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The Heresies of John F. MacArthur Jr. h

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Friday, October 25, 2024

The Heresies of John F. MacArthur Jr.

I had not intended to write this essay.  I was only going to share a link through e-mail to a video that the online Christian (Presbyterian) apologist Redeemed Zoomer had made about the Nestorianism of John F. MacArthur Jr.  In what was supposed to be a brief explanation of why I thought the video was important, I mentioned that MacArthur had taught several other false doctrines.  That grew into a full essay so I decided to share that here.  Here is the Redeemed Zoomer video: Is John MacArthur HERETICAL??? – YouTube

Nestorianism is a heresy that many prominent evangelical leaders of the last century or so have shared with John F. MacArthur Jr.  Several years ago, for example, I pointed out in an essay that an article the late R. C. Sproul had written criticizing Charles Wesley’s hymn “And Can it Be” for the line “that Thou my God shouldst die for me” was based entirely on Nestorian assumptions and reasoning.

Nestorianism is not the only heresy that John F. MacArthur Jr. has taught over the years.  The only one of his heresies of which he has publically recanted is Incarnational Sonship.  This was his doctrine, shared by J. Oliver Buswell Jr. and Walter Martin among others, that Jesus Christ was eternally the Logos, the Word of God, but that He became the Son of God in the Incarnation.  This is heresy.  Many evangelicals don’t recognize it as such because they think “he’s got three co-equal, co-eternal, Persons, Who are one in essence, that’s the orthodox doctrine of the Trinity, this is just quibbling about names and titles.”  This is not the case.  If Jesus is the Son of God only because of the Incarnation, in which He was born of the Virgin without a human father, then the persons of the Father and the Holy Spirit are confused.  This is because in both St. Luke’s nativity account and that of St. Matthew, the Holy Spirit is identified as the Agent in the conception of Jesus by Mary.  If Jesus’ Sonship is due to this then the Holy Spirit is His Father.  The confusion of the Persons of the Trinity is one of the most ancient heresies.  Tertullian addressed it under the label Patripassionism in his second century work Against Praxeas.  Historically it was known as Sabellianism after Sabellius who taught it in the early third century.  Today it is called modalism and is taught by the kind of Pentecostals who call themselves “Unity” or “Oneness” Pentecostals.

The orthodox doctrine is the Eternal Sonship of Jesus Christ.  The Father was always the Father because He always had the Son, and the Son was always the Son because He was Son of the Father.  Closely related to the doctrine of Eternal Sonship is the doctrine of the Eternal Generation of the Son.  Jesus Christ is eternally the Son of God because while there never was a time when the Father was without the Son, the Son’s sharing the Godhead, the numerically singular essence/nature/substance of God is derived from the Father in a relational sense that is called Generation because begetting/siring/generation is the closest analogy we have to it.  The implication of the Scriptural references to Jesus as the “only-begotten”, it was articulated by Origen of Alexandria in the third century and was incorporated into the Nicene Creed to combat Arianism in the fourth.  It has been denied by apologist William Craig Lane and theologian Wayne Grudem, although Grudem has apparently since recanted the denial.  MacArthur taught Incarnational Sonship from 1983 until the end of the twentieth century.  He apparently recanted it in 1999, although the article on his website containing the recantation was published in the Journal for Biblical Manhood and Womanhood (the flagship publication of complementarianism, the weenie compromise position promoted by John Piper and Wayne Grudem for evangelicals who have enough sense not to fully buy in to feminism and egalitarianism but don’t have the gonads to take a stand for patriarchy) in 2001.  The doctrinal statement of Master’s Seminary has finally been redacted to teach the orthodox view of Eternal Generation and Eternal Sonship.  This was not the case a couple of years ago.  It only took him a quarter of a century after his recantation to do this.

