultimate issue can be, and we are more cautious because of our ignorance.  Thus we are left with a profound conviction that the evil which we experience must be punished and with a discouraging realization that neither our words nor our art is up to the task of describing how such retribution will happen.

Long before Dante described Hell, however, early Christians had to make use of the existing understandings of life after death.  As we know, the Apostle Paul likened the transformation into a new life to the emergence of a full plant from a seed.  One of the questions for which early Christians needed an answer is still with us today.  Can a person who lived before Jesus' time be saved?  Dante left Virgil, the pagan Roman poet who was his guides, standing outside Paradise assuming that he could not have been saved.  Simon Peter made the case that when Jesus died he took the Gospel with him to the realm of the dead!  This positive understanding of  Jesus' death and burial made its way into the Apostles' Creed in the phrase, "He descended into hell."

What Did the Creed Mean?

While we here at MBBC use a modified version of the Apostles' Creed, we know that the original version(s) of the Creed affirmed that Jesus "descended into hell." We don't use that phrase from the Creed any longer, perhaps because it seems to affirm something unthinkable for us.  We associate "hell" with the place of punishment for evil, and Jesus was not evil, thus, he could not have descended into hell.  Surely our instincts are right!  The Creed certainly did not mean to affirm that Jesus was sent to hell to be punished.   Far from it! 

Isn't it interesting that our Gospels portray Jesus' entire ministry as a coming down.  In John's Gospel Jesus is the Word who "was with God and was God" but who came down to tabernacle amongst us.  Talk about a "come down!"  Matthew and Luke portray his birth as a  coming down, a descent to the humblest circumstances of human life.  He had nowhere to lay his head.  There was no room in the inn.  Wise men who wanted to honor him had to go to the stable and kneel in the straw. But that wasn't all!   Paul says he came down even further: "he emptied himself...and being found in human form he humbled himself, and became obedient unto death, even death on a cross" (Philippians 2:8).  It was downhill all the way to the cross, but that was not all.  Peter was surely sharing what other Christians believed when he said that Jesus came down even further.  When he was put to death, "he went and preached to the spirits in prison" (1 Peter 3:19).  He went down to the very depths of death on a mission to tell all who had ever lived the good news of grace.  It was downhill all the way from heaven to hell.  And that's what the Creed intended us to affirm.

By affirming that Jesus "descended into hell," the Creed described the descent of Jesus into the realm of the dead, affirming that his death was a real death and not just a swoon.   It also affirmed that by descending into the realm of the dead Jesus was able to preach to "the spirits in prison"  as Peter put it --something Jesus announced he was sent to do early on when he read from Isaiah 61 in the synagogue in Nazareth:(6)

The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me, because the LorD has anointed me to bring good tidings to the afflicted, he has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to those who are bound...

And the gates of hell could not prevent him from completing his mission.

So What About Hell

            I'm going to take the liberty of quoting at some length from Jim Somerville's article I referred to earlier because I think he has helped me with his conclusion:

" What we long to know in all of this is something about the real heaven and the real hell and what we find, to our great disappointment, is that  they can’t be known. Our end, like our beginning, belongs to God. And if Jesus knows he isn’t telling. He seems content to leave the details, like the details of the final judgment, in the hands of the father (Mark 13:32). And so, like the owner of that bar in Adams-Morgan, we resort to metaphor. We decorate our concept of hell with fire and brimstone, demons with pitchforks, and the screams of the damned. We decorate our concept of heaven with angels with halos, heavenly choirs, and streets of gold. We stretch our minds toward those unknowable realities. But in the end all we have is the best, and the worst, we can imagine. "

"The temptation is to leave it there, in the realm of imagination, but  here is the frightening truth: as surely as God’s ways are not our ways and God’s thoughts are not our thoughts, neither is God’s imagination our imagination. If burning in hell forever is the worst we can imagine, it is altogether possible that God can imagine worse, and altogether probable that the worst God can imagine would never cross our minds. But the corollary is also true: if heavenly mansions and streets of gold are the best we can imagine, it is altogether possible that God can imagine something better."

"And altogether probable that he already has."(7)

Footnotes:

1. Jim Somerville, "Hell Is A Bar in Adams-Morgan," in Heaven and Hell: Christian Reflection, A Series In Faith And Ethics, edited by Robert Kruschwitz (Baylor University, 2002), 43-45.

2. E. Anni Judkins, "Unquenchable Fire," in Heaven and Hell: Christian Reflection, A Series In Faith And Ethics, edited by Robert Kruschwitz (Baylor University,2002), 24.

            3. Judkins, op.cit., 25.

            4. Dan Brown describes this Map of Hell in Chapter 14  of his book Inferno: "The masterpiece before him- La Mappa dell' lnferno-had been painted by one of the true giants of the Italian Renaissance, Sandro Botticelli. An elaborate blueprint of the underworld, The Map of Hell was one of the most frightening visions of the afterlife ever created. Dark, grim, and terrifying the painting stopped people in their tracks even today. Unlike his vibrant and colorful Primavera or Birth of Venus, Botticelli had crafted his Map of Hell with a depressing palate of reds, sepias, and browns."

                  5. See Kathleen Verduin, "Dante's Inferno, Jonathan Edwards, and New England Calvinism," Dante Studies, with the Annual Report of the Dante Society No. 123 (2005), pp. 133-161.

                  6.  "I believe it [1 Peter 3:19] means Jesus did what he said he would do, what he proclaimed his mission to be — to release from darkness those imprisoned, even if they’re imprisoned in world of the dead.  That is what Jesus meant when he said “the gates of hell” will not prevail, will not stand, against the onslaught of the Kingdom of God." Chuck Warnock, pastor of the Chatham Baptist Church in Chatham, VA whose sermon, "I Believe in Christ and Him Crucified," may be viewed in the September 2009 Archive of his blog at    http://chuckwarnockblog.wordpress.com/about.

                  7. Jim Somerville, op. cit., 45.