Michael Bauman | Politics | The Chronicle of an Undeception

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"So great is the favor and love of Christ for us, that he does more for us than we can comprehend . . . Having opened the side of Christ on the cross, the door of paradise was opened. Having poured out his blood, the stain of sin is removed, God is pleased, the weakness of sin is taken away, the punishment due to sin is lifted, and the exiles are called back to the kingdom." Thomas Aquinas, Sermon-Conferences	Chapter Five "suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead and buried. He descended into Hell." "passus sub Pontio Pilato, crucifixus, mortuus et sepultus. Descendit ad infernum." "So great is the favor and love of Christ for us, that he does more for us than we can comprehend . . . Having opened the side of Christ on the cross, the door of paradise was opened. Having poured out his blood, the stain of sin is removed, God is pleased, the weakness of sin is taken away, the punishment due to sin is lifted, and the exiles are called back to the kingdom." Thomas Aquinas, Sermon-Conferences "Whatever game He is playing with His creation, He has kept His own rules and played fair. He can exact nothing from man that He has not exacted from Himself. He has Himself gone through the whole of human experience, from the trivial irritations of family life and the cramping restrictions of hard work and lack of money to the worst horrors of pain and humiliation, defeat, despair, and death. When He was a man, He played the man. He was born in poverty and died in disgrace and thought it well worthwhile . . . [T]hat is the outline of the official story -- the tale of the time when God was the underdog and got beaten, when He submitted to the conditions He had laid down and became a man like the men He had made, and the men had made broke Him and killed Him. This is the dogma we find so dull -- this terrifying drama of which God is the victim and hero." Dorothy L. Sayers, "The Greatest Drama Ever Staged" "The Crucifixion is an event in history. It happened in Palestine in the early years of the first century; and we can trace the historical causes which led to it. But it is more than an event in history. It is a revelation of what always happens when God meets evil." Hugh Burnaby, Thinking Through the Creed "The body that was broken on Calvary was a human body, but the heart that was broken on Calvary is the heart of the God who had taken that human body upon Him . . . [But] to break the heart of God is not to break the will or power of God." Carroll E. Simcox, Living the Creed Beyond a few tantalizing and memorable facts, we know precious little about the earliest years of the life of Jesus. We know of his unique and miraculous birth, of his family's flight into and out of Egypt, of his discussions with the rabbis in the temple, and of his declaration to Mary and Joseph that He had to be about his Father's business. While these telling episodes might not be all we desire to know of his early years, they are enough. They reveal that the young Jesus was already on his way to becoming the sin-shattering figure He actually became. The child, indeed, was father to the man. That much about Him is clear. By comparison, we know considerably more about Jesus's years of public ministry and about the things He did and taught than we do about his youth. But even most of these the creed passes over in silence, with good reason. As the confession of an instructed candidate for baptism, the creed rightly presupposes familiarity with Christ's biographical data, and it therefore does not rehearse them. The Apostles' Creed is not a full course in theology, biblical history, and spiritual life; it is the baptismal confession of a Christian who already has significant knowledge of them. Or, to put a different point on it, such episodes are absent from the creed not because they are uninteresting or unimportant -- they most certainly are not -- but because the details of Christ's life and message are best summed up in the story of his suffering, his crucifixion, and his death, to which the creed, without comment or embellishment, now directs our attention. If in the previous chapter we spoke of Christ's incarnation, in this we speak of his humiliation, drawn ultimately from the accounts of it preserved for us in the four gospels, and summarized in near-creedal form by Paul (1 Cor. 15: 1ff). Here in the passion of Christ, more than anywhere else, we discover what we -- and God -- are truly like. Christ's suffering, death, burial and resurrection help us give definition to the concept of the love of God because no greater love has any man than this, that he lays down his life for his friend (John 15: 13). In the case of Jesus, his life was given for his enemies as well. This is what love looks like; this is what love does; and God is love (1 John 4: 8). The cross of Christ also shows us the horrid face of sin because, in order to banish it from the world, the Holy and Immortal God, the Lover of our souls, had to die: "The cross in all its ghastliness and shame demonstrates, as nothing else could, not only the love which endured it, but also the nature and effect of the sin which brought it about" (Quick, Essays in Orthodoxy 96, 97). The creed begins its recitation concerning the passion of Christ by reminding us that He "suffered," and in so doing it truly and graphically compresses his life and work into one word. The specific suffering denoted here is not that of his crucifixion and death, which are mentioned subsequently, but that of his unjust arrest, during which time He was beaten, mocked, whipped, spat upon, stripped naked, falsely accused, falsely judged, and crowned with thorns, all by his enemies; and then betrayed, neglected and denied, by his closest friends. All this He suffered not for Himself, of course, but for others. He himself was sinless (1 Pet. 2: 22). According to Thomas Aquinas, Christ suffered these ignominies for two reasons: "as a remedy against sin" and as "an example for behavior," especially our cultivation of Christian virtues like obedience, patience, and courage (Aquinas, Sermon-Conferences 69). The suffering of Messiah had been the subject of prophecy from the very beginning, being foretold by God Himself to our first parents, then fallen (Gen. 3: 15). As well, Isaiah long ago prophesied the Savior's wounding for our transgressions, his oppression and affliction on our behalf, and his lamb-like journey to slaughter (Isa. 53: 3-10). Christ's suffering and death were foreshadowed, furthermore, by such incidents as the offering of Isaac by Abraham and by the ceremonial statutes in the law of Moses. They were predicted even by Christ Himself (Matt. 16: 21; Luke 18: 31ff). Historically the word "suffered" seems to have been added to the creed in response to the Docetic heresy, which theorized that, because such suffering required a physical body, and because physical matter was (allegedly) evil, such suffering must be both impossible and inappropriate for a divine being like Christ. Therefore, the Docetists reasoned, both Christ's body and his suffering were only apparent, not genuine. Against such fantasies the creed rightly insists that Christ indeed suffered. As difficult as it must be for some modern minds to comprehend, at one time people were so deeply convinced of Christ's divinity that they had great problems believing He was genuinely human. Moderns, because they are more thoroughly secularized and inordinately skeptical, uncritically assume the opposite. By putting us in mind of Christ's suffering, the creed implies that Jesus endured the human condition's full measure of agony. In silent but eloquent faithfulness, He was indeed the man of sorrows, acquainted with all our griefs. And if it be true that he who is incapable of suffering is incapable of loving, we can conclude from the nature of Christ's sufferings that his love for us is unsurpassed. The creed, like both Testaments, puts to flight the mistaken notion of many philosophers and theologians, both ancient and modern, that God is impassible, that He cannot and does not suffer, that his heart cannot be deeply touched, even broken. Regarding the consequences of Christ's suffering, I cannot improve upon the words of Dorothy L. Sayers: "And here Christianity has its enormous advantage over every other religion in the world. It is the only religion which gives value to evil and suffering. It affirms -- not, like Christian Science, that evil has no real existence, nor yet like Buddhism, that good consists in a refusal to experience evil -- but that perfection is attained through the active and positive effort to wrench a real good out of a real evil" (Sayers, "Creed or Chaos?" 