MacArthur has not recanted to the best of my knowledge for the false teaching over which Bob Jones Jr. of Bob Jones University raised the first red flag in an article for Faith for the Family back in 1986.  This is his teaching that the blood of Jesus Christ has no value in se but merely as a sign or symbol representing the death of Jesus Christ.  The following is from a sermon MacArthur preached in April 1976:

The term “the blood of Christ” is a metonym that is substitute for another term: “death.” It is the blood of Christ that simply is a metonym for the death of Christ, but it is used because the Hebrews used such a metonym to speak of violent death. Whenever you talk about the blood of somebody being poured out, to the Hebrew that meant violent death. And when you commune with the blood of Christ, it doesn’t mean the literal blood of Christ, that is a metonym for His death; you commune with His death.

Now let me say something that might shake some of you up, but I’ll try to qualify it. There is nothing in the actual blood that is efficacious for sin. Did you get that? The Bible does not teach that the blood of Christ itself has any efficacy for taking away sin, not at all. The actual blood of Christ isn’t the issue. The issue is that His poured out blood was symbolic of His violent death. The death was the thing that paid the price, right? “The wages of sin is” – what? – “death.”

He died for us. It is His death that is the issue. The Hebrews spoke of it as His outpoured blood because that was something that expressed violent death. And they believed, for example, in the Old Testament it said, “The life of the flesh is in the blood.” And so, the pouring out of blood was the significance of death.

And so, when it says here we are communing with the blood of Christ, it does not mean the literal blood of Christ is efficacious, it does not mean the literal blood of Christ is involved; it means we enter into a genuine, vital participation in His death. But it is not the blood; the blood is only the symbol of the poured out life. 

Do you recognize what is wrong this doctrine (which MacArthur shared with the late Col. Robert B. Thieme Jr. of Berachah Church in Houston, Texas)?

There are different aspects to the Atoning work of Jesus Christ.  The Scriptures speak of it as a ransom paid for the release of hostages.  This was emphasized in the early Church.  The New Testament and the book of Isaiah also use the language of vicariousness and substitution to speak of Christ dying for us.  This was emphasized in the Reformation and this is what MacArthur emphasizes.  There is nothing wrong with that.  However, when the language of blood specifically is used, it is the Atonement as a sacrifice that is being emphasized. 

Now a blood sacrifice involved more than just killing an animal. In the Old Testament, there are three identifiable elements to animal sacrifices – the slaying, the offering, and the eating.  The first is when the animal brought as an offering was killed at the door of the Tabernacle/Temple. (Lev. 1:3-5) This killing of the animal alone did not make it a sacrificial offering.  Indeed, the priests were not the ones who did the killing unless they were offering the sacrifice for themselves.  The priest would burn the portion of the animal that was to be burned – the fat and fatty portions – on the altar (Lev. 1:8-9).  The priest would also take the blood of the animal and sprinkle it on the altar (Lev. 1:5) which was near the door of the Tabernacle/Temple.  If it were Yom Kippur and he was the High Priest he would take it further into the Holy of Holies and sprinkle the Mercy Seat (Lev. 16:14-15).  It is these actions by the priest that turned what otherwise would have just been the slaying of an animal – which the Israelites were permitted to do themselves in their own homes if they lived too far from the place (Jerusalem) appointed for sacrifice (Deut. 12:15, 21-22) – into a sacrificial offering.  Finally, except for the olah or whole burnt offering which was entirely burned,  the rest of the animal was divided between the portions assigned to the priest (Lev. 7:31-35) and the portions assigned to the ones who had brought the offering and eaten (Lev. 7:15-20, ; Deut. 12:6-7). 

