He descended into hell

The Text

The single most consequential question this clause raises is which Latin form is older and what either form means. Both inferna and inferos are plural nouns meaning “the [places] below” — the realm of the dead, not a place of torment.

Translation Notes

The Latin word inferna / inferos translates the Hebrew Sheol and the Greek Hades — the shadowy underworld common to all the dead in ancient cosmology — not Gehenna, the fiery place of judgment Jesus speaks of in the Gospels.

The English word “hell” in 1662 carried the older, broader sense of “the covered place” (cognate with German Hölle, Old English helan, “to cover”). It could mean either Hades or Gehenna. After about 1700, English “hell” narrowed almost exclusively to mean Gehenna, the place of damnation — which is why the line now sounds, to modern ears, like a claim it never originally made.

The shift to “to the dead” in ICET (1975) and ELLC (1988) was a translation correction, not a doctrinal revision. It restores what inferos actually means while losing the older English’s deliberate ambiguity.

The Greek katelthónta eis tà katṓtata (“having descended into the lowest [places]”) echoes Ephesians 4:9 — tà katṓtera tês gês — which becomes a major proof-text for the doctrine.

Note the divergence even within Methodism: the 1989 United Methodist Hymnal prints “to the dead” in both the traditional and ecumenical versions, while many Methodist congregations still pray “into hell” from memory and printed bulletins.

Historical Context

This clause is one of the latest additions to the Apostles’ Creed. It is absent from the Old Roman Symbol (c. 215) and from most early Western baptismal creeds. Its earliest secure attestation is in Rufinus of Aquileia’s Commentary on the Apostles’ Creed (c. 404), where Rufinus notes that the Roman and Eastern churches don’t include it but the church of Aquileia does. By the 6th century it appears in the Sacramentarium Gallicanum; by the 8th-century Textus Receptus form, it is universal in Western use.

It was added to answer two converging pressures:

1. Scriptural integration. The Western church wanted the creed to reflect 1 Peter 3:18–20 (“he went and preached to the spirits in prison”), 1 Peter 4:6 (“the gospel was preached even to the dead”), Ephesians 4:9 (“he descended into the lower parts of the earth”), Acts 2:27/31 (citing Psalm 16, “you will not abandon my soul to Hades”), and Matthew 12:40 (“three days and three nights in the heart of the earth”).

2. Anti-docetic and anti-Apollinarian polemic. If Christ only seemed to die, or if his human soul was replaced by the divine Logos, then no real death occurred and no real resurrection followed. The descent affirms that Jesus genuinely died — body in the tomb, soul in Sheol — and that the resurrection is therefore a genuine return from death.

The clause carries, in other words, a christological argument disguised as a geographical one.

Lines of Interpretation

Patristic / Conciliar

Tradition: Greek and Latin Fathers, broadly

The dominant patristic reading is the Harrowing of Hell: Christ in his soul descended to the realm of the dead between Good Friday and Easter, proclaimed his victory, and led out the righteous dead of Israel — Adam, Eve, the patriarchs, the prophets — into paradise. The classical sources are the Gospel of Nicodemus (4th c.), Melito of Sardis’s Peri Pascha, the Paschal homilies of Epiphanius and pseudo-Epiphanius, and iconographically the Anastasis image that becomes standard in Eastern Orthodoxy.

Strengths

• Takes the scriptural language seriously and connects it to a unified narrative of redemption
• Gives theological substance to Holy Saturday, an otherwise empty day
• Has produced some of the richest liturgical and iconographic tradition in Christianity

Weaknesses

• Depends heavily on the Gospel of Nicodemus, a late and non-canonical source
• The “preaching to the dead” texts in 1 Peter are notoriously difficult and may not refer to this at all

Medieval / Scholastic

Tradition: Aquinas and the Western Schoolmen

Thomas Aquinas (Summa Theologiae III, q. 52) systematizes the descent into four parts of infernum: the limbus patrum (the holy fathers awaiting Christ), the limbus puerorum (unbaptized infants), purgatorium (souls being purified), and infernum damnatorum (the damned). Christ descends to all four in different modes: he liberates the patriarchs in their substance, he illuminates purgatory and limbo by his presence, and he confounds the damned by manifesting his victory — but he does not save them.

Strengths

• Maintains the patristic harrowing reading while introducing precise theological distinctions
• Integrates the descent with the broader medieval sacramental and eschatological system

Weaknesses

• The fourfold structure of infernum is a theological construction with thin biblical basis
• Limbo in particular has been quietly retired by the contemporary Catholic Church (ITC, 2007)

Reformation — Lutheran

Tradition: Luther, Formula of Concord (1577)

Luther treated the descent as the first act of Christ’s exaltation, not the last act of his humiliation. The resurrected Christ descends to hell in triumph to proclaim victory over the devil and to terrify the damned. The Formula of Concord explicitly forbids speculation about how this happened and contents itself with the fact: “the whole person, God and man, descended to hell after his burial, conquered the devil, destroyed the power of hell, and took from the devil all his might.”

Strengths

• Avoids speculative excess
• Reads the descent as gospel — as good news of Christ’s victory

Weaknesses

• Reverses the natural narrative sequence (death → descent → resurrection) by making the descent post-resurrection
• Strained as a reading of the creed’s word order

Reformation — Reformed

Tradition: Calvin, Institutes II.16.8–12; Heidelberg Catechism Q.44

Calvin rejects the literal-geographical reading entirely. The descent refers to the spiritual torments Christ endured on the cross — bearing the weight of divine judgment, experiencing the “hell” of separation from the Father in the cry of dereliction. The Heidelberg Catechism softens this: the clause assures believers that “in my greatest temptations I may be assured… that my Lord Jesus Christ, by his inexpressible anguish, pains, and terrors, which he suffered in his soul on the cross and before, has redeemed me from the anguish and torment of hell.”