38-39). That wrenching of real good out of real evil is precisely the effect wrought by the suffering of Christ mentioned here in the creed. Part of that real good, strange to say, was His own, for as a man the Pioneer of our salvation was made perfect by suffering (Heb. 2: 10), as are we, but with this difference -- we suffer also because we are evil; He does not. Unlike Jesus, we suffer because we need to purge our lives of sin. Jesus suffers for his own growth into perfection and for our redemption; we suffer primarily for our own purgation and punishment. In that light, the question "Why do the righteous suffer?" has accurate reference to only one person in all the world, Jesus Christ. The answer to that question is, "For us and for our salvation." But our own suffering, however, is a different tale. For fallen people like us, people who desperately need the stain and pollution of their sin expunged, the apostle Paul envisages suffering as a thing very much like the gospel itself -- a gift from God (Phil. 1: 29), though I confess it never felt to me like a cause for rejoicing, as whatever brings about Christlikeness truly is. By naming Pontius Pilate, who was Roman procurator of Judea from 26-36 A. D., the creed identifies for us both the time and the place of Christ's death. Pilate is named, it seems, not to make him a target of perennial reproach, but to give the passion of Christ an historical anchor. If the purpose of mentioning Pilate in the creed were simply to cast blame or to subject his name to perpetual derision, the creed no doubt would also have included for indictment Judas Iscariot, Christ's betrayer, and the scribes and Pharisees who led the movement to end his life. No, the creed mentions Pilate solely in order to root its confession in the firm and fertile ground of historical fact. As the creed makes evident repeatedly, the taproot of Christian faith is deeply imbedded in human history, from which it draws its most nourishing truth. The affirmations of the Apostles' Creed are not primarily metaphysical in character; they are factual, historical. In this emphasis, the creed is simply following both Testaments, which themselves are fundamentally historical in nature. Luke, for example, never tires of identifying for us the various intersections of sacred and secular history, employing them as his narrative guideposts: His gospel account begins with what happened to Zechariah, the priest, and to his wife, "in the time of Herod, king of Judea" (Luke 1: 5), and then goes on to tell us of the birth of Jesus, which occurred when "an edict was issued by Caesar Augustus for a census of the whole empire" (Luke 2: 1). The phrase before us in the creed does precisely the same thing. It hangs our faith confidently and boldly on the peg of world history. To take recourse again to Dorothy L. Sayers' memorable words, "God was executed, for being a public nuisance, 'under Pontius Pilate' -- much as we might say 'when Mr. Joynson-Hicks was Home Secretary.' It is as definite and concrete as all that." (Sayers, "The Greatest Drama Ever Staged" 14). In other words, our sin is a fact of history; so is our redemption. Because they were under Roman domination, and because Roman law prohibited them from carrying out on their own any decrees of capital punishment, the Jewish leaders who condemned Christ on trumped up charges of blasphemy and sedition were obliged to bring him before Pilate for disposition. But Pilate found no fault in Him and told the Jews so (John 18: 38). Nevertheless, Pilate did not release Him as he ought. Succumbing instead to the clamor of Jesus's enemies, Pilate eventually gave both the order to scourge Him (John 19: 1) and to have Him crucified (John 19: 16). For that, his name lives in infamy. Spiritually, Pilate is something of an Everyman, the sinful compromiser who knows the truth but who does not act upon it, whose feeble attempts to distance himself from any responsibility concerning Christ serve only to make him all the more guilty, all the more responsible. Like most of us, Pilate was a man of pragmatics, not of principle and of justice, a defect he thought he could remedy with a little soap and water (Matt. 27: 24). I have said that Pilate was not made part of the creed simply to be ridiculed, and that is true. Nevertheless, I cannot leave him behind without passing on Ronald Knox's cheeky quip regarding him: "What is truth?" Pilate asked, and it serves him right that he should be put there in the middle of the Credo, as if the Church were determined to go on saying to him, to the end of time, "Here, you fool, this is it!" (Knox, The Creed in Slow Motion 82). To balance this jibe, I point out the (to me) surprising fact that, in response to the pious Christian stories that grew up around Pilate after his death, the Coptic and Abysinnian churches have made him a saint, and that he is celebrated June 25th. I note merely in passing that the mention of Pilate here in the creed is by no means, as some commentators argue it is, either a denunciation or a renunciation of politics, of political power, or of government. Neither the creed nor the Bible are opposed to the state as such (Matt 22: 21; Rom.13: 1-7), only to some of the things that states sometimes do. Having told us of Christ's suffering under Pontius Pilate, the creed turns our attention next to his crucifixion. The crucifixion of the one perfect man was the price paid for the sins of the world, a price we sinful people could never pay for ourselves. His crucifixion was the price of redemption, expiation, reconciliation, and justice, which all find their means here, in his unjust execution. As the Protestant reformers were wont to say, in the cross of Christ the debt for sin was cancelled, the righteousness of God was satisfied, and the salvation of man was secured. In fact, the cross of Christ looms so large in the Christian faith that Paul made it the centerpiece of his message: "I determined," he said to the Christians at Corinth, "not to know anything among you except Jesus Christ, and him crucified" (1 Cor. 2: 2). Elsewhere Paul writes that he actually gloried in the cross of Christ (Gal. 6: 14). As Bishop Goodwin once explained, "Glorying is quite a different thing from sorrowing, or regretting, or accepting the inevitable. To St. Paul it was evidently a positive delight, a joy, a satisfaction, a pride, to meditate upon and to write to his friends concerning the crucifixion of his Master; he considered it the very business of his life to make known the fact that Christ had been crucified, not apologizing for it or softening it down or explaining it away, but endeavoring to persuade all men with whom he had influence, whether Jews or Greeks, to regard the fact in the same earnest, affectionate, enthusiastic manner as that in which he regarded it himself" (Goodwin, The Foundations of the Creed 166, 167). In thus regarding the crucifixion of Christ as the central element of his faith, Paul was following the explicit teaching of Jesus, who commanded that we remember his crucifixion, indeed that we celebrate it, by the breaking of bread, which is his body, and the drinking of wine, which is his blood, until He returns. As the mention of Pontius Pilate helps identify both the time and place of Jesus's death, the mention here of crucifixion identifies for us its means. Though borrowed from earlier empires, in the days of Jesus crucifixion was a distinctly Roman form of torture, one that was exceedingly cruel. It was a proven and efficient means of bringing death, though it did so with excruciating, almost idle, slowness. Christ endured it for several agonizing hours. During those hours of agony, while He hung upon the cross, Christ seemed to passers-by to be the villainous enemy of both the empire and of mankind, an evil malefactor who was getting merely what He deserved when, in that very act, He was our greatest benefactor, getting what we deserved. Infinitely more agonizing than any pain He endured in the body was the suffering of soul He endured when his own Father, for the sake of our redemption, turned his back his Son, and left Him to die alone and forsaken. The deepest abyss of Christ's suffering on the cross, we might easily surmise, was that terrible moment of supreme dereliction when He cried out, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" (Matt. 27: 46). The answer to that question, quite unbeknownst to the one who gave it, came from Caiaphas, the high priest: "it is expedient that one man die for the people, so that the people do not perish (John 18: 14). Luther's way of explaining the significance of the crucifixion was to stipulate that all theologies reduce to one of two varieties: theologia gloriae, or the theology of glory, and theologia crucis, or the theology of the cross. While the theology of glory insists that human beings can become acceptable to God simply by trying harder and doing better (and thereby receive the glory for their salvation by doing so), the theology of the cross realizes more accurately what human nature is truly like. It insists that no one, regardless of the effort extended, could ever become good enough to meet divine standards of righteousness. Only Christ's perfect life and his death in our place on the cross can provide that. The theology of the cross, furthermore, understands how demeaning to Christ the theology of glory really is. If we could save ourselves, if redemption and righteousness could be ours merely by greater exertion, then Christ was simply a great fool and died for nothing. What He tried to provide for us by his suffering and death, we could provide for ourselves quite as well and without going to such extreme measures. The Apostles' Creed, obviously, is a creed of the cross, not of human glory. Put differently, the word "crucified" describes what happened to Jesus when He stood in our place and made the fate of sinners his own: He became the object of God's curse; which is exactly what it means to be crucified (Gal. 3: 13). This was the horrifying consequence to be borne when He who had no sin became sin for us (2 