In the epistle to the Hebrews St. Paul, for it is he who wrote that epistle, tells us that Moses was given a vision of Heaven on Mt. Sinai, that the instructions for the Tabernacle and system of worship he was given were imitations of the pattern he had seen there, (Heb. 8:5) and that it was into this Tabernacle made without hands that Jesus Christ, as High Priest after the order of Melchizedek, entered with His own blood to make the one offering that effectively takes away sin (Heb. 9:11-14, 23-28).  This is not symbolic language for the crucifixion.  The crucifixion took place in time and history, in a specific place on a specific date.  It corresponds to the slaying of the animal in the Old Testament sacrifices.  Note that as the OT sacrifices were slain at the door of the Tabernacle, so Jesus was crucified on Calvary outside the walls of Jerusalem.  Of course, His suffering and dying had precisely the vicarious significance with regards to our salvation that MacArthur et al. assign to it.  However, the offering of His blood that makes the whole thing a sacrifice is not something that took place in time and history, in a specific place on a specific date.  This offering occurred once, but in the Holy of Holies of the Tabernacle in Heaven, which is situated in eternity, outside of time and space as we know them because time and space are dimensions of Creation.  The death and the offering of the blood are two very distinct elements in the dispensation of Atonement, this is clear in both Testaments, and MacArthur missed it all.  Astonishingly, he repeated this error in his commentary on Hebrews of all places.

In each of these instances MacArthur’s serious doctrinal error are arguably the result of his taking Protestantism too far.  Protestantism, in the sense of the branch of the Christian tradition that emerged from the sixteenth century Reformation, is alright in itself, since the Reformation was a necessary response to real abuses on the part of the Roman ecclesiastical authorities in the late Middle Ages.  When one acts as if the history of orthodox Christianity took a hiatus after the completion of the New Testament canon until All Hallows Eve in 1517 and so sets his Protestantism against the Catholicism that is the general tradition of first millennium Christianity prior to the East-West Schism, then one can go very far astray.  If he looks with suspicion on Catholicism as defined in the previous sentence, then he feels free to ignore the Creed with which Christians around the world have confessed their faith for almost two thousand years when it says that Jesus is “the Only-Begotten Son of God, Begotten of the Father before all worlds, God of God, Light of Light, Very God of Very God, Begotten not made.”

Furthermore he feels free to ignore the rulings of the Ecumenical Councils to which the bishops of the entire Church were invited (whether they attended or not is another matter) to address problems of doctrine and discipline, the decisions of which were received as authoritative by the Church such as the ruling of third Ecumenical Council, that of Ephesus in 431 AD, that it is heresy to reject the term Theotokos, God-Bearer or Mother of God, for Mary, as Nestorius did on the basis that Jesus did not derive His deity from Mary, because in Jesus deity and humanity, while remaining distinct natures, are united in One Person of Whom Mary was Mother.  John MacArthur wrote “It’s heretical to call the blood of Jesus Christ the blood of God, and it demonstrates a failure to understand what theologians have called the hypostatic union, that is the God-man union in Christ.”  Ironically, it is MacArthur’s sentence here which is heretical precisely because he himself fails to understand the hypostatic union a consequence of which is that whatever is the property of Jesus in either of His natures is His property as a Person and can be attributed to Him as such even when speaking of Him in terms of the other nature.  For example, a counterpart in the Scriptures to calling Mary the Mother of God (an equivalent of which also appears in the Scriptures in Luke 1:43) is when Jesus tells Nicodemus “And no man hath ascended up to heaven, but he that came down from heaven, even the Son of man which is in heaven” thus identifying Himself by His humanity in the same breathe in which He references His omnipresence. 

Finally, it is because of His suspicion of the Catholic tradition of the first millennium that MacArthur refuses to acknowledge that Christ’s offering of His blood is not just metynomic language for His death on earth, but is rather referring to the one offering Jesus made in His priestly office in the Heavenly Tabernacle in eternity.  If he acknowledged that, then He would have to admit that it is from that offering in the Heavenly Tabernacle, which being situated in eternity is therefore equidistant to every single point in time in history from Creation until the Last Judgement that the benefits of Christ’s Atonement come to us where we are in space and time.  This would be admitting the foundation of the Catholic understanding of the Eucharist (the first millennium understanding before it got twisted into a caricature of itself in the late Middle Ages) that the earthly offering of bread and wine in the Eucharist is mystically united to Christ’s Heavenly oblation so that when the faithful receive the bread and wine, Christ’s one sacrifice becomes the meal that sustains the new life as Jesus explained in His Bread of Life Discourse in John 6, which completes the correspondence of the New Testament sacrifice with those of the Old Covenant.  Slaying of animal – Crucifixion.  Offering of blood on altar/Mercy Seat – Offering of blood in Heavenly Tabernacle.  Eating of the sacrifice – the Eucharistic meal.

