Did Jesus Descend to Hell?

Untangling Methodism's Creedal Mess

By © Ralph Hammann - Wikimedia Commons - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=20275407

When I converted to Christianity and began attending church, I attended a small United Methodist congregation in rural south Georgia. We followed the standard order of worship in the United Methodist Hymnal pretty closely. Our Response to the Word was, like many such UM congregations, the Apostles’ Creed. Our order of worship went largely unchanged, minus the services where we threw together a choir, on Easter, or when we shared in Holy Communion on the first Sunday of the month.

One Sunday, our pastor broke from the lectionary and began preaching a series on the Apostles’ Creed. I loved this series as a relatively new Christian engaging with doctrine post-conversion. However, about halfway through his sermon series, the message was on something that wasn’t even in the Creed… or at least not as I had ever heard us recite it on a Sunday. Much to my shock, he boldly proclaimed from the pulpit that our church had been omitting a line from the Apostles’ Creed: “he descended to the dead.”

Reaching for the pew shelf in front of me I grabbed a United Methodist Hymnal and turned to #881 and discovered two versions of the Apostles’ Creed: the ‘Traditional Version’ and the ‘Ecumenical Version.’ Our pastor was right. The so-called Traditional Version omitted the line “he descended to the dead”. Or was it that the Ecumenical Version added it? There was also an asterisk where the line would be in the Traditional Version noting at the bottom of the page that “Traditional use of this creed includes these words: ‘He descended into hell.’” But isn’t it the traditional version already? Is it traditional with the line or without? Why does one say dead and the other hell? Let’s untangle this web and then explore what that line means, which will uncover why it is so important to affirm as part of the Apostolic Faith.

Screengrab of the problematic and confusing page in the United Methodist Hymnal. Retrieved from Hymnary.

The Apostles’ Creed

The Apostles’ Creed finds its origins in the Old Roman Creed, a second century baptismal formula, itself an evolution of Matthew 28:19. Put simply, early Christians recognized the Great Commission, carried it out, and required affirmation of it for new converts.

In most liturgical churches, the Apostles’ Creed will replace the Nicene Creed during a service when Holy Baptism is being conducted. Converts or children’s parents will, on that day, affirm the Apostles’ Creed line by line. This expresses continuity with the Apostolic Church in one Lord, one Faith, one Baptism. It also reaffirms the long held tradition of the Apostles’ Creed being a baptismal confession.

The Descent to Inferos, Or Holy Saturday

The Apostles’ Creed declares one doctrine that is not expressed in the Nicene Creed. It contains the Latin phrase descendit ad inferos. Infero is a word that can be translated in a multitude of ways. At its root, it means “lower regions, that which lies beneath, under the earth” but can mean any place of death or suffering. In large part due to the translation of literary works like Dante’s Divine Comedy, the word became predominantly associated with hell when used in religious contexts.

What the Apostles’ Creed is describing with descendit ad inferos is the ancient Christian doctrine that Christ went to the place of the dead in the time between His death on the Cross and His Resurrection on Sunday. This is known as Holy Saturday. There is a lot of speculation about what actually happened on Holy Saturday, ranging from Christ simply descending to the lower reaches of human existence, to Christ triumphantly leading repentant souls out of Satan’s grasp in the Harrowing of Hell.

So, what did happen on Holy Saturday? Scripture gives us several references that do not answer the question completely, but do establish that Christ did indeed descend to the place of the dead. Underpinning the events of Holy Saturday is the fact that Christ defeated death itself. In the same way that He bore all of our sins, and was tempted in every way we are, He also went through all the throes of death, including going to Sheol/Hades. “For just as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the great fish, so will the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth” (Matt 12:38). At the very least, Christ descending to the dead means he fully identified with humanity in death in order to redeem it and defeat death, including going to the darkest pits of Sheol, so we can say with David, “But God will ransom my soul from the power of Sheol, for he will receive me” (Ps 49:15 ESV). Scripture is clear that Christ, in His death, experienced the same Sheol realities humanity has always experienced and conquered even that. This is, at minimum, what all Christians affirm when we say “He descended to the dead” as we affirm the Apostles’ Creed.