Cor. 5: 21). That Christ has died on the cross in our stead, the just for the unjust, does not mean, of course, that no cross awaits us, or that in this fallen world we have no burden to bear. We do. Christ Himself taught that whoever would be his follower must take up his own cross, whatever it might be (Matt. 16: 24). The third poignant facet of Christ's passion brought forward for us by the creed is his death. Death as the punishment for sin is a verdict as old as the world itself, for this was the verdict God declared to our first parents -- if you sin, you die (Gen. 2: 17), a verdict repeated for us by Paul (Rom. 6: 23). In other words, it costs something to sin. As Christ's death demonstrates, it also costs something to forgive. In the words of Oscar Cullmann, "Death is a curse, and the whole creation has become involved in the curse. The sin of man has necessitated the whole series of events which the Bible records and which we call the story of redemption. Death can be conquered only to the extent that sin is removed" (Cullmann, Immortality of the Soul or Resurrection of the Dead? 28). Christ's atoning death extends as far as the curse of Adam is found. It covers every sin completely, fully and finally. His brutal death was something He tasted for every man (Heb. 2: 9). His death was a ransom paid on behalf of us all (1 Tim. 2: 6), a propitiation rendered for the sins of the whole world (1 John 2: 2), a world whose sins He took upon Himself (John 1: 29), and for whom He gave his life as a ransom. "For as in Adam all die," says Paul, "so also in Christ shall all be made alive" (1 Cor. 15: 22). It reduces to this: "God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself (2 Cor. 5: 19). In other words, as the writer of the epistle to the Hebrews teaches, Christ endured the shame and ignominy of the cross for the sake of the joy that was set before Him (Heb. 12: 2), a joy based upon his knowledge that, if He be lifted up in crucifixion, He would draw all men to Himself (John 12: 32). He was; He did. Because God is a God of love, He is a God of the gallows. What happened to Christ ought to have happened to us, for death is the inescapable destiny of all who sin. Had Christ not died for us, and had God not been merciful, it would have. To say that Christ died for us means that He died in our place and for our inestimable benefit. He stands where we sinners should have stood. He endured the divine wrath; He caught the deadly bullet upon which our names were rightly written. Because He has paid the price for sin, mercy for sinners is now possible. In the death of Christ on our behalf, God's law against evil is kept and mercy is extended to all who repent and believe. But we must never forget the means of our redemption, the shocking fact God has come so close to us that we could kill him, and did. How extraordinary to think that death should exercise dominion over Him who is life itself, but that is precisely what happened. God died. That death, like the suffering and crucifixion that preceded it, is a fact of history. The Lord does not escape death, He endures it; He conquers it; He transforms it. He makes it a door to life. Of course, in all this Christ was not merely passive. He did not simply get killed. After great anguish of heart, and in the face of crushing fear, He chose death. To its chilling throes He fearfully and willing submitted. No man took his life from him, Christ said, He laid it down of his own accord (John 10: 18). His death was, so to speak, something He did, an action, an accomplishment. He could have called a halt to those immoral and deadly proceedings at any moment. He could have; but because of his love for his Father and for us, He did not. To come to that position of willingness was not easy, even for the sinless Son of God, who three times petitioned his Father to take away the bitter cup set before Him. "No," His Father said, and turned away. The heart of God, because it is a heart that longs to welcome every one of his prodigal children home, because it is a heart that is not willing that any of us should perish but that all should come to repentance, that heart, for that very reason, turned its back on the One it loved most. At that very moment, our Savior learned what it means to have your most ardent prayers and requests denied, requests of life and death. One can only shudder to contemplate the results had our Heavenly Father said "Yes." In the past, I have always considered the crucifixion of Christ only from Christ's perspective. Not until now did I ever think about how much suffering was endured at that time by the Father, whose heart must have broken when, because of his love for us, He turned his back on his own Son. Christ went to his death knowing full well that, despite his own fears and misgivings, it was his Father's express will. Indeed it was the very reason for which Christ came to earth, and while the Apostles' Creed does not overtly specify the purpose of Christ's suffering and death in the way some other creeds do, its meaning is precisely the same. Christ died in company with all sinners, except for this -- his death was both worse and undeserved. Christ's death has significance not only for our redemption, but also for our spirituality. Our death, Paul says, takes place in Christ's. We were crucified with Him, and our "lives are hid with Christ in God" (Col. 3: 3). The implications of such a union between Christ and Christian are profound. His death includes our own, and in conjunction with his, our dying is transformed. Its apparent hopelessness, the seeming impossibility of its cure, its evident finality, have all been done away, and in their place stand the mercy and love of God, which, in Christ, triumph even over our sin and death. As many theologians have pointed out, "the death and resurrection of Christ somehow include much more than the mere historic events which in the first instance they are. In Christ humanity has died and risen . . . It is something wrought in humanity as a whole, so that any man may claim in union with Christ to have shared His death for sin and have passed through to the resurrection-life of restored fellowship with God (Quick, Essays in Orthodoxy 101, 102). This being so, of course, we ought to act accordingly -- putting our old selves to death, summarily executing them for being the death-dealing villains they truly are. The death of Christ, as almost the entire tradition of Christian spirituality attests, ought to be one of the controlling images of our sanctification and our life with God. Before turning to Christ's burial, we need to make one further point regarding his death. As was the word "suffered," the word "dead" here is a later addition to the creed. Both words were added in opposition to the Docetists, who, contrary to the clear record of Scripture, taught that the death of Jesus was merely an apparent death, not a real one. In fact, in a vain attempt to establish their beliefs, some Docetists even surmised that Christ somehow escaped from his captors and that either Judas Iscariot or Simon of Cyrene died in his place. That the Docetists should transform the betrayer of the Savior into the savior of the Savior simply demonstrates the perverse lengths to which some people go in order to preserve a cherished but roundly mistaken prejudice. But the creed's anti-Docetism continues. By going on to affirm that Christ was "buried," the creed makes the Docetic view all the more unthinkable. By this word the creed effectively underscores the reality of the crucifixion and death of Jesus. The suffering ended in crucifixion; the crucifixion ended in death; the death was sealed in burial. Jesus was buried, Scripture says, in the borrowed tomb of Joseph of Arimathea, who, along with Nicodemus, had procured from Pilate Christ's dead body, which they prepared for burial and then interred. Their well-intentioned efforts were "the last tribute of love from friends who had ceased to hope: He was buried" (Westcott, The Historic Faith 62). Having buried Him, his friends did for Him all they could do. And, as was every other fact mentioned in this article of the creed, Jesus's burial was a matter of prophecy, being foreshadowed by Jonah's three days in the belly of the great fish, to which Christ Himself referred (Matt 12: 40). The burial of Christ, Paul tells us, was a key element in the tradition and instruction he received (1 Cor. 15: 4). Little wonder then that he made it part of his own message from the very beginning (Acts 13: 29), and that the creed incorporates it here. In his burial, as in all the other of his actions pertinent to the creed, Christ is our pioneer. I recall here Richard Baxter's comforting observation that Christ leads us through no darker rooms than He went through before. The tomb, we may be sure, is one of the very darkest of those rooms. But the light that shines in darkness, the light that enlightens everyone who comes into the world (John 1: 5, 9), shines even in the obscure recesses of the grave. Paul exhorts us not only to be crucified with Christ, but also to be buried with him. That is, we not merely put our sinful desires to death, we put them to death and lock them away forever. To this renunciation of sin, Paul teaches (Romans 6: 4), we were committed in our baptism. Like Christ in his tomb, our sinful selves must be buried in the baptismal waters, so that like Him, we too can be raised in newness