One might think from this that MacArthur must at least sound in the teachings that were important in the Reformation.  MacArthur certainly sees himself as a champion of Reformation orthodoxy.  When Hank Hanegraaff, Walter Martin’s successor at the Christian Research Institute, joined the Eastern Orthodox Church in 2017 MacArthur acted as if Hanegraaff had converted to Islam or Buddhism or just apostatized.  Hanegraaff, quite capable of defending himself, provided clips from MacArthur’s remarks in his response. By joining the Eastern Orthodox Church, MacArthur felt, Hanegraaff had abandoned or was close to abandoning the Gospel.  Not the Gospel as St. Paul identified it in 1 Corinthians 15, that Christ died for our sins, according to the Scriptures, and was buried, and rose again the third day according to the Scriptures, of course, because that Gospel is confessed in the Nicene Creed which Eastern Orthodoxy confesses, but the doctrine of justification by faith alone. 

Justification by faith alone is, of course, a central doctrine if not the central doctrine of the Reformation.  While it was not until the sixteenth century that it was put in that wording it is essentially identical to St. Paul’s doctrine of justification by faith and not by works.  In St. Paul’s epistles, especially Romans, it is stressed that justification is by faith and not by works.  It has to be by faith and not by works, St. Paul argued, because only then can it be by grace, that is, by God’s favour, a gift freely bestowed.  If it were by our works it would be a wage or reward rather than a gift.  This is an important truth and, indeed, in Ephesians 2:8-9 St. Paul says that salvation, which is larger than justification, is a gift of grace by faith and not works.  The importance of this truth should not be minimized, but it does need to be kept in perspective.  It is a truth about what is sometimes called the mechanics of salvation.  The Gospel is the Good News of that salvation proclaimed to the world of sinners, Jew first then Greek.  Its content is Jesus Christ, the Son of God, Who He is and what He did.  The Gospel is all about Jesus Christ.  Justification by faith and not works is about us, what we believe and what we do or rather what we don’t do to receive what Jesus Christ has done.  It is an important truth, but truths in which we are the subject rather than Jesus Christ are not on par with the Gospel truths about Jesus Christ and we ought not to make them out as if they were.  The evangelical Protestant habit of referring to the doctrine of justification by faith alone as if it were itself the Gospel rather a truth about ourselves derived from the Gospel is a very bad one.  Any truth can become a heresy when it is taken out of its proper context.  The proper context for Sola Fide is as the answer to the question “what is the hand with which we reach out and appropriate to ourselves the gift of salvation that God has given to us in Jesus Christ” because this is the role that belongs uniquely to faith. 

In his negative remarks on Hanegraaff’s chrismation into Eastern Orthodoxy MacArthur treated justification by faith alone as an essential article of faith to which one must formally subscribe to be a Christian.  How much is such subscription worth, however, when you affirm the doctrine formally while stripping it of all real meaning?

One of John MacArthur’s best known books was The Gospel According to Jesus, first published by Zondervan in 1988.  This book was his response to a real problem afflicting evangelicalism.  MacArthur called the problem “easy believism” but it would have been more accurately called “mass production evangelism” because it was basically large-scale evangelism, designed to get as many conversions as possible no matter how shallow, through a lowest-common denominator approach to the Christian message. Had MacArthur written a book denouncing the factory assembly-line approach to evangelism and its bad “decisionism” theology and tracing it back to the neo-Pelagianism of Charles G. Finney in the early nineteenth century it could have been a very worthy volume.  It would have been a completely different book from The Gospel According to Jesus, however.  Instead, MacArthur’s book retained the basic structure of evangelical decisionism but called for the decision to be defined in the much more demanding terms of total commitment, which arguably merely returned it to the point at which it went wrong in the teachings of Finney.  MacArthur wed this with a type of Dortian Calvinism that is entirely incompatible with it producing theological incoherency.   He is heavily indebted to heretical, liberal, “God is dead” theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer for his thesis, although Bonhoeffer’s  The Cost of Discipleship is not listed in the bibliography, at least in my copy (the 1989 paperback edition), nor is Bonhoeffer listed in the index. There was a revival of interest in Bonhoeffer at the time MacArthur was writing this book, brought about in part by the dishonest promotion of Bonhoeffer as a “martyr.”  A martyr is someone who is put to death for his faith.  Bonhoeffer was not executed for his faith but for his political activities, including his involvement whether actual or merely assumed due to his associations in an assassination plot.  No matter how worthy political activism may be or how deserving of assassination an intended target may happen to be it does not make the person executed for such into a martyr, much less does it transform a heretical theologian into a sound one. Nor did MacArthur succeed in turning Bonhoeffer’s bad theology sound by slapping lipstick on the pig and rebranding it in The Gospel According to Jesus.

