From the WSJ Opinion Archives
HOUSES OF WORSHIP
The Day After
Between Jesus' death and Resurrection, what happened?
Recently an elderly friend of our family passed away after a period of grueling discomfort. At one point she blurted out to my mother, "Why must I endure this? Jesus only suffered for three hours!"
Of course, most Christians know that Jesus suffered longer than three hours, including the Agony in the Garden, the Scourging and the long climb up Golgotha. He was also, it may be argued, carrying all sin, which burdened him with a weight that is unimaginable to us.
Yet did Christ's suffering end when he announced, "It is finished"? Holy Saturday is the time between Jesus' crucifixion and resurrection, and it is one of the most dramatic, if cloudy, episodes in Christian theology.
According to certain traditions, Christ descends into hell, or "the abode of the dead," to claim the souls of the righteous who came before him. The scene is set in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, which offers an "ancient homily for Holy Saturday": "Today a great silence reigns on earth, a great silence and a great stillness. A great silence because the King is asleep. The earth trembled and is still because God has fallen asleep in the flesh and he has raised up all who have slept ever since the world began. . . . He has gone to search for Adam, our first father, as for a lost sheep." In Dante's "Inferno" crumbling bridges and walls in hell bear witness to the post-crucifixion arrival of Christ.
The descent into hell was taught by the church fathers--Peter refers to Our Lord preaching to the dead (Acts 2:31)--and made its first credal appearance in the fourth century. With some particularity, the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 announced that Christ "descended into Hell, rose again from the dead, and ascended into Heaven. But he descended in soul, rose again in the flesh, and ascended equally in both."
Not that there was steady agreement on such questions. In the early church there arose a heresy claiming that Christ was only divinity and flesh. The church responded that divinity and flesh cannot make the descent--only the soul can. Some iconoclasts from the early church, by contrast, destroyed crucifixes in the belief that such objects were idolatrous because Christ's suffering on earth was not sufficient for redemption, which required the ordeal of the descent.
One interpretation holds that Jesus did indeed descend into hell but that it wasn't hell. Rather, it was a dwelling place of the dead who had never known Christ and were awaiting resurrection. This underworld was known as Sheol in the Old Testament and became Hades in the New. Before Christ, it was compartmentalized into places for the wicked and the good. With the arrival of Christ, hell became purely for the evil and paradise relocated, well, north.
This idea of shifting places for the afterlife was supported by Hans Urs von Balthasar, a Swiss priest and theologian who claimed that Christ's most intense suffering could have occurred in the underworld. He got this view from his friend Adrienne von Speyr (1902-67), a mystic, author and physician.
From the year of her conversion from Protestant to Catholic in 1940, the Swiss von Speyr had episodes where, beginning on Good Friday, she would go into a trance and relive the passion of Jesus. Von Balthasar recorded the events. In a 1968 book he explained her ideas of Holy Saturday, when Christ "walks through sin. . . . In sheer obedience, he must seek the Father where he cannot find him." As the theologian John Saward elaborates: "He suffers the whole penalty of sin in order to expiate the whole of sin."
According to Father Richard John Neuhaus, the editor of First Things magazine, von Speyr's ideas are what the Catholic Church calls "theologoumenon, a possible but controverted speculation that is not official church teaching but is worthy of further study." Yet for some, von Speyr is bunk. In September, the conservative Catholic magazine the New Oxford Review ran a long refutation of von Speyr, arguing that her ideas echo Calvin, who believed Christ did not save mankind by bodily suffering alone but by suffering in his soul "all the sorrows of Hell." Calvinists believe, however, that this suffering took place between the Agony in the Garden and the death on the Cross. For other Protestants, the events of Holy Saturday are pure speculation. New Testament traditions might agree that Christ was raised "from among those who are dead," but no one seems sure what state he was in while there.
The meaning of Holy Saturday may always be contested among Christians. Not so, let it be said, the day after.
Mr. Judge is author of "Damned Senators," just out from Encounter.