of life. But though Christ's lifeless body was laid to rest in a borrowed tomb, his soul's journey had not yet ended. By declaring that Christ "descended into Hell," the creed announces the final, indeed ultimate, stage in what G. F. Maclear called Christ's "ever-deepening humiliation" (Maclear, An Introduction to the Creeds 118). For our sakes Christ went through Hell; He went through Hell to get to Heaven, so that where He now is we might be also. Although this phrase was not incorporated into the creed until sometime in the middle-to-late fourth century, Christian writers dating back even to the apostles themselves make reference to what it teaches. The apostle Peter, for example, on the day of Pentecost, mentions it in his very first Christian sermon when, quoting one of the prophetic psalms of king David regarding Christ, he proclaimed to the listening Jews that God would not leave the soul of his Son to languish in Hades (Acts 2: 31), thus indicating Peter's belief that Christ's soul, after death, descended into Hell. In other words, even though this notion was late in being incorporated into the creed, Peter's Pentecost sermon and his related comments elsewhere (1 Pet. 3: 18-20; 4: 6) combine with those of Paul (Eph. 4: 8-10 [cp. Ps. 49:17ff.]; Rom. 10: 6, 7; 1 Cor. 15: 29) and several early church fathers to attest not only that this belief is biblical but that it was widespread in Christian antiquity. In the second century, for example, both Ignatius and Irenaeus allude to it, the former in his epistle to the Magnesians, the latter a full half dozen times in his polemic against heresy. So also do other second century theologians like Justin Martyr and Tertullian, as well as later writers like Clement, Origen, Cyril, and Rufinus, to name but a few. In addition, early Christian apocryphal literature, such as the so-called Gospel of Peter and the so-called Acts of Pilate, is replete with such allusions. Interestingly, The Shepherd of Hermas, which dates from about 140 A. D., says that the message of Christ was taken to Hell not by Jesus but by the apostles. Except perhaps for that concerning the virgin birth of Jesus, this phrase in the creed is the one most often denied by modern theologians. It seems to them too crude, too much the child of an outdated view of the world. Enlightened people, we are told, can no longer believe that Christ descended into Hell; He merely entered the realm of the dead. But that is not true. The words "dead," buried," and "Hell" in this creed are not all the same and are not interchangeable. As I have indicated, many of the earliest Christians -- apostles, sub-apostolic fathers, apologists, theologians, priests, laymen, even heretics -- did, in fact, believe that, as the nadir of his redemptive humiliation, Christ Himself entered the bowels of Hell. To adopt the modernist interpretation of this portion of the creed is to consign it to mere redundancy, as if descending into Hell were merely another way of saying He was among the dead. But Christ's death and burial were already clearly affirmed in the creed. The Apostles' Creed, perhaps more than any other, studiously shuns redundancy and verbosity, as by now must be clear to every reader. He who became sin for us endured the just punishment for sin; He went to Hell, compared to which his brutal suffering and death were but prologue. Here as elsewhere the creed means what it says. On this point Emil Brunner is exactly right: "Jesus has experienced not only the greatest human, earthly suffering; he has suffered the tortures of Hell in the literal, serious sense of the word . . . [H]e has suffered Hell for us" (Brunner, I Believe in the Living God 77, 82). That is, while the word "descended" might be figurative, the word "Hell" is not. If you want to rescue a trapped or dying miner, you must go down to where he is. We have Christ's own word on it that most who ever lived go the broad way that leads down to Hell. To rescue them, or even some of them, He had to follow them there. That rescue, Peter tells us, was effectuated by the gospel of Christ in the words of Christ (1 Pet. 4: 6). For those who are in Christ, therefore, there remains no punishment for sin because He Himself has already borne it. He walked through fire until his feet had trod it down, and He dethroned the vile emperor of the realm of sorrows. He endured the final, the ultimate, judgement upon sin: "He descended into Hell." For that reason, the early church often found itself echoing the psalmist's words of awe and of amazement: "Even if I go down to Hell, behold, you are there also" (Psalm 139: 8). When Christ spoke about Hell, He sometimes used the word "Gehenna" to describe it. Gehenna was the always-burning garbage dump just outside Jerusalem. Hell, under this image, is the garbage dump of lost and ruined souls, the smoldering repository of wasted human beings. In his descent into Hell, Christ became, and I say this most reverently, the divine Garbage Picker, sifting through the living debris, salvaging what still could be salvaged. In other words, his descent from Heaven reached not simply to the realm of the dead, but to the realm of the lost, to the prisonhouse of the underworld. Because it did, we cannot, none of us, go where He Himself has not gone before. No one can claim to have undergone a suffering beyond the reach of Christ's, for there exists no depth of pain or punishment beyond that of Hell. No one, saved or lost, can ever go where the Son of God Himself has not gone. Jesus set his face like flint toward Jerusalem, the Bible says (Luke 9: 51), indicating that He would not be deterred from the accomplishment of his divine mission by anyone or anything, not even Hell itself. He intends to build his Church, and the gates of Hell are not going to prevail against it (Matt. 16: 18). In the very bowels of Hell, there was no rescue party for Him; He was the rescuer. He was no paper tiger. He was not mere talk or boast. He felt a profound recoil at death's approach, something He acknowledged three times to his Father in the garden of Gethsemane. The putrid stench of Hell filled his nostrils. But He marched resolutely forward to meet death and Hell face to face and to conquer them. Because of the mercy of the Father and the obedience of the Son, the gospel cannot be walled either in or out. This phrase in the creed, in other words, seems to imply that Christ's victory is total. Not death, not even the Hell itself, falls beyond the pale of Christ's redemptive triumph. God enters Hell and Hell succumbs. The salvific sovereignty of God is not closed out even by the adamantine walls of Hell, for mercy is omnipresent. Where the love of God has an intention, the power of God provides a means. No obstacles prevent the redemptive ingress of the almighty Father. Christ descended into Hell, we can assume, for two reasons. First, He seems to have done so in order to shoulder the full punishment of sin, which includes not only death of the body but also of the soul. He was not spared any of the penalty of sin, physical or spiritual. He drank the cup of divine wrath all the way to the bottom, to the bitter dregs of Hell. Second, He seems to have done it in order to spoil Satan of his ill-gotten plunder, which he presumed to take from God. Christ entered into the enemy's own house and defeated him even there. Christ has not only invaded but conquered the Devil's citadel, the very capital of the kingdom of iniquity. As Hendrikus Berkhof once affirmed to me, "God ultimately will be all in all . . . I am convinced that there will be no finally successful attempt to plunder anything from God's vineyard. Satan may win many battles, but he will not win the war" (Bauman, Roundtable 70). From Christ's descent into Hell three lessons can be drawn. First, no matter what our current spiritual condition, God can still reach us. We have but to turn around and walk back into the light, into the open arms of a waiting, loving, beckoning Father. Second, the wickedness of human sin must indeed be very great if Christ Himself had to descend to such depths to undo it. Third, there seems to be no depth to which God cannot reach, and no darkness his light cannot brighten. If Christ goes to such depths for us, what lengths ought we ourselves to go for Him and for those whom He loves? But as spring follows winter, and as day follows night, Easter follows Good Friday. The story is not over.	"Whatever game He is playing with His creation, He has kept His own rules and played fair. He can exact nothing from man that He has not exacted from Himself. He has Himself gone through the whole of human experience, from the trivial irritations of family life and the cramping restrictions of hard work and lack of money to the worst horrors of pain and humiliation, defeat, despair, and death. When He was a man, He played the man. He was born in poverty and died in disgrace and thought it well worthwhile . . . [T]hat is the outline of the official story -- the tale of the time when God was the underdog and got beaten, when He submitted to the conditions He had laid down and became a man like the men He had made, and the men had made broke Him and killed Him. This is the dogma we find so dull -- this terrifying drama of which God is the victim and hero." Dorothy L. Sayers, "The Greatest Drama Ever Staged"
	Copyright © 2006. Michael Bauman. All rights reserved.	date modified: 5 July 2006 Website Hit Counters

