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Bible Dictionaries
Hell (2)
Hastings' Dictionary of the New Testament
or HELL (Descent into).—During the 16th cent. the Descent of Christ into Hades was made the subject of acrimonious debates. Though commentators still differ, they discuss the subject in a more peaceable spirit, and offer some hope of future agreement on the main question. We must review—(1) the evidence of the NT, (2) early Christian tradition, to explain (3) the insertion of such teaching in Creeds and Articles of Religion. We may then (4) summarize the history of the controversy in modern times.
1. The evidence of the NT.—It is important to distinguish between the bare statement of the Descent as a fact in the history of our Lord as the Son of Man, which is acknowledged by all who believe that He truly died, and any theory of His mission in the unseen world, which can claim acceptance only after careful scrutiny of incidental references to it in the NT supported by the independent testimony of the earliest Christian tradition.
Hades (Αἵδης), corresponding to the Heb. Sheol, which in the Authorized Version of the OT is rendered by ‘hell,’ means both in the LXX Septuagint and in the NT the abode of departed spirits. This was the general meaning of the word ‘hell,’ the unseen, hidden place which is the abode of the dead.
In the OT a sense of gloom and unreality was felt about the lot of the spirits of men taken away from the light and activity of earthly life. At first no distinction was supposed to exist in that shadowy realm between good and bad any more than between king and subject. But in NT times such ideas had grown up, and our Lord sanctioned current belief when in the parable of Dives and Lazarus (Luke 16:19-31) He contrasted happiness in the society of Abraham with misery ‘in corments.’ This agrees with His promise to the penitent thief (Luke 23:43): ‘To-day shalt thou be with me in Paradise.’ St. Peter in his first sermon (Acts 2:24-31) quotes Psalms 16:10 and explains the words, ‘Thou wilt not leave my soul in Hades,’ as a prophecy of the Resurrection of Christ, which received no fulfilment in the case of David. He distinctly implies that Christ’s soul passed into Hades at His death.
St. Paul (Romans 10:7), adapting Deuteronomy 30:13, teaches the same truth inferring that it is not necessary to search the depth, since Christ is risen from the dead. He regards the Descent as the preparation for the Ascension, Ephesians 4:9 ‘Now this, He ascended, what is it but that he also descended into the lower parts of the earth?’ In the LXX Septuagint rendering of Psalms 62:10 (Psalms 63:9), this phrase, τὰ κατώτατα τῆς γῆς, is referred to Hades. It is therefore probable that St. Paul uses it in the same sense.* [Note: Some commentators explain the words as contrasting the earth beneath with the heavens above, and refer them to the Incarnation when Christ descended to the earth.] Obedience even unto death secured for the Lord the sovereignty of the underworld; His descent was the pledge of His lordship over it (Philippians 2:10).
The famous passage 1 Peter 3:18-20 (cf. 1 Peter 4:6) introduces the question of the object of the Descent: ‘Because Christ also suffered for sins once, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God; being put to death in the flesh, but quickened in the spirit; in which also he went and preached unto the spirits in prison, which aforetime were disobedient, when the long-suffering of God waited in the days of Noah, while the ark was a preparing’; 1 Peter 4:6 ‘For unto this end was the gospel preached even to the dead, that they might be judged according to men in the flesh, but live according to God in the spirit.’
The earliest Christian tradition, which was probably independent of this passage, certainly supports the interpretation that Christ preached to the spirits of the men and women who were drowned in the Flood. Not until the time of St. Augustine was any other interpretation offered. The Apostle is endeavouring to encourage his readers in Christlike patience under persecution. Christ died, the just for the unjust, but His death in the flesh was followed by quickening in the spirit. Therefore we need not fear death, which will bring us freedom from sin and increase of spiritual energy. The reference which follows (1 Peter 3:22) to the Ascension suggests that this preaching took place after Christ’s death, and not that Christ in Noah preached to the men of Noah’s time.
In view of modern interpretations, however, we must enter further into detail. πνεύματα in the NT generally refers to angels (Acts 23:8), but it refers also to spirits of the dead (Hebrews 12:23, cf. Luke 24:37-39). And 1 Peter 4:6 proves that this is the sense here.† [Note: The tense of εὑαγγελίσθη shows that the preaching was regarded as a completed act in the past.]