However, the following Scriptures point to a greater reality than that mere affirmation. Consider the following Scriptures:

Ephesians 4:8-10 (NKJV) - “Therefore He says: “When He ascended on high, He led captivity captive, And gave gifts to men.” (Now this, “He ascended”—what does it mean but that He also first descended into the lower parts of the earth? He who descended is also the One who ascended far above all the heavens, that He might fill all things.)”

1 Peter 3:18-20 (ESV) - “For Christ also suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh but made alive in the spirit, in which he went and proclaimed to the spirits in prison, because they formerly did not obey, when God’s patience waited in the days of Noah, while the ark was being prepared, in which a few, that is, eight persons, were brought safely through water.”

1 Peter 4:6 (ESV) - “For this is why the gospel was preached even to those who are dead, that though judged in the flesh the way people are, they might live in the spirit the way God does.”

Both Paul and Peter in their epistles, cited above, seem to elude to something more taking place on Holy Saturday, more akin to the Harrowing mentioned earlier where something occurs for those who are dead. For me, this doctrine is a comfort when presented with a pastoral question like “What happens to all those who die without hearing the Gospel?” My answer is still “I don’t completely know,” but can be confidently followed up by “but I know Christ and His Gospel have been there, too.” Our dialogue about defeating death, emptying the grave, and breaking down the doors of Hades are too often presented as spiritual realities divorced from physical realities. Put another way, all of this talk in the Bible about defeating death actually has signification about death itself, it is not merely some metaphorical way of talking about sin. Consider these words from Australian theologian Ben Myers:¹

“The Son of God has taken our nature to himself. He allows our fallen nature to drag him down. He descends to the very abyss of human condition. He traces our plight right back to the root and takes hold of us there. He embraces our humanity at the point of its total collapse into nonbeing. Because he shares our nature he is able to fall with us into death; because he is the Son of God he is able to fill death with his presence so that the grave becomes a source of life. In Christ the dead are united to God and are alive in the strength of that union. The resurrection is not just an isolated miracle that happens to Jesus. It is something that happens to us—to Adam and Eve, to me, to the human family. As Jesus rises, the whole of humanity rises with him.” - Ben Myers

Maurizia Lees / The Harrowing of Hell / Mural / 2010 / Our Lady of the Rosary, Brixton

Ultimately, this doctrine effects how we as Christians view death itself and is deeply intertwined with the doctrine of the Resurrection. Some of the practices of early Christians may seem strange to us—indeed they were strange to the Romans who witnessed them. They would pray in tombs, honor the bodies of martyrs, celebrate with joy at funerals, and catechumens would learn the faith in the catacombs surrounded by the dead. In our contemporary faith, we scarcely resemble this sort of faith when confronted with death, and too often act and think like the pagan Romans looking at the Christians wondering, “What are those fools doing, so embracing death?” As Christians we believe in newness of life and the veracity of the resurrection, because we know death is no longer the ultimate power in our lives.

John Wesley

As I’ve stated before in a different article, while Methodism is well-postured to be a tradition that stands in the stream of the Great Christian tradition alongside Roman Catholicism, Orthodoxy, Anglicanism, and Lutheranism, it has a glaring problem: John Wesley. It is not his theology or anything he did that is the problem. Rather, it is how modern Methodists treat him as something like a Pope, for better and worse. Put differently, his teaching is sometimes regarded as infallible, sometimes completely disregarded, and other times taken completely out of context. This relates to the Apostles’ Creed because, of course, the confusion around it in Methodism traces back to John Wesley… or, more accurately, some folk’s interpretation of Wesley.

Wesley and Hell

John Wesley entered the debate about the phrase descendit ad inferos in his sermon “On Faith.” He argues that “by Christ descending into hell, they [the translators of the Apostles’ Creed from Latin into English] meant, his body remained in the grave, his soul remained in hades, (which is the receptacle of separate spirits,) from death to the resurrection.”² What Wesley is doing is making a distinction between two Greek words which were commonly both translated as hell in English: Hades and Gehenna.

