To Restore Apostles’ Creed to Historical Form regarding Christ’s “Descent into Hell”

WHEREAS, All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching,rebuking, correcting, and training in righteousness(2Tim. 3:16); and

WHEREAS, God’s Word is never to be added to nor subtracted from (Rev. 22:18–19; Deut. 18:20); and

WHEREAS, God’s Word is very clear that Christ Jesus died, was buried, and was fully dead in the grave until raised to life by God on the third day, Sunday (Matt. 12:40; 16:21; 17:22–23; 20:18–19; 27:50–28:7; Mark 15:37–16:6; Luke 23:44–24:8; John 19:30– 20:18;Acts2:22–32; Rom. 4:24–25;8:11;10:9; 1Cor. 15:3–8); and

WHEREAS, Psalm 16:10 and Acts 2:27 and 2:31 reference Christ Jesus not being abandoned to the grave (Sheol in Hebrew, Hades in Greek), meaning abandoned in the realm of the dead; and

WHEREAS, The Hebrew word Sheol and the Greek word Hades are not the equivalent of our English word hell; and

WHEREAS, The English word hell, in contemporary understanding and usage, is the sum total combination of multiple biblical words and concepts, including

• Gehenna — the garbage dump outside of Jerusalem, formerly the place of child sacrifices before Jerusalem became the holy city of the Israelites, a place where there was a constant fire because of the garbage being burned;

• Tartarus(2Peter 2:4) —the place where God sent the angels who had sinned, placing them in chains of darkness to be held for judgment;

• The abyss (Luke 8:31; Rev. 9:1–2, 11; 11:7; 17:8; 20:1, 3) —a place of confinement and perhaps suffering for the evil spirits;

• The lake of fire and brimstone (Rev. 20:10) — a place of torment into which the devil will be thrown, where the beast and the false prophet have already been thrown, to suffer for all eternity;

• A final judgment place for those who did not confess (Rom. 10:9) and believe in (John 3:16; Mark 16:16) Christ as Lord and did not serve Him with their lives on earth, or said another way— “who do not know God and do not obey the gospel ofour Lord Jesus” (2 Thess. 1:8), described as a place of great suffering, where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth (Matt. 8:12), where their worm does not die and the fire is not quenched (Mark 9:48), where there is everlasting punishment (Matt. 25:46) in the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels (Matt. 25:41), punished with everlasting destruction and shut out from the presence of the Lord and from the majesty of his power (2 Thess. 1:9), and

• Abaddon (mentioned in the Hebrew text of Job 26:6; 28:22; 31:12; Prov. 15:11; Psalm 88:11; and the Greek text of Rev. 9:11), which seems to be a place of destruction in the Old Testament references and the literal Hebrew name of the angel who reigns as king over the bottomless pit in the Revelation text, also known as Apollyon in Greek; and

WHEREAS, The Greek word φυλακή, used in 1 Pet. 3:19, which is often translated as prison in the English text, literally means a place where something or someone is carefully watched, protected, or guarded, and is also the exact word used by Luke in Luke 2:8 as the shepherds “kept watch” over their flocks by night, is never used to imply a place of suffering or punishment; and

WHEREAS, Francis Pieper in his Christian Dogmatics ([CPH, 1951] II:314) cites 1 Peter 3:19 as the proof text for Christ Jesus’ descent into hell spoken of in the modern Apostles’ Creed; and

WHEREAS, Even if this text from 1 Peter 3:19 was referencing our modern understanding of hell it would still be properly placed in the Creed after Christ Jesus was “made alive by the Spirit,” after the resurrection, not before as is stated in the modern Apostles’ Creed; and

WHEREAS, The Old Roman Creed, upon which the Apostles’ Creed was based, does not contain any mention of Jesus’ descent into hell (e.g., Philip Schaff, The Creeds of Christendom [New York: Harper and Row, 1931], 46–47); and

WHEREAS, The Nicene Creed, which predates the Apostles’ Creed, also does not contain any mention of a descent into hell by Jesus following His death; and

WHEREAS, There is no clear text of Scripture that speaks of Jesus “descending” to some place after His death, nor any text of Scripture that speaks of Jesus going to a place called hell nor to a place that carries with it our modern understanding of that term; and

WHEREAS, The only reference to Christ Jesus descending to the lower parts of the earth is in Eph. 4:9, and is most probably a reference to Jesus’ incarnation, to His descent from heaven to earth (Phil. 2:7), used in contrast to His ascent back into heaven (Eph. 4:8); but if this descent is a reference to Psalm 16:10 or Acts 2:27, 31, then it is a reference to Sheol and/or Hades, not a reference to our modern understanding of hell; and