Some critics suppose that the preaching was to the fallen angels mentioned in 2 Peter 2:4, Judges 1:6; according to Baur, after Christ’s death; according to Spitta, before the Incarnation. This view is regarded by Charles (art. ‘Eschatology’ in Encyc. Bibl.) as the only possible alternative. But Charles holds that Christ preached a gospel of redemption between His death and His resurrection. Salmond thinks that the key may be found in a non-canonical Jewish book. Others, again, think that Enoch was regarded as an incarnation of the Messiah, and that the passage refers to his preaching. But as Clemen says (Niedergefahren, p. 131), while we hear in the Book of Enoch (12:4ff., 13:8, 14:1ff.) of a preaching of punishment to fallen angels, we hear nothing of a preaching of salvation to the souls of men.
Perhaps the most extraordinary interpretation of all is that which Clemen quotes from Cramer. An unknown person, in possession of 1 and 2 Pet., is supposed to have been reminded by v. 22 of a former ὑποταγή of angels, and therefore on the basis of 2 Peter 2:4 f. with which he compared Judges 1:6; Judges 1:14 and also the Book of Enoch, is supposed to have written in the margin: Ἐνὼχ τοῖς ἐν φυλακῇ πνεύμασιν πορευθεὶς ἐκήρυξεν, κ.τ.λ., understanding πνεύμασιν of angels and ἐκήρυξεν of a concio damnatoria. Some one else at a later time, referring the first word to the souls of the departed and the latter to the preaching of salvation, reading ΕΝΩΚ for ΕΝΩΧ, and this again for ἐν ᾦ καί, took the whole into the text after 1 Peter 3:18!
Such speculations are absurd. On the other hand, it is reasonable to explain the ἐκήρυξεν of the one passage by the εὐαγγελίσθη of the other, to maintain that repentance was offered, rejecting the suggestion that Christ preached only to the righteous, or to those who had repented at the moment of death, or to some the gospel and to others damnation.
If it is asked, Why should only the generation of Noah profit by it? we can say that they were typical sinners, cut off in their sins, whose fate was questioned at that time. Bigg shows that ‘it is possible that St. Peter is here expressing in a modified form a belief which was current in the Jewish schools.’ Certain passages in the Book of Enoch seem to mean that the antediluvian sinners have a time of repentance allowed them between the first judgment (the Deluge) and the final judgment; e.g. 69:26 ‘There was great joy among them because the name of the Son of Man was revealed unto them,’ Bereshith Rabba: (a) ‘But when they that are bound, they that are in Gehinnom, saw the light of the Messiah, they rejoiced to receive Him’; (b) ‘This is that which stands written: “We shall rejoice and exult in Thee.” When? When the captives climb up out of hell, and the Shekinah at their head.’
We may hope that research will yet further enlighten us on these points. Enough has been said to prove that, in the words of Professor Charles (art. cited):
‘These passages in 1 Peter are of extreme value. They attest the achievement of the final stage in the moralization of Shĕôl. The first step in this moralization was taken early in the 2nd cent. b.c., when it was transferred into a place of moral distinctions, having been originally one of merely social or national distinctions. This moralization, however, was very inadequately carried out. What they were on entering Shĕôl, that they continued to be till the final judgment. From the standpoint of a true theism can we avoid pronouncing this conception mechanical and unethical? It precludes moral change in moral beings who are under the rule of a perfectly moral being.’
2. Early Christian tradition.—The belief that Christ’s descent into Hades changed in some way the condition of the faithful departed meets us in the earliest Christian tradition.
Ignatius (a.d. 115), writing to the Magnesians (c. ix.), says: ‘Even the prophets, being His disciples, were expecting Him as their teacher through the Spirit. And for this cause He whom they rightly awaited, when He came, raised them from the dead.’
Justin Martyr, in his Dialogue with Trypho (c. 72) accuses the Jews of cutting out the following passage from Jeremiah: ‘The Lord God remembered His dead people of Israel, who lay in the graves, and descended to preach to them His own salvation.’
