The Apostles’ Creed article: “He descended into Hell (Hades)”

William Barclay, in The Plain Man looks at the Apostles’ Creed, after discussing and analyzing this article of the Creed (passage in light of what others have proposed—over the course of thirteen pages, finalizes what he believes this passage alludes to:

“This doctrine means symbolically that either in this life or in the life beyond death all men are offered the gospel of truth and the love of God.

“There is another and more inclusive way of putting this: it means that there are no limits in space and time to the grace of God, indicating symbolically that the grace of God continues to operate in whatever other world and whatever other life there may be.

“Here there is surely something to make us think. What right have we to set limits to the operation of the grace of God? Whatever other world there is and whatever other life there is, surely still belong to God; the whole universe in time and in eternity, here and hereafter, is the Lord’s. In this doctrine we may at least glimpse the truth that the sphere of operation of the grace of God is illimitable; that God has not only time but also eternity to win men to himself.

“If we look at this from still another angle, from that of the later versions of the doctrine, we see that this doctrine does symbolically lay it down that the triumph of Jesus Christ is destined to be complete. It is the affirmation that it is true that at the name of Jesus every knee shall bow in heaven and on earth and under the earth (Philippians 2:10). In other words, we may believer encouragingly in the universal hope that in the end all men will be saved. Origen, who was in many ways the greatest and the most adventurous thinker the Church ever produced, took the idea of the final and ultimate triumph of Christ so seriously and so completely that he believed that in the end even Satan himself would submit to the love and power of God in Jesus Christ and would be saved.

“There are tremendous reaches of thought in this apparently unpromising article of the creed. But the more we think of it, the more we come to the conclusion that it belongs far more to the poetry of thought than to the theology of thought. If we take it quite simply to mean that Jesus underwent the death which all men undergo, then no doubt it is statement which ought to be included in the creed, but the wording does need clarification. But, if we go further, and if we allow it to lead us on to these thoughts and speculations amid which we have been moving, this is not material which can be crystallized and stereotyped in a creed. This is the language of hope and of devotion and of vision and of poetry. And therein lies the value of this article of the creed—it states a fact, but it opens a vision. The fact the mind can accept; of the vision the heart may dream.”

Barclay, William. The Plain Man looks at the Apostles’ Creed. London and Glasgow: Collins Fontana Books, 1967. 132-133