"So great is the favor and love of Christ for us, that he does more for us than we can comprehend . . . Having opened the side of Christ on the cross, the door of paradise was opened. Having poured out his blood, the stain of sin is removed, God is pleased, the weakness of sin is taken away, the punishment due to sin is lifted, and the exiles are called back to the kingdom."
Thomas Aquinas, Sermon-Conferences

Chapter Five

"suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead and buried. He descended into Hell."

"passus sub Pontio Pilato, crucifixus, mortuus et sepultus. Descendit ad infernum."

"Whatever game He is playing with His creation, He has kept His own rules and played fair. He can exact nothing from man that He has not exacted from Himself. He has Himself gone through the whole of human experience, from the trivial irritations of family life and the cramping restrictions of hard work and lack of money to the worst horrors of pain and humiliation, defeat, despair, and death. When He was a man, He played the man. He was born in poverty and died in disgrace and thought it well worthwhile . . . [T]hat is the outline of the official story -- the tale of the time when God was the underdog and got beaten, when He submitted to the conditions He had laid down and became a man like the men He had made, and the men had made broke Him and killed Him. This is the dogma we find so dull -- this terrifying drama of which God is the victim and hero."
Dorothy L. Sayers, "The Greatest Drama Ever Staged"

"The Crucifixion is an event in history. It happened in Palestine in the early years of the first century; and we can trace the historical causes which led to it. But it is more than an event in history. It is a revelation of what always happens when God meets evil."
Hugh Burnaby, Thinking Through the Creed

"The body that was broken on Calvary was a human body, but the heart that was broken on Calvary is the heart of the God who had taken that human body upon Him . . . [But] to break the heart of God is not to break the will or power of God."
Carroll E. Simcox, Living the Creed

         Beyond a few tantalizing and memorable facts, we know precious little about the earliest years of the life of Jesus. We know of his unique and miraculous birth, of his family's flight into and out of Egypt, of his discussions with the rabbis in the temple, and of his declaration to Mary and Joseph that He had to be about his Father's business. While these telling episodes might not be all we desire to know of his early years, they are enough. They reveal that the young Jesus was already on his way to becoming the sin-shattering figure He actually became. The child, indeed, was father to the man. That much about Him is clear.
         By comparison, we know considerably more about Jesus's years of public ministry and about the things He did and taught than we do about his youth. But even most of these the creed passes over in silence, with good reason. As the confession of an instructed candidate for baptism, the creed rightly presupposes familiarity with Christ's biographical data, and it therefore does not rehearse them. The Apostles' Creed is not a full course in theology, biblical history, and spiritual life; it is the baptismal confession of a Christian who already has significant knowledge of them. Or, to put a different point on it, such episodes are absent from the creed not because they are uninteresting or unimportant -- they most certainly are not -- but because the details of Christ's life and message are best summed up in the story of his suffering, his crucifixion, and his death, to which the creed, without comment or embellishment, now directs our attention.
         If in the previous chapter we spoke of Christ's incarnation, in this we speak of his humiliation, drawn ultimately from the accounts of it preserved for us in the four gospels, and summarized in near-creedal form by Paul (1 Cor. 15: 1ff). Here in the passion of Christ, more than anywhere else, we discover what we -- and God -- are truly like. Christ's suffering, death, burial and resurrection help us give definition to the concept of the love of God because no greater love has any man than this, that he lays down his life for his friend (John 15: 13). In the case of Jesus, his life was given for his enemies as well. This is what love looks like; this is what love does; and God is love (1 John 4: 8). The cross of Christ also shows us the horrid face of sin because, in order to banish it from the world, the Holy and Immortal God, the Lover of our souls, had to die: "The cross in all its ghastliness and shame demonstrates, as nothing else could, not only the love which endured it, but also the nature and effect of the sin which brought it about" (Quick, Essays in Orthodoxy 96, 97).
         The creed begins its recitation concerning the passion of Christ by reminding us that He "suffered," and in so doing it truly and graphically compresses his life and work into one word. The specific suffering denoted here is not that of his crucifixion and death, which are mentioned subsequently, but that of his unjust arrest, during which time He was beaten, mocked, whipped, spat upon, stripped naked, falsely accused, falsely judged, and crowned with thorns, all by his enemies; and then betrayed, neglected and denied, by his closest friends. All this He suffered not for Himself, of course, but for others. He himself was sinless (1 Pet. 2: 22). According to Thomas Aquinas, Christ suffered these ignominies for two reasons: "as a remedy against sin" and as "an example for behavior," especially our cultivation of Christian virtues like obedience, patience, and courage (Aquinas, Sermon-Conferences 69).
         The suffering of Messiah had been the subject of prophecy from the very beginning, being foretold by God Himself to our first parents, then fallen (Gen. 3: 15). As well, Isaiah long ago prophesied the Savior's wounding for our transgressions, his oppression and affliction on our behalf, and his lamb-like journey to slaughter (Isa. 53: 3-10). Christ's suffering and death were foreshadowed, furthermore, by such incidents as the offering of Isaac by Abraham and by the ceremonial statutes in the law of Moses. They were predicted even by Christ Himself (Matt. 16: 21; Luke 18: 31ff).
         Historically the word "suffered" seems to have been added to the creed in response to the Docetic heresy, which theorized that, because such suffering required a physical body, and because physical matter was (allegedly) evil, such suffering must be both impossible and inappropriate for a divine being like Christ. Therefore, the Docetists reasoned, both Christ's body and his suffering were only apparent, not genuine. Against such fantasies the creed rightly insists that Christ indeed suffered. As difficult as it must be for some modern minds to comprehend, at one time people were so deeply convinced of Christ's divinity that they had great problems believing He was genuinely human. Moderns, because they are more thoroughly secularized and inordinately skeptical, uncritically assume the opposite.
         By putting us in mind of Christ's suffering, the creed implies that Jesus endured the human condition's full measure of agony. In silent but eloquent faithfulness, He was indeed the man of sorrows, acquainted with all our griefs. And if it be true that he who is incapable of suffering is incapable of loving, we can conclude from the nature of Christ's sufferings that his love for us is unsurpassed. The creed, like both Testaments, puts to flight the mistaken notion of many philosophers and theologians, both ancient and modern, that God is impassible, that He cannot and does not suffer, that his heart cannot be deeply touched, even broken. Regarding the consequences of Christ's suffering, I cannot improve upon the words of Dorothy L. Sayers:

"And here Christianity has its enormous advantage over every other religion in the world. It is the only religion which gives value to evil and suffering. It affirms -- not, like Christian Science, that evil has no real existence, nor yet like Buddhism, that good consists in a refusal to experience evil -- but that perfection is attained through the active and positive effort to wrench a real good out of a real evil" (Sayers, "Creed or Chaos?" 38-39).