Irenaeus quotes this passage both from Isaiah (in Isaiah 3:22) and from Jeremiah (in 4:36), and (in 4:55) without naming the author. It is probably a fragment from some Jewish Apocalypse. Irenaeus (4:42) also quotes a presbyter ‘who had heard it from those who had seen the Apostles and from those who had been their disciples,’ as saying that ‘the Lord descended to the underworld, preaching His advent there also, and declaring remission of sins received by those who believe in Him.’
Tertullian (de Anima, c. 55) taught that Christ ‘in Hades underwent the law of human death; nor did He ascend to the heights of heaven, until He descended to the lower parts of the earth, that there He might make patriarchs and prophets sharers of His life.’
We may even claim the heretic Marcion as a witness to this widespread tradition, though in his view, according to Irenaeus (1. xxvii. 3), it was Cain and the Sodomites and other sinners who were released by the Lord from Hades.
The apocryphal Gospel of Peter, which may be dated possibly from about a.d. 165, contains the following passage: ‘They see three men coming forth from the tomb, two of them supporting the other, and a cross following them; and the head of the two reached to heaven; but that of Him who was led by them over-passed the heavens. And they heard a voice from the heavens saying, Hast thou preached to them that sleep? and a response was heard from the cross, Yea.’
The apocryphal Gospel of Nicodemus, a name given in the 13th cent. to two much older books, the Acts of Pilate and the Descent into Hell, tells the same story of the two brothers with a considerable amount of dramatic power.
Clement of Alexandria is the first Christian writer who brings the passage in 1 Peter into connexion with the tradition that Christ’s Descent benefited OT saints. He taught that the heathen, as well as the Jews, shared in the revelation made to the souls in Hades. He quotes Hermas (Sim. ix. 16), who taught that the Apostles and first teachers of the gospel, when they entered into rest, preached to the souls in Hades. Clement (Strom. ii. 9, p. 452) explains the passage as including righteous heathens as well as Jews, though it is not clear that Hermas himself contemplated such an application of his words. The example quoted by St. Peter appeared to him to be only one example of a far-reaching law (Strom. vi. 6).
Origen seems to have been the first to suggest that, since the coming of Christ, the souls of the faithful can go at once to Paradise instead of Hades, regarding Paradise as an intermediate state (in Reg. Hom. 2). In his treatise against Celsus (2:43), to the scoff, ‘You will not surely say that Christ, when He failed to persuade the living, went down to Hades to persuade those who dwell there?’ he replies: ‘His soul, stript of the body, did there hold converse with other souls that were in like manner stript, that He might there convert those who were capable of instruction, or were otherwise in ways known to Him fit for it.
Athanasius speaks of the warders at the gates of Hell ‘cowering in fear at the presence of the Lord,’ quoting in this connexion Matthew 27:54. He thinks (de Sal. Aduent. 9) of ‘the soul of Adam as held fast under the sentence of death, and crying to his Lord evermore, and of those who had pleased God, and had been justified by the law of nature, as mourning and crying with him,’ till God in His mercy revealed the mystery of redemption. He quotes 1 Peter 3:19 in connexion with the Descent (Ep. ad Epict. 5).
The later Fathers, while they regarded Hades as a place of rest for the just, regarded Paradise as something better. Both Ambrose (de Fide ad Gratian. iv. 1) and Jerome (Com. in Eccles. c. iii.) followed Origen on this line of thought. This notion became the germ of the mediaeval doctrine of the Limbus Patrum.
Cyril of Jerusalem (Cat. iv.) classed the doctrine of the Descent among the ten necessary dogmas, interpreting it as designed for the redemption of the just. ‘Could you wish,’ he asks, ‘that the living should enjoy His grace, and that the holy dead should not share in freedom?’ Having named OT saints, he explains John the Baptists question ‘Art thou he that should come?’ as referring to the Descent. In this opinion he was followed by Rufinus.
Hilary of Poitiers (on Psalms 119:82) speaks of the souls of the faithful as knowing, on the witness of the Apostle Peter, that when the Lord went down into Hades, words of comfort were preached even to those who were in prison and were formerly unbelieving in the days of Noah. It is interesting to add that the Venerable Bede quoted the words, without naming the author, in order to condemn them, on the ground that the Catholic faith taught only the release of the faithful.
