Did Jesus Suffer in Hell After the Cross?

Two Different Places Called Hell

The question usually starts with the Apostles’ Creed. In its traditional English form it says that Christ “was crucified, dead, and buried” and then that “he descended into hell.” A reader who hears “hell” as the place of final punishment will naturally ask whether Jesus suffered there.

In older English the word covered more ground than it does now. The King James Version uses “hell” for gehenna, the word Jesus used for the place of final punishment, “where their worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched” (Mark 9:44). It also uses “hell” for hades, the Greek name for the place of the dead, which the Old Testament calls Sheol. Everyone went to Sheol at death, the righteous as well as the wicked. Jacob, told that Joseph was dead, expected to go down there to his son (Genesis 37:35).

Revelation keeps the two apart. At the last judgment “death and hell delivered up the dead which were in them,” and then “death and hell were cast into the lake of fire” (Revelation 20:13–14). The hell that holds the dead is emptied at the end and thrown into the place of final punishment, so it is a different place. The Latin creed speaks of the realm of the dead. Scripture never says that Christ went to gehenna. The creed’s clause and the texts behind it are covered more fully in Did Jesus Descend into Hell?

Hades has more than one condition in it. In Jesus’ account of the rich man and Lazarus, the rich man “in hell he lift up his eyes, being in torments,” while Lazarus is comforted in Abraham’s bosom across a great gulf (Luke 16:23, 26). So the real question is what kind of visit Christ made when he went among the dead. Did he go as a sufferer among the tormented, or as something else?

The View That Christ Suffered Torment After Death

Some modern teachers, many of them associated with the Word of Faith movement, have taught that Christ’s sufferings continued after the cross. On this view his spirit went down to the place of torment when he died, and there he suffered for three days under the power of Satan, as the lost suffer, until God declared him righteous and raised him. Some who hold it say that Christ died spiritually as well as physically, and they treat his suffering in hell as the place where our redemption was completed.

The view has reasons behind it. Its teachers want to take seriously that Christ bore the full consequence of sin, and they know the wages of sin include more than the death of the body. They point to Peter’s words that God raised Jesus up “having loosed the pains of death” (Acts 2:24), to the Son of man’s three days “in the heart of the earth” (Matthew 12:40), and to Paul’s statement that Christ “descended first into the lower parts of the earth” (Ephesians 4:9). The early church also read those passages as placing Christ among the dead.

Teachers across the Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox traditions have criticized the view. The disagreement turns on two things: where Christ’s suffering ended, and what these same passages say he did among the dead.

Calvin’s Reading: Hell Was Suffered on the Cross

A much older answer comes from John Calvin. In his Institutes he insisted that the creed’s clause means something, since a summary of the faith does not waste words. He rejected the idea that Christ’s soul went to a prison of the patriarchs to bring them out. He read the clause as a description of what Christ suffered inwardly on the cross and in Gethsemane: the weight of God’s judgment against sin, borne in his soul. On this reading the creed first lists what Christ suffered in the sight of men, his crucifixion, death, and burial, and then names the hidden judgment he endured before God.

Calvin was careful to add that the Father was never hostile to his Son or angry with him. The Heidelberg Catechism, written in the next generation, gave the same explanation: Christ delivered believers from the torments of hell by the anguish of soul he suffered before and especially on the cross. Through the Geneva Bible’s notes and later Reformed writing, this reading spread, and many Reformed churches went on reciting the creed while teaching that Christ’s soul did not go down to the place of the dead at all. The Westminster Larger Catechism took a somewhat different line, explaining the clause as Christ continuing in the state of the dead, under the power of death, until the third day.

Calvin and the torment view both speak of Christ suffering something like hell. They disagree about when. Calvin placed all of it before Christ died, and his concern behind that deserves a hearing: he wanted nothing taken from the cross. If Christ went on suffering after his death, someone will ask whether the cross was enough. Chris White shares that concern. He departs from Calvin on the timing of the descent. The passages about Christ among the dead describe something that happened after the cross, and the creed’s order, crucified, dead, buried, descended, rose, is the order those passages give.

A literal descent belongs to no single theory of the atonement. Some Reformed writers today hold that Christ bore God’s wrath on the cross and then went down to the dead to subdue his enemies there. A Christian can accept Calvin’s account of what happened on the cross and still read the descent as the early church did.

What Jesus Said as He Died

Three sayings from the cross bear on the question. The first is in John’s Gospel:

When Jesus therefore had received the vinegar, he said, It is finished: and he bowed his head, and gave up the ghost.

John 19:30

In John’s Gospel the thing that is finished is the work the Father gave the Son to do on earth. The night before he died Jesus prayed, “I have finished the work which thou gavest me to do” (John 17:4). Two verses before “It is finished,” John writes that Jesus knew “that all things were now accomplished, that the scripture might be fulfilled” (John 19:28). Chris White reads the saying as the end of the course of suffering and obedience that the Scriptures had marked out for the Son, down to the thirst and the vinegar.

In the book’s reading the saying closes the suffering, and the saving work goes on. John himself records things still to come, the ascent to the Father and the gift of the Spirit, and Hebrews describes the risen Christ entering heaven as high priest (see the resurrection and forgiveness). On the suffering, though, the saying is final. When Jesus bowed his head, nothing remained for him to endure.

The second saying is in Luke:

And when Jesus had cried with a loud voice, he said, Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit: and having said thus, he gave up the ghost.

Luke 23:46

Jesus gave his spirit into his Father’s hands. The torment view needs that spirit handed over to Satan’s power for three days. Luke records him entrusting it to the Father with his last breath.