Hades (ᾅδης) properly refers to the place of the dead, where all the buried go. This is the word often used to refer to the Old Testament place of Sheol (שאול). Sheol is the Hebrew understanding of the afterlife. Sheol is important for establishing the doctrine of the Resurrection, and is often divided between Paradise and a place of anguish (Luke 16:19-31).

Gehenna (γέεννα) properly refers to the Valley of Hinnom (גֵּי הִנֹּם), the place between Judah and Benjamin, a place of great judgment. The Valley of Hinnom gained eschatological significance from being the place where Kings Ahaz and Manasseh sacrificed children to the pagan gods (2 Chron 28 & 2 Chron 33), what the prophet Jeremiah called the “Valley of Slaughter” (Jer 7:32), and this connotation continues through the apocryphal writings (i.e. 2 Esdras 7:36) and the New Testament (i.e. Matt 10:28, 23:33; Jas 3:6). Therefore, to refer to Gehenna or the Valley of Hinnom is to refer to a place of severe judgment.

Wesley was making the point that hell is no longer a suitable word for both Hades and Gehenna. Hell has it etymological roots in a meaning closer to “the underworld,” closer in meaning to Hades, but by Wesley’s day almost exclusively meant a place of judgment. The English Bibles of the period like the King James translated them both as hell. Hell more accurately refers to Gehenna to our modern ears, and even to Wesley’s 18th century ears. Needless to say, Wesley was right and this is why many contemporary translations of the Bible either do not translate Hades and leave it untranslated, or translate it as “the place of the dead” (like the NLT does). Following this pattern, modern translations of the Apostles’ Creed often translate descendit ad inferos as “he descended to the dead.”

Wesley and the Creeds

As some may know John Wesley was a priest in the Church of England. One of the formularies of the English Church is a document called the 39 Articles of Religion. When John Wesley determined that the newly independent United States urgently needed ministers, he consecrated Thomas Coke as “General Superintendent,” a title Coke and the American Methodists would later change to Bishop. Wesley sent him to America to superintend the Methodist societies there and provide the sacraments as many Church of England priests fled in the wake of the Revolution. Along with Coke, Wesley appropriated 25 of the 39 Articles of the Church of England to become standards of doctrine for the Methodist societies in America. These societies would organize as the Methodist Episcopal Church. Interestingly, some of the articles Wesley omitted directly concern the Apostles’ Creed and descendit ad inferos, namely Articles III and VIII. They read:

III. Of the Going Down of Christ into Hell

As Christ died for us, and was buried, so also is it to be believed, that he went down into Hell.

VIII. Of the Three Creeds

The Three Creeds, Nicene Creed, Athanasius’s Creed, and that which is commonly called the Apostles’ Creed, ought thoroughly to be received and believed: for they may be proved by most certain warrants of Holy Scripture.

Some take Wesley’s choice to omit these two Articles as an argument from silence that he rejected the creeds or the line, despite him being bound by English law and his ordination vows to the contrary. However, a look at another document Wesley gave Coke will beyond doubt reveal he was indeed creedal and intended the Methodists to be. That document is The Sunday Service of the Methodists in North America which is often called ‘John Wesley’s Book of Common Prayer’ because it is exactly that—a slight revision of the 1662 BCP. In Sunday Service, Wesley retains the Apostles’ Creed in its entirety, including the line “he descended into hell.” It is true he had a problem with the translation from the Latin of inferos into hell. As stated before, this is why we often translate it as dead today instead of hell. However, he accepted the creed entirely even if he had this qualification, as noted by his inclusion of it in his prayer book intended for use by American Methodist societies. John Wesley had no qualms about making what he saw as necessary changes to the BCP, for example, changing every instance of priest in the prayer book to ‘elder’ or ‘minister.’ If he truly thought this line was out of step with primitive Christianity or was what the American societies needed in their context, he could’ve omitted it. But he didn’t.