It was reserved for Augustine to give a new interpretation to St. Peter’s words. In his earlier books he accepts the current teaching, but confuses Hades and Gehenna. In de Gen. ad litt. xii. 63, he says that there is reason for believing that the soul of Christ descended to the regions where sinners are punished, that He might release from torment those whom He, in His righteous judgment, which is hidden from us, found worthy to be loosed.
In his letter to Euodius, Bp. of Uzala, oo the right interpretation of 1 Peter 3:19, as Bp. Horsley puts it, ‘he perplexes himself with questions.’ Why, out of all the tens of thousands who had died before the coming of Christ, some at least, though heathen, penitent and believing, did He bestow the knowledge of the gospel on those only who had perished in the Flood? He accepts the common belief that Adam was released. He notes that some believed this of Abel, Seth, Noah, and other patriarchs. Still confusing Hades with Gehenna, be asks, How could Abraham’s bosom he a synonym for Paradise? Were the patriarchs worse off than Abraham? If they were at rest, how could they be benefited by Christ’s descent into Hades? What was done for the disobedient of Noab’s time should be done for all who died in ignorance before or since. But the idea that a man might believe after death would weaken the appeal of Christian preaching to the ‘terrors of the Lord.’ Not able to believe in salvation without Baptism, he cuts the knot of the difficulty by denying that the words of St. Peter had anything to do with the descent of Christ into Hades. Christ preached in spirit in the days of Noah as in Galilee in the days of His flesh. Plumptre truly says: ‘he leaves all the questions which he had started as to the descent itself unanswered.’ Finally (de Heres. 79), he reckoned it a heresy to believe that Christ cleared Hell of all the souls that were then in torment.
3. Creeds and Articles of Religion.—At the end of the 4th cent., Rufinus, commenting on the clause ‘descended into hell’ in the Creed of his native city of Aquileia, noted that it was not contained in the Creed of the Church of Rome or in Eastern Creeds. This is true of Baptismal Creeds, but not of others. The words had found a place in three confessions of faith put forward by Arian Synods at Sirmium, Nice, and Constantinople.
| Sirmium, a.d. 359. | Nice, a.d. 359. | Constantinople, a.d. 360. |
| καὶ εἰς τὰ καταχθόνια κατελθόντα, καὶ τὰ ἐκεῖσε οἰκονομήσαντα. | καὶ ταφέντα καὶ εἰς τὰ καταχθόνια κατελθόντα | καὶ ταφέντα καὶ εἰς τὰ καταξθόνια κατεληλυθότα· |
| ὃν πυλωροὶ ἃδου ἰδοντες ἔφριξαν | ὄν αὐτὸς ὁ ἄδης ἐτρόμασε. | ὅντινα καὶ αὐτὸς ὁ ᾳδης ἔπτηξεν. |
It is interesting to compare also the recently discovered ‘Faith of St. Jerome,’ which contains the words ‘descended into hell, trod down the sting of death.’ It has been found by Dom G. Morin, O.S.B., in some four MSS [Note: SS Manuscripts.] , and is probably the Confession of Faith which Jerome notes in one of the letters he had drawn up for Cyril of Jerusalem. This ‘Faith’ contains elements which may have been drawn from his Baptismal Creed of Pannonia. In like manner it is possible that the Sirmium Creed, quoted above, at this point quoted the Baptismal Creed of the district, since Sirmium is in the south-east corner of Pannonia. But it seems that the Creed was drawn up mainly by Mark, Bp. of Arethusa in Palestine; and there are traces of the influence of Cyril of Jerusalem elsewhere in this document. The doctrine was one on which he felt strongly; and, therefore, in default of further evidence as to the Pannonian Creed, it is safer to trace to his influence the occurrence of the words in the Creed of Sirmium, on which the Creeds of Nice and Constantinople are dependent.