WHEREAS, The earliest versions of the Apostles’ Creed were written in Greek, and the oldest record we have of this Creed is in a letter from Marcellus of Ancyra to Pope Julius I in or about A.D. 340–341 and has no inclusion of the phrase “descended into hell” (J.N.D. Kelly, Early Christian Creeds, Third Ed. [London: Longman Group, 1972], 102–3) furthermore, when this phrase is found in later Greek versions of the Creed morethan300yearslater, the phrase in question states that Jesus descended into “Hades,” which means to the dead or the grave, and not to a place of punishment (i.e. Gehenna, Tartarus, Apollyon, or the abyss); and

WHEREAS, The first appearance of this phrase is in only one of the two Latin versions of the Apostles’ Creed from Rufinus, circa A.D. 390, where it was written as “descend it ad infer os,” which meant that Jesus “descended to those below,” but the phrase does not show up again until A.D. 650, when it became the official version of the Apostles’ Creed adopted by the Roman Catholic Church at the Council of Trent; and

WHEREAS, The Greek translations today have this phrase as “κατελθόντα εἰς τὰ κατώτατα,” which translated means “descended to the lower ones,” again consistent with Psalm 16:10 (Sheol) and Acts 2:27, 31 (Hades), that Christ Jesus after dying on the cross was in the realm of the dead until raised back to life on resurrection Sunday; and

WHEREAS, Somewhere along the way the original Latin word infer os, (meaning lower) referring to those below, the dead ones in Sheol/Hades,became infernos, from which we get our English word inferno (meaning a fire), which came to be used for our modern word and understanding of hell; and

WHEREAS, Paul in 1 Cor. 15:3–4 states: “For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures,”thus highlighting those things that we should be confessing in our Creed concerning Christ’s death, that He was “crucified, died, and was buried” and that “the third day He rose again from the dead,” with no mention of any descent into hell; and

WHEREAS, It is clear from the original insertion of this phrase into the Apostles’ Creed that it was not meant to represent Christ’s post-resurrection visit to preach to the spirits in prison referenced in 1 Peter 3:19, but rather, it seems to have been inserted to show the genuine and complete dead ness of Jesus, which is taught and supported throughout the Scriptures, thus making the power of Christ Jesus over death that much more significant and His identification with and participation in the human condition that much more real, since He really was dead; and

WHEREAS, The original Greek and Latin versions of the “descent into hell” phrase all referred to the realm of the dead and not a place of suffering, thus it is placed between Jesus’ burial and His resurrection,which then also means that it belongs as part of Christ's state of humiliation and not exaltation; and

WHEREAS, Our modern word hell simply does not reflect the original intent of the state of Christ Jesus between His burial and His resurrection; and

WHEREAS, A creed is a statement of belief, and as such our Christian creeds should only contain those things which are clear and explicit in the Scriptures, and which are necessary to our faith and confession; and

WHEREAS, Thereisno clear wordin the Scriptures that states that Jesus descended to a place that corresponds with our modern understanding of hell at any point in His life, death, or after His resurrection; and

WHEREAS, This non-biblical addition to the Apostles’ Creed does not add clarity to the essence of our faith and confession, but rather serves to compel the confessor to confess something which is not clearly taught in the Holy Scriptures, and which adds no value to the Creed nor to our theology; and

WHEREAS, Some of the other Christian church bodies who confess the Apostles’ Creed have translated this phrase as “He descended to the dead,” (including but not exclusive to the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and The Episcopal Church) which is consistent with the origin of this phrase and with the placement of this phrase before Christ’sresurrection on the third day, or have left the phrase “descended into hell” out of the creed entirely, which is consistent with the Old Roman Creed; therefore be it

Resolved, That The Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod in convention commend this resolution to the Commission on Theology and Church Relations (CTCR) for further study; and be it further

Resolved, That the Synod encourage all of its roster ed pastors to study the history and addition of the phrase “He descended into hell” into the Apostles’ Creed since it wasn’t part of the old Roman Creed from which the Apostles’ Creed was developed, nor did this phrase reference a descent of Christ into a place of suffering in any of the early translations or understandings when it was first added to the Creed; and be it further

Resolved, That the Synod encourage all of the roster ed pastors of the Synod to educate their people as to thenon-biblical nature of the phrase “descended into hell” in the Apostles’ Creed, and that the Synod allows pastors after educating their congregations to change the word hell to Hades in the Creed to reflect the original word as drawn from the Holy Scriptures (Acts 2:27, 31), or to change hell to “the realm of the dead,” to reflect the original phrase in the Apostles’ Creed, and thus to remain in agreement with the biblical references and teaching concerning the state/place of Jesus following His burial but before His resurrection; and be it finally

Resolved, That if the CTCR finds the rationale of this overture to be true, that the Synod would have the courage and the integrity to return the Apostles’ Creed to its original form, either without a reference to Christ’s descent into hell altogether, or to change its form back to the way it was when it was first introduced to the Creed, being that after Christ Jesus died and was buried He “descended to Hades,” or that He “descended to the realm of the dead.”