That wrenching of real good out of real evil is precisely the effect wrought by the suffering of Christ mentioned here in the creed. Part of that real good, strange to say, was His own, for as a man the Pioneer of our salvation was made perfect by suffering (Heb. 2: 10), as are we, but with this difference -- we suffer also because we are evil; He does not. Unlike Jesus, we suffer because we need to purge our lives of sin. Jesus suffers for his own growth into perfection and for our redemption; we suffer primarily for our own purgation and punishment. In that light, the question "Why do the righteous suffer?" has accurate reference to only one person in all the world, Jesus Christ. The answer to that question is, "For us and for our salvation." But our own suffering, however, is a different tale. For fallen people like us, people who desperately need the stain and pollution of their sin expunged, the apostle Paul envisages suffering as a thing very much like the gospel itself -- a gift from God (Phil. 1: 29), though I confess it never felt to me like a cause for rejoicing, as whatever brings about Christlikeness truly is.
         By naming Pontius Pilate, who was Roman procurator of Judea from 26-36 A. D., the creed identifies for us both the time and the place of Christ's death. Pilate is named, it seems, not to make him a target of perennial reproach, but to give the passion of Christ an historical anchor. If the purpose of mentioning Pilate in the creed were simply to cast blame or to subject his name to perpetual derision, the creed no doubt would also have included for indictment Judas Iscariot, Christ's betrayer, and the scribes and Pharisees who led the movement to end his life. No, the creed mentions Pilate solely in order to root its confession in the firm and fertile ground of historical fact. As the creed makes evident repeatedly, the taproot of Christian faith is deeply imbedded in human history, from which it draws its most nourishing truth. The affirmations of the Apostles' Creed are not primarily metaphysical in character; they are factual, historical. In this emphasis, the creed is simply following both Testaments, which themselves are fundamentally historical in nature. Luke, for example, never tires of identifying for us the various intersections of sacred and secular history, employing them as his narrative guideposts: His gospel account begins with what happened to Zechariah, the priest, and to his wife, "in the time of Herod, king of Judea" (Luke 1: 5), and then goes on to tell us of the birth of Jesus, which occurred when "an edict was issued by Caesar Augustus for a census of the whole empire" (Luke 2: 1). The phrase before us in the creed does precisely the same thing. It hangs our faith confidently and boldly on the peg of world history. To take recourse again to Dorothy L. Sayers' memorable words, "God was executed, for being a public nuisance, 'under Pontius Pilate' -- much as we might say 'when Mr. Joynson-Hicks was Home Secretary.' It is as definite and concrete as all that." (Sayers, "The Greatest Drama Ever Staged" 14). In other words, our sin is a fact of history; so is our redemption.
         Because they were under Roman domination, and because Roman law prohibited them from carrying out on their own any decrees of capital punishment, the Jewish leaders who condemned Christ on trumped up charges of blasphemy and sedition were obliged to bring him before Pilate for disposition. But Pilate found no fault in Him and told the Jews so (John 18: 38). Nevertheless, Pilate did not release Him as he ought. Succumbing instead to the clamor of Jesus's enemies, Pilate eventually gave both the order to scourge Him (John 19: 1) and to have Him crucified (John 19: 16). For that, his name lives in infamy.
         Spiritually, Pilate is something of an Everyman, the sinful compromiser who knows the truth but who does not act upon it, whose feeble attempts to distance himself from any responsibility concerning Christ serve only to make him all the more guilty, all the more responsible. Like most of us, Pilate was a man of pragmatics, not of principle and of justice, a defect he thought he could remedy with a little soap and water (Matt. 27: 24).
         I have said that Pilate was not made part of the creed simply to be ridiculed, and that is true. Nevertheless, I cannot leave him behind without passing on Ronald Knox's cheeky quip regarding him:

"What is truth?" Pilate asked, and it serves him right that he should be put there in the middle of the Credo, as if the Church were determined to go on saying to him, to the end of time, "Here, you fool, this is it!" (Knox, The Creed in Slow Motion 82).

To balance this jibe, I point out the (to me) surprising fact that, in response to the pious Christian stories that grew up around Pilate after his death, the Coptic and Abysinnian churches have made him a saint, and that he is celebrated June 25th.
I note merely in passing that the mention of Pilate here in the creed is by no means, as some commentators argue it is, either a denunciation or a renunciation of politics, of political power, or of government. Neither the creed nor the Bible are opposed to the state as such (Matt 22: 21; Rom.13: 1-7), only to some of the things that states sometimes do.
Having told us of Christ's suffering under Pontius Pilate, the creed turns our attention next to his crucifixion. The crucifixion of the one perfect man was the price paid for the sins of the world, a price we sinful people could never pay for ourselves. His crucifixion was the price of redemption, expiation, reconciliation, and justice, which all find their means here, in his unjust execution. As the Protestant reformers were wont to say, in the cross of Christ the debt for sin was cancelled, the righteousness of God was satisfied, and the salvation of man was secured. In fact, the cross of Christ looms so large in the Christian faith that Paul made it the centerpiece of his message: "I determined," he said to the Christians at Corinth, "not to know anything among you except Jesus Christ, and him crucified" (1 Cor. 2: 2). Elsewhere Paul writes that he actually gloried in the cross of Christ (Gal. 6: 14). As Bishop Goodwin once explained,

"Glorying is quite a different thing from sorrowing, or regretting, or accepting the inevitable. To St. Paul it was evidently a positive delight, a joy, a satisfaction, a pride, to meditate upon and to write to his friends concerning the crucifixion of his Master; he considered it the very business of his life to make known the fact that Christ had been crucified, not apologizing for it or softening it down or explaining it away, but endeavoring to persuade all men with whom he had influence, whether Jews or Greeks, to regard the fact in the same earnest, affectionate, enthusiastic manner as that in which he regarded it himself" (Goodwin, The Foundations of the Creed 166, 167).