As regards the interpretation put on the clause in the Creed of Aquileia, Pearson is incorrect when he suggests that Rufinus merely regarded it as equivalent to ‘buried,’ which was omitted. The Creed certainly contained the word ‘buried,’ and Rufinus was at pains to show that this word in the Eastern Creeds, as in the Roman, included the idea of a descent into Hades. Swete (p. 61) suggests that Rufinus had lost the clue to the interpretation of the clause, and that the addition was made long before his time, possibly to meet the Docetic tendency of the latter part of the 2nd century. The difficulty about this suggestion is that the Docetic apocryphal Gospel of Peter, as we have seen, distinctly teaches belief in the descent. The present writer would rather regard pseudo-Peter as witnessing to the common belief of the 2nd cent., and explain the addition in the Aquileian Creed as derived from the ordinary catechetical teaching, of which it may have been as ‘necessary a dogma’ then in Aquileia as in Jerusalem in the 4th century.
In the time of Rufinus it might seem more necessary to insist on such teaching in view of the rise of the heresy of Apollinaris, who denied that the Lord had a human soul. But Rufinus himself gives no hint of this. There is more reason to connect the occurrence of the clause in the so-called Athanasian Creed, now generally accepted as a Gallican writing of the 5th cent., with opposition to Apollinarianism, because the author obviously had that heresy in view. There is no proof, however, that the clause had yet passed into any Gallican Creed. By the end of the century we find it in the Creed of Caesarius of Arles, and in the century following in the Creeds of Venantins Fortunatus of Poitiers and of the Spanish Bishop Martin of Bracara. Thus it passed into the Received Text of the Western Creed.
During the Middle Ages the idea of the ‘Harrowing of Hell’ was made popular by the Gospel of Nicodemus, and as the theme of Mystery Plays, and at a later time by Christian Art. Discussion seldom arose. But the opinion of Abelard that the soul of Christ entered the underworld only virtually and not substantially, was condemned by the Council of Sens (1140) and Pope Innocent II. It found favour with Durandus and Pico della Mirandola, whose names may suffice to show that the debate was not extinct in the 15th century. During the Reformation period, controversy began to wax fierce, and was reflected in some of the more famous Articles of Religion. In the Confession of Augsburg the bare fact of the Descent is stated, but the Geneva Catechism taught that the Descent meant only the terrible anguish with which the soul of Christ was tried. The Catechism of the Church of the Palatinate explained that Christ descended in order that the Christian in all his mental and spiritual agonies might know that there was One who had borne them and could sympathize with them. These Catechisms reflect the opinion of prominent leaders of thought. Luther, in his Table Talk (ccvi.), spoke of the laying of the devil in chains as the purpose of the Descent. His view fluctuated, but in his Com. on Hosea 6:1 he wrote that Peter clearly teaches that Christ preached to some who, in the time of Noah, had not believed, and who waited for the long-suffering of God—that is, who hoped that God would not enter into so strict a judgment with all flesh—to the intent that they might acknowledge that their sins were forgiven through the sacrifice of Christ.
It was Calvin (Institut. ii. 16) who taught the revolting doctrine that the Descent means that in His suffering on earth, in Gethsemane and on the Cross, Christ suffered all the horrors of hell. To which Pearson’s words are a sufficient reply: ‘There is a worm that never dieth which could not lodge within His breast; that is, a remorse of conscience, seated in the soul, for what that soul hath done; but such a remorse of conscience could not be in Christ.’ Zwingli (Fidei chr. exp., art. ‘de Christo,’ 7) taught that when Christ died the weight of His Redemption penetrated to the Underworld.
The Westminster Standards practically ignore the question of the Descent. The Confession of Faith is wholly silent, and so is the Shorter Catechism. The only allusion to the subject is in the Larger Catechism, where the answer to Question 50 runs: ‘Christ’s humiliation after His death consisted in His being buried, and continuing in the state of the dead, and under the power of death till the third day; which hath been otherwise expressed in these words, He descended into hell.’
Bishop Alley of Exeter, in a paper drawn up for the Convocation of 1553 wrote: ‘There have been in my diocese great invections between the preachers.’ He asked that some certainty might be set concerning this doctrine. Perhaps this explains the form which was given to the third of the Forty-two Articles of 1553.
‘As Christ died and was buried for us: so also it is to be believed that He went down into hell. For the body lay in the sepulchre until the resurrection: but His ghost departing from Him was with the ghosts that were in prison or in hell, and did preach to the same, as the place of St. Peter doth testify.’
Bishop Alley’s ‘hope of certainty’ was not fulfilled, and in 1563 the Elizabethan revisers, with rare wisdom, struck out the last clause.