Strengths

• Connects the descent to a clear gospel logic of substitution
• Avoids problematic speculation about the geography of the afterlife
• Honest about the difficulty of the underlying biblical texts

Weaknesses

• Departs from the natural reading of the creed’s word order (death, burial, then descent)
• Effectively makes the clause redundant with “suffered… was crucified, dead”
• Hard to square with the patristic consensus the creed was meant to articulate

Modern / Ecumenical

Tradition: Hans Urs von Balthasar, Mysterium Paschale; Alyssa Lyra Pitstick’s critique

Balthasar’s 20th-century reading is the most influential modern revision: Christ on Holy Saturday undergoes the full passivity of death — solidarity with the godforsaken in their godforsakenness — and this is itself the deepest moment of redemption. The descent is not active triumph but radical solidarity. Pitstick (Light in Darkness, 2007) has argued this is a serious departure from the patristic and Catholic tradition; the debate continues.

Strengths

• Pastorally powerful for those who experience God’s absence
• Takes seriously what death-as-such is
• Theologically generative for theodicy and the problem of suffering

Weaknesses

• Departs substantially from the patristic harrowing tradition
• Risks projecting modern existential categories onto an ancient text
• Some critics see implicit universalism

Wesleyan Voice

Wesley himself rarely preached on this clause. In his abridgment of the Thirty-Nine Articles for American Methodists (1784), he dropped Article III “Of the going down of Christ into Hell” entirely — one of the small number of articles he silently omitted. This is striking: Wesley keeps the clause in the Creed (which Methodists pray) but removes the doctrinal article (which the church confesses). The most likely reasons:

• Article III in the 39 Articles is itself thin — it merely affirms “as Christ died for us, and was buried, so also is it to be believed that he went down into Hell” without specifying meaning
• Wesley generally trimmed doctrinal articles he considered speculative rather than essential to salvation
• His soteriology was practical and experiential; the harrowing of hell didn’t bear on the ordo salutis the way justification, regeneration, and sanctification did

When Wesley does discuss Christ’s descent — e.g., his sermon “On the Resurrection of the Dead,” and scattered notes in the Explanatory Notes upon the New Testament — he aligns closest to a modified Lutheran position: the descent is real, it concerns the soul of Christ in the state of the dead, it includes the proclamation of victory to “the spirits in prison” — but he refuses to speculate about its mechanics. His Notes on 1 Peter 3:19 call the passage “very obscure” and decline to systematize it.

The practical Wesleyan posture: pray the clause, refuse to speculate, let the hymnody carry the doctrine.

Hymnody

Charles Wesley’s hymnody is more theologically vivid here than John’s prose. “Christ the Lord is risen today” (1739) draws on the harrowing imagery: the triumph over death and the grave is named as Christ’s, the sting of death broken, the victory of the grave undone. The 1780 Collection of Hymns for the Use of the People Called Methodists gives the descent no dedicated treatment but threads the harrowing motif through the Easter section — descent-as-victory rather than descent-as-torment.

This is the Wesleyan instinct on the clause: where John’s prose stays cautious, Charles’s verse celebrates. The pulpit said we cannot say; the hymnal said Christ has conquered. Read together, the two carry the doctrine without speculation.

Pastoral and Liturgical Use

When a congregation prays “he descended to the dead” — or “into hell” — what are they saying?

At minimum, that Jesus was really dead, not apparently dead. The clause is a load-bearing pillar of resurrection faith: there is no Easter without a real Good Friday and a real Holy Saturday. To pray this line is to refuse every form of docetism, ancient and modern, that wants a Christ who skipped the worst of it.

Beyond that, the clause functions as a confession of Christ’s reach. Wherever the dead are — wherever the lost, the unevangelized, the pre-Christian righteous, those who died in despair — Christ has been there before them. For congregations grieving a death outside the visible bounds of the church, this is among the most pastorally powerful lines in the creed.

Holy Saturday liturgies in liturgically-conscious Methodist congregations sometimes draw on this clause directly: a vigil that sits in the silence of the day Christ lay in the tomb, refusing to rush to Easter. The clause licenses that pause.

Further Reading

• Rufinus of Aquileia, Commentary on the Apostles’ Creed (NPNF II/3) — the earliest sustained treatment
• Gospel of Nicodemus (Acts of Pilate, 4th c.) — the foundational narrative source for the Harrowing tradition
• Melito of Sardis, Peri Pascha — early Paschal homily drawing on descent imagery
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae III, q. 52 — the scholastic systematization
• Martin Luther, sermons on 1 Peter 3; Formula of Concord IX (1577)
• John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion II.16.8–12
• Heidelberg Catechism, Q. 44
• John Wesley, Explanatory Notes upon the New Testament on 1 Peter 3:18–20
• John Wesley, “The Articles of Religion of the Methodist Church” (1784) — note the omission of the Anglican Article III
• John Wesley, Sermon 137, “On the Resurrection of the Dead”
• Charles Wesley, “Christ the Lord is risen today” (1739) and the Easter section of A Collection of Hymns for the Use of the People Called Methodists (1780)
• Hans Urs von Balthasar, Mysterium Paschale (Ignatius, 2000) — the most influential modern reading
• Alyssa Lyra Pitstick, Light in Darkness: Hans Urs von Balthasar and the Catholic Doctrine of Christ’s Descent into Hell (Eerdmans, 2007) — the major modern critique