Further, if John Wesley would’ve changed the Apostles’ Creed by removing “he descended to hell” he would’ve been plainly wrong and in error. Creeds are received by churches that express continuity with all Christians in all time and in all places. They define what one must believe about God at minimum to claim to be truly part of the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church. Wesley, ever the Churchman, knew this reality and did not edit the Apostles’ Creed, and therefore it is contingent on Methodists today to recognize that reality and claim their inheritance.

My copy of Sunday Service, containing the Apostles’ Creed, stating “He defcended into hell”.

The Role of Sunday Service for Methodists

What purpose did Wesley intend Sunday Service to fulfill in American Methodism? While it is a service book for liturgy and order just like the BCP, it begs the question: does a prayer book have any other roles? The saying goes that when you ask an Anglican what they believe, they will respond, “Come pray with us.” This is the principle of ‘lex orandi, lex credendi,’ or ‘the law of prayer is the law of belief.’ Put more concisely, Christians pray what they believe, and they believe what they pray. For the Anglican Church, the BCP is more than liturgy and order, the book itself is a formulary, which means it declares, through the forms of worship and prayer, what Anglicans believe. The Preface to the ACNA’s 2019 BCP recognizes this saying the 1662 BCP (the prayer book Wesley used) is “the standard for doctrine, discipline, and worship” in Global Anglicanism.³

It is reasonable to conclude that Wesley fully intended the Sunday Service to be for the American Methodists what the Book of Common Prayer is for Anglicans: not mere liturgy but doctrine and discipline. Otherwise, why did he make certain precision edits to Sunday Service that reflected his beliefs more deeply, such as his belief about the two-fold order of ministry and replacing references to priests with the word elder? Modern Methodists recognize this principle as they continue to use the word elder for the office of presbyter/priest today. This is the principle of lex orandi, lex credendi in action, and the treating of Sunday Service as a de facto formulary. With this standard, his inclusion of the Apostles’ Creed in its full form says magnitudes about what Wesley intended for Methodists. At the very least, it confirms Methodism’s tricky history with dodging the creeds is completely unnecessary and reinforces that attempts to change the Apostles’ Creed to satisfy some apparent secret longing of Wesley have no basis in reality. When it came down to it, Wesley included the Creed in its fullness. It is a shame the Sunday Service fell out of use by 1792 before all the formulaic implications it held could take hold in American Methodism.⁴

Back to Georgia

Boy-howdy, what a conundrum we had to process that Sunday in church as our pastor told us we’d been saying the Apostles’ Creed wrong the whole time! After much theologizing, our pastor did a faithful job preaching the texts about the ‘missing’ line, and that Sunday led us in adding that line back to its rightful place in the Creed. This practice continued for a while until appointment season came around one year and we received another pastor. I distinctly remember the first Sunday with our new pastor. As we all recited the Apostles’ Creed we were saying “he descended to the dead” while our new pastor was saying “On the third day”. Needless to say, the next week descended to the dead was missing from the Creed in our bulletins. Slowly, as the weeks went on, people stopped saying it. I don’t know if there was a conversation around it with the new pastor, there certainly was not from the pulpit, and I was too young and naïve to bring the matter up to the new pastor myself!

If there’s one thing I’ve learned since then it’s that the Christian faith at its core and in its creeds does not change. Indeed, any religion that changes its core doctrines is not worth following at all. So, why do some denominations let pastors pick and choose when it comes to the creeds? This is unfortunately an example of when our traditions have done damage to the tradition of the Church.

For more on the creeds of the Christian church, continue reading:

1. Ben Myers, Catechism: A Guide to the Ten Commandments, the Apostles’ Creed, and the Lord’s Prayer, Lexham Press, 2023, 204-206.

2. John Wesley, “On Faith” Sermon 122, retrieved from: https://www.ccel.org/ccel/wesley/sermons.vii.xiv.html

3. The 2019 Book of Common Prayer, 4.

4. Don E. Saliers, “Divine Grace, Diverse Means: Sunday Worship in United Methodist Congregations,” in The Sunday Service for Methodists: Twentieth-Century Worship in Worldwide Methodism, Kingswood Books, 1996, 32-33.