The Roman Catechism* [Note: Rom. 95.] speaks of the release of holy and just men as the purpose of the Descent, of the imparting of the fruit of the Passion, and of the Beatific Vision.
4. Summary of the controversy in modern times.—We may begin this section with the names of Pearson and Hammond, who agreed in teaching that the only meaning of St. Peter’s words was that Christ by His Holy Spirit inspired the preaching of Noah.
Hammond (ad loc.) writes: ‘The spirits in the prison are those souls of men that lay so sheathed, so useless and unprofitable in their bodies, immersed so deep in calamity as not to perform any service to God, who inspired and placed them there.’ He quotes Isaiah 42:7; Isaiah 49:9; Isaiah 61:1 to prove that elsewhere it is ‘a figurative speech to express wicked men.’ ‘By His Spirit is evidently meant that Divine power by which He was raised from the dead after His crucifixion.’ We have already noted the objections to this interpretation, and also the fact that Pearson on this point confuses Hades and Gehenna. He writes, indeed, ‘less lucidly than is his wont,’ but in regard of the Descent regarded as a fact his final summary strikes no uncertain note.
‘I give a full and undoubting assent unto this as to a certain truth, that when all the sufferings of Christ were finished on the Cross, and His soul was separated from His body, though His body were dead, yet His soul died not; and though it died not, yet it underwent the condition of the souls of such as die; and being [i.e. since] He died in the similitude of a sinner, His soul went to the place where the souls of men are kept who die for their sins, and so did wholly undergo the law of death.’
Barrow taught to the same effect (Serm. xxviii.): ‘If we do thus interpret our Saviour’s descent into hell, for His soul’s going into the common receptacle and mansion of souls, we shall so doing be sure not substantially to mistake.’ He adds: ‘I cannot well be at the pain to consider or examine those conceits, which pretend to acquaint us why and to what effect our Saviour descended into hell.’ This almost contemptuous refusal to discuss the passages in St. Peter is partly explained by the gaps in the line of evidence of early Christian tradition which was known at that time. Coming from a man of Barrow’s calibre, it has probably had great weight.
On the other hand, Jeremy Taylor,* [Note: Eden, ii. 718, 720.] while he avoids any explanation of St. Peter’s reference to the Deluge, maintains the Patristic view that Christ improved the condition of holy souls.
‘And then it was that Christ made their condition better: for though still it be a place of relation in order to something beyond it, yet the term and object of their hope is changed: they sate in the regions of darkness, expecting that great promise made to Adam and the patriarchs, the promise of the Messias; but when He that was promised came, He “preached to the spirits in prison,” He communicated to them the mysteries of the gospel, the secrets of the kingdom, the things hidden from eternal ages, and taught them to look up to the glories purchased by His passion, and made the term of their expectation be His second coming, and the objects of their hope the glories of the beatific vision.… But now it was that in the dark and undiscerned mansions there was a scene of the greatest joy and the greatest horror represented, which yet was known since the first falling of the morning stars. Those holy souls, whom the prophet Zechariah calls “prisoners of hope,” lying in the lake where there is no water, that is, no constant stream of joy to refresh their present condition (yet supported with certain showers and gracious visitations from God and illuminations of their hope); now that they saw their Redeemer come to change their condition, and to improve it into the neighbourhoods of glory and clearer revelations, must needs have the joy of intelligent and beatified understandings, of redeemed captives, of men forgiven after the sentence of death, of men satisfied after a tedious expectation, enjoying and seeing their Lord, whom, for so many ages, they had expected. But the accursed spirits, seeing the darkness of their prison shine with a new light, and their empire invaded, and their retirements of horror discovered, wondered how a man durst venture thither, or, if he were a God, how he should come to die.’
Bishop Horsley’s sermon on 1 Peter 3:19 at the end of the 18th cent. is the next important contribution to the subject. He regretted the alteration of the Third Article of 1563. He found it difficult to believe that ‘of the millions who died in the Flood all died impenitent.’ He taught that Christ ‘certainly preached neither repentance nor faith, for the preaching of either comes too late for the departed soul.’ He faced the great difficulty why only this one class of penitents should be mentioned, having ‘observed in some parts of Scripture an anxiety, if the expression may be allowed, of the sacred writers to convey distinct intimations that the antediluvian race is not uninterested in the redemption and the final retribution.’ The following words also deserve quotation, for they go to the root of the matter. ‘If the clear assertions of Holy Writ are to be discredited on account of difficulties which may seem to the human mind to arise out of them, little will remain to be believed in revealed or even in what is called natural religion.’
