The Cross and the Harrowing (2 of 2)

The Christus Victor frame opens onto something largely forgotten in modern Protestant teaching: the Harrowing of Hell.

The Apostles' Creed includes the line that he descended into hell — descendit ad inferos. The line was not invented by the medieval Church. It is the Creed's compressed reference to a strand of New Testament and patristic teaching that took the Cross's downward arc seriously enough to follow it past death. In 1 Peter 3:18-19, the apostle writes that Christ was put to death in the flesh but made alive in the spirit, in which he went and proclaimed to the spirits in prison. Ephesians 4:8-10 picks up Psalm 68 and reads it as applying to Christ — when he ascended he led a host of captives — and notes that the ascending one is the same who descended into the lower parts of the earth. Matthew 27:51-53 records the most striking moment in the Passion narrative outside the resurrection itself: at the moment Jesus yielded up his spirit, the veil of the temple was torn from top to bottom, the earth shook, the rocks split, the tombs were opened, and many bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep were raised.

The Fathers read these passages as a single doctrine. Christ's descent into death was not passive. It was the invasion of death's domain by the one being death could not hold. Athanasius wrote that the Logos, having become flesh, entered death as a man and there destroyed death from within, because the deathless One could not be retained by mortality. Gregory of Nyssa offered the image of the divinity hidden in the humanity as the bait on a hook — death swallowed the human flesh of Christ and found itself caught on the divinity it could not consume. The image is not flattering to dignity but it is precise about mechanism. Death was overcome not by being resisted from outside but by being entered, voluntarily, by life itself.

The Anastasis icon, which has been the standard Eastern depiction of the resurrection from at least the eighth century forward, never shows Christ rising from a tomb in the empty-cave sense the Western tradition prefers. It shows him standing on the broken gates of Hades, gripping Adam and Eve by the wrists, lifting them out. The icon is painted theology. It says that what happened between the Cross and the empty tomb was the breaking of death's hold on the human race at its source.

The engineer notices the structure of the redemption at this point. The fix has been administered at the place of the fault, and it has been administered from the only side from which it could come. The asymptote could not be crossed from below. Death could not be defeated from outside. Both limits had to be crossed by someone who came from the other side, who entered the limits voluntarily, and whose entrance broke their power because they could not hold what entered them.

This is why the Cross is the location where redemption happens rather than a transaction performed elsewhere. Love enters the place where the consequence of rebellion is being suffered. Light enters the absolute darkness. The eternal enters the void that the temporal had produced for itself. And the love, the light, the eternal — each of them, by being what they are, undoes the thing that had set itself up to oppose them. Death does not consume the source of life. Darkness does not extinguish the source of light. Rebellion does not silence the source of love. Each of them tries, and in the trying is broken.

And the source of love being entered into the place of rebellion is not love as one attribute among others that God happens to display in this moment. It is love as what God essentially is, on the second Johannine anchor of 1 John 4:8. The Cross is where the essence — the love that God is — meets the place that had been built to refuse it, and the meeting breaks the place. Death cannot hold the love that is the inner life of God. Darkness cannot extinguish the light that is the same essence under a different anchor.

The Cross answers the question the creation has been asking from the beginning. The question is whether the love that built the asymptote and made human beings capable of rebellion and let death enter when we chose it — whether that love is also willing to enter what it has permitted. The answer is yes. All the way down. Through the flesh, through the wood, through the silence, into the gates of death and through them.

And from that place, in the next chapter, life returns.