The Vicar continues his weekly exposition of the Catechism, found in the Book of Common Prayer, pp. 845-862.

Q.       What do we mean when we say that he descended to the dead?

A.       We mean that he went to the departed and offered them also the benefits of redemption.

The Harrowing of Hell is a colorful story, but it is a problematic teaching. The Catechism's answer raises more questions than it answers. Who are the departed? Are they the "good pagans" like Plato? That's more Dante than Bible. And what are the benefits of redemption? Resurrection? By itself resurrection is insufficient, as Daniel 12:2 makes clear, since both the just and the unjust are raised from the dead.

 

It seems safest to say that what we mean when we say that Christ descended to the dead is just that: he really and truly died. That is, he suffered the penalty for sin. He threw His lot in with us and shared in our common mortality. As Jesus really and truly lived, so he really and truly died — as a man.

 

The benefit of redemption is for all of those who can say with faith that they are in Christ, even those who lived before Him. Hebrews 11 names some of them: Abel, Enoch, Noah, Abraham, Sarah, Jacob, Esau, Joseph, Moses, Gideon, Barak, Samson, Jephthah, David, Samuel, and the prophets, as well as the women who received back their dead, raised to life again, those who were tortured, jeered at, flogged, put in chains, imprisoned, put to death by stoning, sawed in two, killed by the sword, and impoverished. "All these people were still living by faith when they died. They did not receive the things promised; they only saw them and welcomed them from a distance, admitting that they were foreigners and strangers on earth" (Heb. 11:13).

 

Thus, what we really mean when we say that Christ descended to the dead is that all those who died in faith finally received what they were promised by that faith.

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Highlights from Henry Chadwick's The Early Church (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967), selected by the Vicar. Chadwick was the sometime Master of Peterhouse, Cambridge.

"It was possible for the Jews to gain greater tolerance than the Christians partly because they were more opposed to any public disparagements of pagan cults. Both Philo and Josephus held that, while the God of the Bible was the only true God, it was wrong to insult the religious feelings of others, and they enjoined courtesy upon their fellow Jews. They were content to ask the imperial government for as much toleration as it accorded to other national religions, but were more interested in the defence of Judaism and is liberty of worship than in any active mission to convert pagans and to make them proselytes. For the Christians, by contrast, the raison d'etre of the church consisted in its reconciling role for all mankind, including Jew and Gentile alike, religious and even irreligious alike. Like Philo, St Paul disapproved of insulting pagan temples, but he took the lowest view of polytheistic religion. The paradox of the church was that it was a religious revolutionary movement, yet without a conscious political ideology; it aimed at the capture of society throughout all its strata, but was at the same time characteristic for its indifference to the possession of power in this world. Celsus was the first known person to realize that this non-political, quietist, and pacifist community had it in its power to transform the social and political order of the empire." (p. 69)

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