About the same time, Dr. Hey, Norrisian Professor at Cambridge, gave in his lectures a succinet account of the history of the doctrine, and discussed the difficulty of using the metaphor of descent in popular language (3rd ed. p. 654).
There is an excellent survey of the literature of the subject down to the middle of the last century in Dean Alford’s Greek Testament. Both he and Bishop Wordsworth accepted the Patristic view that Christ preached salvation to the disembodied spirits of those drowned in the Flood if found penitent. Thus light is thrown on ‘one of the darkest enigmas of Divine justice.’ Bishop Harold Browne expounded the Article to the same effect, and has been followed recently by Bishop Gibson. But not all writers were equally bold. Bishop Harvey Goodwin was content with what was practically Pearson’s position. Bishop Westcott (Historic Faith, p. 77) feared to say more on ‘a mystery where our thought fails us and Scripture is silent.’ Surely this is too dogmatic in face of the great consensus of opinion which interprets 1 Peter 3:19 literally.
There is a full account of modern German literature on this subject in Clemen’s Niedergefahren zu den Toten. He interprets 1 Peter 3:19 as referring to human spirits, and builds on it an argument in favour of ‘the larger hope,’ though he does not commit himself to any theory of Universal Restitution. He makes much use of English books, especially Dean Plumptre’s The Spirits in Prison.
This survey of the whole course of the controversy leads to the conclusion that eventually agreement will be reached as to the exegesis of the passage in 1 Peter. The weighty authority of Professor Charles may be invoked to prove that the interpretation which accepts Christ’s mission to the dead fits in with our fuller knowledge of contemporary Jewish literature. It throws light on one of the darkest enigmas of the Divine justice. At the same time full justice will be done to the early Christian tradition that in some way or other Christ benefited the souls of the faithful departed. But it must be admitted that the bare statement of the Apostles’ Creed asserts only that Christ’s soul passed into the condition which our souls will enter at death, sanctifying every condition of human existence. Harnack writes that ‘the clause is too weak to maintain its ground beside the others, as equally independent and authoritative,’ but, as Swete (p. 62) says, he fails to point out in what the weakness lies, while ‘to us it appears to possess in a very high degree the strength which comes from primitive simplicity and a wise reserve.’
Thus the consensus of theological opinion justifies the teaching of the poet of the Christian Year:* [Note: Keble, Easter Eve.]
‘Sleep’st Thou indeed? or is Thy spirit fled
At large among the dead?
Whether in Eden bowers Thy welcome voice
Wake Abraham to rejoice,
Or in some drearier scene Thine eye controls
The thronging band of souls;
That, as Thy blood won earth, Thine agony
Might set the shadowy world from sin and sorrow free.’
Literature.—C. Bigg, Com. on Epistles of St. Peter and St. Jude, Clark, 1901: C. Clemen, Niedergefahren zu den Toten, Giessen, 1900; Bishop Gibson, The Thirty-nine Articles2 [Note: designates the particular edition of the work referred] , Methuen, 1898; Bishop Harold Browne, The Thirty-nine Article2 [Note: designates the particular edition of the work referred] , 1854; Bishop Pearson, Expos, of the Apostles’ Creed, ed. Burton3 [Note: designates the particular edition of the work referred] , 1847; E. H. Plumptre, The Spirits in Prison, labister, 1885; S. D. F. Salmond, Christian Doct, of Immortality5 [Note: designates the particular edition of the work referred] , Clark, 1903; F. Spitta, Christi Predigt an die Geister, 1890; H. B. Swete, The Apostles’ Creed, Cambridge, 1899.
A. E. Burn.
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Hastings, James. Entry for 'Hell (2)'. Hastings' Dictionary of the New Testament. https://www.studylight.org/dictionaries/eng/hdn/h/hell-2.html. 1906-1918.