In thus regarding the crucifixion of Christ as the central element of his faith, Paul was following the explicit teaching of Jesus, who commanded that we remember his crucifixion, indeed that we celebrate it, by the breaking of bread, which is his body, and the drinking of wine, which is his blood, until He returns.
         As the mention of Pontius Pilate helps identify both the time and place of Jesus's death, the mention here of crucifixion identifies for us its means. Though borrowed from earlier empires, in the days of Jesus crucifixion was a distinctly Roman form of torture, one that was exceedingly cruel. It was a proven and efficient means of bringing death, though it did so with excruciating, almost idle, slowness. Christ endured it for several agonizing hours. During those hours of agony, while He hung upon the cross, Christ seemed to passers-by to be the villainous enemy of both the empire and of mankind, an evil malefactor who was getting merely what He deserved when, in that very act, He was our greatest benefactor, getting what we deserved.
         Infinitely more agonizing than any pain He endured in the body was the suffering of soul He endured when his own Father, for the sake of our redemption, turned his back his Son, and left Him to die alone and forsaken. The deepest abyss of Christ's suffering on the cross, we might easily surmise, was that terrible moment of supreme dereliction when He cried out, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" (Matt. 27: 46). The answer to that question, quite unbeknownst to the one who gave it, came from Caiaphas, the high priest: "it is expedient that one man die for the people, so that the people do not perish (John 18: 14).
         Luther's way of explaining the significance of the crucifixion was to stipulate that all theologies reduce to one of two varieties: theologia gloriae, or the theology of glory, and theologia crucis, or the theology of the cross. While the theology of glory insists that human beings can become acceptable to God simply by trying harder and doing better (and thereby receive the glory for their salvation by doing so), the theology of the cross realizes more accurately what human nature is truly like. It insists that no one, regardless of the effort extended, could ever become good enough to meet divine standards of righteousness. Only Christ's perfect life and his death in our place on the cross can provide that. The theology of the cross, furthermore, understands how demeaning to Christ the theology of glory really is. If we could save ourselves, if redemption and righteousness could be ours merely by greater exertion, then Christ was simply a great fool and died for nothing. What He tried to provide for us by his suffering and death, we could provide for ourselves quite as well and without going to such extreme measures. The Apostles' Creed, obviously, is a creed of the cross, not of human glory.
         Put differently, the word "crucified" describes what happened to Jesus when He stood in our place and made the fate of sinners his own: He became the object of God's curse; which is exactly what it means to be crucified (Gal. 3: 13). This was the horrifying consequence to be borne when He who had no sin became sin for us (2 Cor. 5: 21). That Christ has died on the cross in our stead, the just for the unjust, does not mean, of course, that no cross awaits us, or that in this fallen world we have no burden to bear. We do. Christ Himself taught that whoever would be his follower must take up his own cross, whatever it might be (Matt. 16: 24).
         The third poignant facet of Christ's passion brought forward for us by the creed is his death. Death as the punishment for sin is a verdict as old as the world itself, for this was the verdict God declared to our first parents -- if you sin, you die (Gen. 2: 17), a verdict repeated for us by Paul (Rom. 6: 23). In other words, it costs something to sin. As Christ's death demonstrates, it also costs something to forgive.
         In the words of Oscar Cullmann, "Death is a curse, and the whole creation has become involved in the curse. The sin of man has necessitated the whole series of events which the Bible records and which we call the story of redemption. Death can be conquered only to the extent that sin is removed" (Cullmann, Immortality of the Soul or Resurrection of the Dead? 28). Christ's atoning death extends as far as the curse of Adam is found. It covers every sin completely, fully and finally. His brutal death was something He tasted for every man (Heb. 2: 9). His death was a ransom paid on behalf of us all (1 Tim. 2: 6), a propitiation rendered for the sins of the whole world (1 John 2: 2), a world whose sins He took upon Himself (John 1: 29), and for whom He gave his life as a ransom. "For as in Adam all die," says Paul, "so also in Christ shall all be made alive" (1 Cor. 15: 22). It reduces to this: "God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself (2 Cor. 5: 19). In other words, as the writer of the epistle to the Hebrews teaches, Christ endured the shame and ignominy of the cross for the sake of the joy that was set before Him (Heb. 12: 2), a joy based upon his knowledge that, if He be lifted up in crucifixion, He would draw all men to Himself (John 12: 32). He was; He did. Because God is a God of love, He is a God of the gallows.
         What happened to Christ ought to have happened to us, for death is the inescapable destiny of all who sin. Had Christ not died for us, and had God not been merciful, it would have. To say that Christ died for us means that He died in our place and for our inestimable benefit. He stands where we sinners should have stood. He endured the divine wrath; He caught the deadly bullet upon which our names were rightly written. Because He has paid the price for sin, mercy for sinners is now possible. In the death of Christ on our behalf, God's law against evil is kept and mercy is extended to all who repent and believe. But we must never forget the means of our redemption, the shocking fact God has come so close to us that we could kill him, and did. How extraordinary to think that death should exercise dominion over Him who is life itself, but that is precisely what happened. God died. That death, like the suffering and crucifixion that preceded it, is a fact of history. The Lord does not escape death, He endures it; He conquers it; He transforms it. He makes it a door to life.
         Of course, in all this Christ was not merely passive. He did not simply get killed. After great anguish of heart, and in the face of crushing fear, He chose death. To its chilling throes He fearfully and willing submitted. No man took his life from him, Christ said, He laid it down of his own accord (John 10: 18). His death was, so to speak, something He did, an action, an accomplishment. He could have called a halt to those immoral and deadly proceedings at any moment. He could have; but because of his love for his Father and for us, He did not. To come to that position of willingness was not easy, even for the sinless Son of God, who three times petitioned his Father to take away the bitter cup set before Him. "No," His Father said, and turned away. The heart of God, because it is a heart that longs to welcome every one of his prodigal children home, because it is a heart that is not willing that any of us should perish but that all should come to repentance, that heart, for that very reason, turned its back on the One it loved most. At that very moment, our Savior learned what it means to have your most ardent prayers and requests denied, requests of life and death. One can only shudder to contemplate the results had our Heavenly Father said "Yes."
         In the past, I have always considered the crucifixion of Christ only from Christ's perspective. Not until now did I ever think about how much suffering was endured at that time by the Father, whose heart must have broken when, because of his love for us, He turned his back on his own Son.
         Christ went to his death knowing full well that, despite his own fears and misgivings, it was his Father's express will. Indeed it was the very reason for which Christ came to earth, and while the Apostles' Creed does not overtly specify the purpose of Christ's suffering and death in the way some other creeds do, its meaning is precisely the same. Christ died in company with all sinners, except for this -- his death was both worse and undeserved.
         Christ's death has significance not only for our redemption, but also for our spirituality. Our death, Paul says, takes place in Christ's. We were crucified with Him, and our "lives are hid with Christ in God" (Col. 3: 3). The implications of such a union between Christ and Christian are profound. His death includes our own, and in conjunction with his, our dying is transformed. Its apparent hopelessness, the seeming impossibility of its cure, its evident finality, have all been done away, and in their place stand the mercy and love of God, which, in Christ, triumph even over our sin and death. As many theologians have pointed out,

"the death and resurrection of Christ somehow include much more than the mere historic events which in the first instance they are. In Christ humanity has died and risen . . . It is something wrought in humanity as a whole, so that any man may claim in union with Christ to have shared His death for sin and have passed through to the resurrection-life of restored fellowship with God (Quick, Essays in Orthodoxy 101, 102).