The third saying came a little earlier, to the thief crucified beside him: “To day shalt thou be with me in paradise” (Luke 23:43). In the story of the rich man and Lazarus, the dead are in two conditions, the rich man tormented and Lazarus carried to Abraham’s bosom and comforted (Luke 16:22–26). Chris White understands paradise, before the resurrection, as that place of comfort among the dead. He holds the identification as an inference from the passages. On that reading Jesus went among the dead that day, and he went to the place of comfort, in the company of a forgiven man. On any reading of paradise, the promise places him far from the torments of the rich man.

Every Text About the Descent Shows a Victor

The New Testament speaks of Christ among the dead in several places. In each one he acts, or God vindicates him.

• Acts 2:24–31. Peter says God raised Jesus, “having loosed the pains of death: because it was not possible that he should be holden of it.” Quoting Psalm 16, he says Christ’s soul “was not left in hell, neither his flesh did see corruption.” The verse the torment view leans on describes death losing its grip.
• Matthew 12:40. Jesus took Jonah’s three days as his sign. Jonah’s prayer from the fish calls his place “the belly of hell,” and says, “thou heardest my voice” and “hast thou brought up my life from corruption” (Jonah 2:2, 6). The sign ends in rescue.
• Romans 10:7. No one needs to “descend into the deep” to “bring up Christ again from the dead,” because God has already brought him up.
• Ephesians 4:8–10. The one who “descended first into the lower parts of the earth” is the one who “ascended up far above all heavens,” and when he ascended “he led captivity captive.”
• 1 Peter 3:18–22. Christ was “put to death in the flesh, but quickened by the Spirit,” and “went and preached unto the spirits in prison.” Readers have long disagreed about who the spirits were and when he preached. The passage ends with him at God’s right hand, “angels and authorities and powers being made subject unto him.”
• Revelation 1:18. The risen Christ says, “I am he that liveth, and was dead; and, behold, I am alive for evermore, Amen; and have the keys of hell and of death.” A key is authority over a place. He entered Hades and came out holding its keys.

None of these passages describes Christ suffering among the dead, held there against his will, or punished there. The suffering in the Gospels is on the cross. Among the dead, Christ is a victor in the enemy’s own territory.

The descent is one part of a larger account. How Atonement Works follows the whole Day of Atonement through the work of Christ: the blood, the high priest in heaven, the scapegoat that carried sins away, and the defeat of the devil.

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Why Christ Went Down: The Book’s Answer

If Christ did not go down to suffer, why did he go? Chris White’s answer comes from the Day of Atonement in Leviticus 16. The blood of one goat was carried in to God. The second goat, the live goat, had the people’s confessed sins laid on its head and carried them “unto a land not inhabited” (Leviticus 16:22), and it was left there.

The book proposes that Christ fulfilled both goats, and that the realm of the dead is the land cut off to which the live goat was sent. Christ bore the sins of the world on the cross, and then he carried them down to the dead and left them there. This is the book’s own synthesis of the texts. Readers from Origen in the third century onward connected the scapegoat with the descent, and the book builds on that connection. The full argument is set out in Where Did Jesus Take the Sins He Bore?

This reading keeps the cross whole. Paul places the cancellation of our sins at the cross, where God was “blotting out the handwriting of ordinances that was against us, which was contrary to us, and took it out of the way, nailing it to his cross” (Colossians 2:14). On the book’s account the descent carried the sins to their destination and added nothing to what the cross had done to the charge against us.

Paul goes on: “having spoiled principalities and powers, he made a shew of them openly, triumphing over them in it” (Colossians 2:15). Hebrews says that Christ took flesh and blood “that through death he might destroy him that had the power of death, that is, the devil” (Hebrews 2:14). The book argues that the devil’s power of death rested on the true charge of sin. Once the sins were carried away and forgiven, the accuser had nothing to bring. Christ went down among the dead as the one who had disarmed their captor.

The early church described the result as the harrowing of Hades: Christ went down, broke the gates, and brought the righteous dead out with him. Gregory of Nazianzus wrote that Christ went down into Hades and led souls up. The story is told more fully in What Is the Harrowing of Hell?

Did the Work Continue After the Cross?

The torment view says that Christ’s work went on after his death. In one sense the book agrees. It holds that what Christ did after he died, among the dead and in heaven, was as much a part of our atonement as what he did on the cross. He carried the sins down to the dead, rose because death could not hold him, entered the true sanctuary with his own life, and gave the Spirit.

The difference lies in the kind of work. In the book’s account everything after the cross is carrying away, victory, and priestly ministry. None of it is further punishment. The bearing of sin and the suffering belong to the cross, and the cross is indispensable to everything that follows: without the death there would be no sin-bearer outside the gate, nothing carried down to the dead, and no life to present in heaven.

What This Means for Christians Today

Christians who say the Apostles’ Creed can say “he descended into hell” as a confession of victory. The clause names the place where death and the devil held the human race, and it says that Christ went there and came back out. Jesus promised that “the gates of hell shall not prevail” against his church (Matthew 16:18). The one who holds the keys of Hades is the one who died and rose.

Where This Understanding Comes From

The belief that Christ went among the dead as a victor is older than the creed’s clause. In the second century Ignatius wrote that Christ raised the prophets who had waited for him, and Irenaeus wrote that he went down and preached to the dead. Origen connected the descent with the scapegoat of Leviticus 16, and Eusebius and Gregory of Nazianzus described it as a conquest. Calvin, who rejected the early writers’ explanation, granted that all of them mention the descent. Recent scholars of ancient Jewish and Christian beliefs about the dead, and recent Reformed writers on the descent, have argued that Christ’s descent to Hades simply followed from his death. How Atonement Works builds on this work and credits it.