Affirming the Apostles ’ Creed (10 page)
Christians hold that the Jesus of the Scriptures is alive and that those who know him as Savior, Lord, and Friend find in this knowledge a way through all life’s problems, dying included. For “Christ leads me through no darker rooms / Than he went through before.” Having tasted death himself, he can support us while we taste it and carry us through the great change to share the life beyond death into which he himself has passed. Death without Christ is “the king of terrors,” but death with Christ loses the “sting,” the power to hurt, that it otherwise would have.
John Preston, the Puritan, knew this. When he lay dying, they asked him if he feared death, now that it was so close. “No,” whispered Preston; “I shall change my
place
, but I shall not change my
company
.” As if to say: I shall leave my friends, but not my Friend, for he will never leave me.
This is victory—victory over death and the fear it brings. And it is to point the way to this victory that the Creed, before announcing Jesus’ resurrection, declares: “he descended into hell.” Though this clause did not establish itself in the Creed until the fourth century and is therefore not used by some churches, what it says is of very great importance, as we can now see.
H
ADES,
N
OT
G
EHENNA
The English is misleading, for “hell” has changed its sense since the English form of the Creed was fixed. Originally “hell” meant the place of the departed as such, corresponding to the Greek
Hades
and the Hebrew
Sheol
. That is what it means here, where the Creed echoes Peter’s statement that Psalm 16:10, “thou wilt not abandon my soul to
Hades
” (so RSV: av has “hell”), was a prophecy fulfilled when Jesus rose (see Acts 2:27-31). But since the seventeenth century “hell” has been used to signify only the state of final retribution for the godless, for which the New Testament name is
Gehenna
.
What the Creed means, however, is that Jesus entered, not
Gehenna
, but
Hades
—that is, that he really died, and that it was from a genuine death, not a simulated one, that he rose.
Perhaps it should be said (though one shrinks from laboring something so obvious) that “descended” does
not
imply that the way from Palestine to Hades is down into the ground, any more than “rose” implies that Jesus returned to surface level up the equivalent of a mine shaft! The language of descent is used because Hades, being the place of the disembodied, is
lower
in worth and dignity than is life on earth, where body and soul are together and humanity is in that sense whole.
J
ESUS IN
H
ADES
“Being put to death in the flesh but made alive in the spirit” (1 Peter 3:18), Jesus entered Hades, and Scripture tells us briefly what he did there.
First, by his presence he made Hades into Paradise (a place of pleasure) for the penitent thief (cf. Luke 23:43), and presumably for all others who died trusting him during his earthly ministry, just as he does now for the faithful departed (see Philippians 1:21-23; 2 Corinthians 5:6-8).
Second, he perfected the spirits of Old Testament believers (Hebrews 12:23; cf. 11:40), bringing them out of the gloom that Sheol, “the pit,” had hitherto been for them (cf.Psalm 88:3-6, 10-12), into this same Paradise experience. This is the core of truth in Medieval fantasies of the “harrowing of hell.”
Now we can face death knowing that when it comes
we shall not find ourselves alone.
He has been there before us,
and he will see us through.
Third, 1 Peter 3:19 tells us that he “proclaimed” (presumably, about his kingdom and appointment as the world’s judge) to the imprisoned “spirits” who had rebelled in antediluvian times (presumably the fallen angels of 2 Peter 2:4ff., who are also “the sons of God” of Genesis 6:1-4). Some have based on this one text a hope that all humans who did not hear the gospel in this life, or who having heard it rejected it, will have it savingly preached to them in the life to come, but Peter’s words do not provide the least warrant for that inference.
What makes Jesus’ entry into Hades important for us is not, however, any of this, but simply the fact that now we can face death knowing that when it comes we shall not find ourselves alone. He has been there before us, and he will see us through.
F
URTHER
B
IBLE
S
TUDY
The Christian’s attitude toward death:
Philippians 1:19—26
Q
UESTIONS FOR
T
HOUGHT AND
D
ISCUSSION
Hades, Sheol,
Gehenna.
And if Christ has not been raised,
your faith is futile and you are still
in your sins.
1 CORINTHIANS 15: 17
The Third Day
S
uppose that Jesus, having died on the cross, had stayed dead. Suppose that, like Socrates or Confucius, he was now no more than a beautiful memory. Would it matter? We would still have his example and teaching; wouldn’t they be enough?
J
ESUS’
R
ISING IS
C
RUCIAL
Enough for what? Not for Christianity. Had Jesus not risen but stayed dead, the bottom would drop out of Christianity, for four things would then be true.
First, to quote Paul, in 1 Corinthians 15:17: “if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins.”
Second, there is then no hope of our rising either; we must expect to stay dead too.
Third, if Jesus Christ is not risen, then he is not reigning and will not return, and every single item in the Creed after “suffered... and [was] buried” would have to be struck out.
Fourth, Christianity cannot be what the first Christians thought it was—fellowship with a living Lord who is identical with the Jesus of the Gospels. The Jesus of the Gospels can still be your hero, but he cannot be your Savior if he did not rise.
A F
ACT OF
H
ISTORY
To show that it views Jesus’ resurrection as a fact of history, the Creed actually times it—”the third day,” counting inclusively (the ancients’ way) from the day when Jesus “suffered under Pontius Pilate” in about a.d. 30. On that precise day in Jerusalem, the capital of Palestine, Jesus came alive and vacated a rock tomb, and death was conquered for all time.
Can we be sure it happened? The evidence is solid. The tomb was empty, and nobody could produce the body. For more than a month afterward, the disciples kept meeting Jesus alive, always unexpectedly, usually in groups (from two to five hundred). Hallucinations don’t happen this way!
The disciples, for their part, were sure that the risen Christ was no fancy and tirelessly proclaimed his rising in the face of ridicule, persecution, and even death—a most effective way of scotching the malicious rumor that they stole Jesus’ body (cf. Matthew 28:11-15).
The corporate experience of the Christian church over nineteen centuries chimes in with the belief that Jesus rose, for the risen Lord truly “walks with me and talks with me along life’s narrow way,” and communion with him belongs to the basic Christian awareness of reality.
No sense can be made of any of this evidence save by supposing that Jesus really rose.