This being so, of course, we ought to act accordingly -- putting our old selves to death, summarily executing them for being the death-dealing villains they truly are. The death of Christ, as almost the entire tradition of Christian spirituality attests, ought to be one of the controlling images of our sanctification and our life with God.
         Before turning to Christ's burial, we need to make one further point regarding his death. As was the word "suffered," the word "dead" here is a later addition to the creed. Both words were added in opposition to the Docetists, who, contrary to the clear record of Scripture, taught that the death of Jesus was merely an apparent death, not a real one. In fact, in a vain attempt to establish their beliefs, some Docetists even surmised that Christ somehow escaped from his captors and that either Judas Iscariot or Simon of Cyrene died in his place. That the Docetists should transform the betrayer of the Savior into the savior of the Savior simply demonstrates the perverse lengths to which some people go in order to preserve a cherished but roundly mistaken prejudice.
         But the creed's anti-Docetism continues. By going on to affirm that Christ was "buried," the creed makes the Docetic view all the more unthinkable. By this word the creed effectively underscores the reality of the crucifixion and death of Jesus. The suffering ended in crucifixion; the crucifixion ended in death; the death was sealed in burial.
         Jesus was buried, Scripture says, in the borrowed tomb of Joseph of Arimathea, who, along with Nicodemus, had procured from Pilate Christ's dead body, which they prepared for burial and then interred. Their well-intentioned efforts were "the last tribute of love from friends who had ceased to hope: He was buried" (Westcott, The Historic Faith 62). Having buried Him, his friends did for Him all they could do. And, as was every other fact mentioned in this article of the creed, Jesus's burial was a matter of prophecy, being foreshadowed by Jonah's three days in the belly of the great fish, to which Christ Himself referred (Matt 12: 40).
         The burial of Christ, Paul tells us, was a key element in the tradition and instruction he received (1 Cor. 15: 4). Little wonder then that he made it part of his own message from the very beginning (Acts 13: 29), and that the creed incorporates it here.
         In his burial, as in all the other of his actions pertinent to the creed, Christ is our pioneer. I recall here Richard Baxter's comforting observation that Christ leads us through no darker rooms than He went through before. The tomb, we may be sure, is one of the very darkest of those rooms. But the light that shines in darkness, the light that enlightens everyone who comes into the world (John 1: 5, 9), shines even in the obscure recesses of the grave.
         Paul exhorts us not only to be crucified with Christ, but also to be buried with him. That is, we not merely put our sinful desires to death, we put them to death and lock them away forever. To this renunciation of sin, Paul teaches (Romans 6: 4), we were committed in our baptism. Like Christ in his tomb, our sinful selves must be buried in the baptismal waters, so that like Him, we too can be raised in newness of life.
         But though Christ's lifeless body was laid to rest in a borrowed tomb, his soul's journey had not yet ended. By declaring that Christ "descended into Hell," the creed announces the final, indeed ultimate, stage in what G. F. Maclear called Christ's "ever-deepening humiliation" (Maclear, An Introduction to the Creeds 118). For our sakes Christ went through Hell; He went through Hell to get to Heaven, so that where He now is we might be also.
         Although this phrase was not incorporated into the creed until sometime in the middle-to-late fourth century, Christian writers dating back even to the apostles themselves make reference to what it teaches. The apostle Peter, for example, on the day of Pentecost, mentions it in his very first Christian sermon when, quoting one of the prophetic psalms of king David regarding Christ, he proclaimed to the listening Jews that God would not leave the soul of his Son to languish in Hades (Acts 2: 31), thus indicating Peter's belief that Christ's soul, after death, descended into Hell. In other words, even though this notion was late in being incorporated into the creed, Peter's Pentecost sermon and his related comments elsewhere (1 Pet. 3: 18-20; 4: 6) combine with those of Paul (Eph. 4: 8-10 [cp. Ps. 49:17ff.]; Rom. 10: 6, 7; 1 Cor. 15: 29) and several early church fathers to attest not only that this belief is biblical but that it was widespread in Christian antiquity. In the second century, for example, both Ignatius and Irenaeus allude to it, the former in his epistle to the Magnesians, the latter a full half dozen times in his polemic against heresy. So also do other second century theologians like Justin Martyr and Tertullian, as well as later writers like Clement, Origen, Cyril, and Rufinus, to name but a few. In addition, early Christian apocryphal literature, such as the so-called Gospel of Peter and the so-called Acts of Pilate, is replete with such allusions. Interestingly, The Shepherd of Hermas, which dates from about 140 A. D., says that the message of Christ was taken to Hell not by Jesus but by the apostles.
         Except perhaps for that concerning the virgin birth of Jesus, this phrase in the creed is the one most often denied by modern theologians. It seems to them too crude, too much the child of an outdated view of the world. Enlightened people, we are told, can no longer believe that Christ descended into Hell; He merely entered the realm of the dead. But that is not true. The words "dead," buried," and "Hell" in this creed are not all the same and are not interchangeable. As I have indicated, many of the earliest Christians -- apostles, sub-apostolic fathers, apologists, theologians, priests, laymen, even heretics -- did, in fact, believe that, as the nadir of his redemptive humiliation, Christ Himself entered the bowels of Hell. To adopt the modernist interpretation of this portion of the creed is to consign it to mere redundancy, as if descending into Hell were merely another way of saying He was among the dead. But Christ's death and burial were already clearly affirmed in the creed. The Apostles' Creed, perhaps more than any other, studiously shuns redundancy and verbosity, as by now must be clear to every reader. He who became sin for us endured the just punishment for sin; He went to Hell, compared to which his brutal suffering and death were but prologue. Here as elsewhere the creed means what it says. On this point Emil Brunner is exactly right: "Jesus has experienced not only the greatest human, earthly suffering; he has suffered the tortures of Hell in the literal, serious sense of the word . . . [H]e has suffered Hell for us" (Brunner, I Believe in the Living God 77, 82). That is, while the word "descended" might be figurative, the word "Hell" is not. If you want to rescue a trapped or dying miner, you must go down to where he is. We have Christ's own word on it that most who ever lived go the broad way that leads down to Hell. To rescue them, or even some of them, He had to follow them there. That rescue, Peter tells us, was effectuated by the gospel of Christ in the words of Christ (1 Pet. 4: 6).
         For those who are in Christ, therefore, there remains no punishment for sin because He Himself has already borne it. He walked through fire until his feet had trod it down, and He dethroned the vile emperor of the realm of sorrows. He endured the final, the ultimate, judgement upon sin: "He descended into Hell." For that reason, the early church often found itself echoing the psalmist's words of awe and of amazement: "Even if I go down to Hell, behold, you are there also" (Psalm 139: 8).
         When Christ spoke about Hell, He sometimes used the word "Gehenna" to describe it. Gehenna was the always-burning garbage dump just outside Jerusalem. Hell, under this image, is the garbage dump of lost and ruined souls, the smoldering repository of wasted human beings. In his descent into Hell, Christ became, and I say this most reverently, the divine Garbage Picker, sifting through the living debris, salvaging what still could be salvaged.
         In other words, his descent from Heaven reached not simply to the realm of the dead, but to the realm of the lost, to the prisonhouse of the underworld. Because it did, we cannot, none of us, go where He Himself has not gone before. No one can claim to have undergone a suffering beyond the reach of Christ's, for there exists no depth of pain or punishment beyond that of Hell. No one, saved or lost, can ever go where the Son of God Himself has not gone.
         Jesus set his face like flint toward Jerusalem, the Bible says (Luke 9: 51), indicating that He would not be deterred from the accomplishment of his divine mission by anyone or anything, not even Hell itself. He intends to build his Church, and the gates of Hell are not going to prevail against it (Matt. 16: 18). In the very bowels of Hell, there was no rescue party for Him; He was the rescuer. He was no paper tiger. He was not mere talk or boast. He felt a profound recoil at death's approach, something He acknowledged three times to his Father in the garden of Gethsemane. The putrid stench of Hell filled his nostrils. But He marched resolutely forward to meet death and Hell face to face and to conquer them.
         Because of the mercy of the Father and the obedience of the Son, the gospel cannot be walled either in or out. This phrase in the creed, in other words, seems to imply that Christ's victory is total. Not death, not even the Hell itself, falls beyond the pale of Christ's redemptive triumph. God enters Hell and Hell succumbs. The salvific sovereignty of God is not closed out even by the adamantine walls of Hell, for mercy is omnipresent. Where the love of God has an intention, the power of God provides a means. No obstacles prevent the redemptive ingress of the almighty Father.
         Christ descended into Hell, we can assume, for two reasons. First, He seems to have done so in order to shoulder the full punishment of sin, which includes not only death of the body but also of the soul. He was not spared any of the penalty of sin, physical or spiritual. He drank the cup of divine wrath all the way to the bottom, to the bitter dregs of Hell. Second, He seems to have done it in order to spoil Satan of his ill-gotten plunder, which he presumed to take from God. Christ entered into the enemy's own house and defeated him even there. Christ has not only invaded but conquered the Devil's citadel, the very capital of the kingdom of iniquity. As Hendrikus Berkhof once affirmed to me, "God ultimately will be all in all . . . I am convinced that there will be no finally successful attempt to plunder anything from God's vineyard. Satan may win many battles, but he will not win the war" (Bauman, Roundtable 70).
         From Christ's descent into Hell three lessons can be drawn. First, no matter what our current spiritual condition, God can still reach us. We have but to turn around and walk back into the light, into the open arms of a waiting, loving, beckoning Father. Second, the wickedness of human sin must indeed be very great if Christ Himself had to descend to such depths to undo it. Third, there seems to be no depth to which God cannot reach, and no darkness his light cannot brighten.
         If Christ goes to such depths for us, what lengths ought we ourselves to go for Him and for those whom He loves?
         But as spring follows winter, and as day follows night, Easter follows Good Friday. The story is not over.

date modified:
5 July 2006

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