In The Gospel According to Jesus, MacArthur affirmed justification by faith alone as an essential article of faith, but gutted it of all its meaning.  Remember that Romans St. Paul argued that justification had to be by faith and not by works so that it might be by grace and therefore a gift rather than a wage.  A gift is something that someone gives and another person receives.  It is not something that one person gives to another in exchange for something else.  MacArthur however wrote “The important truth to grasp is that saving faith is an exchange of all that we are for all that Christ is.” (p. 143).  This does not describe the giving and receiving of a gift but is precisely the sort of transaction that St. Paul says that justification/salvation is not.  In his next sentence MacArthur says “We need to understand that this does not mean we barter for eternal life.”  However, when you say “the water is full of sodium chloride” you cannot clarify your sentence by adding “this does not mean that it is salty” because this is contradicting not explaining yourself and this is the case with MacArthur.  A barter is precisely what MacArthur had described in the first sentence.  Nor is this the only place in this book where he speaks of salvation as a two-way exchange.  Clearly the man who pastors Grace Community Church and whose radio program is entitled Grace to You understands the word grace rather differently from St. Paul.  Since he has difficulty with the entire concept of a gift of grace that is St. Paul’s reason for stressing justification by faith without works it is not surprising that MacArthur’s book is also chock full of statements like this “True faith is humble, submissive, obedience.” (p. 140).  Note that this does not say that true faith is accompanied by humility, submission, and obedience.  It says that true faith is these things.  Basic deductive reasoning here.  If X = Y and Y = Z then X = Z.  Obedience and works are the same thing.  If faith is obedience then faith is works.  If faith is works, then saying that justification is by faith and not works or that justification is by faith alone is utterly meaningless.  It would be one thing if this were a one-time slip of the pen, but is basically what MacArthur argues for throughout the entire book.  Nor is he merely saying what Jesus said when He answered the question of “what shall we do, that we may work the works of God?” with “This is the work of God, that ye believe in him whom he sent.” (Jn. 6:28-29).  Indeed, his intent is clearly the opposite of Jesus’ in this passage. 

Ironically, much of this book is dedicated to justifying disobedience, disobedience, that is, to Matt. 7:1.  True, as is indicated elsewhere in the New Testament or even in the verses that immediately follow, Jesus did not intent to prohibit all judgement in this verse.  However, statements like “If a person declares he has trusted Christ as Savior [sic], no one challenges his testimony, regardless of how inconsistent his life-style may be with God’s Word” (p. 59) variations of which complaint are found repeatedly in these pages are evidently calling for a kind of judgement that if it is not fall under Jesus’ prohibition, nothing does.

The title of the second chapter “He Calls for a New Birth” displays just how muddled MacArthur’s theology is in this book.  When Jesus told Nicodemus that he must be born again this was not a call for a new birth.  It was an indicative statement of the necessity of the new birth.  A call for a new birth would take the form of Jesus telling Nicodemus that he requires a new birth from Nicodemus, that Nicodemus is capable of meeting the requirement and needs to undergo such a birth to meet the requirement.  That, however, is not the conversation Nicodemus and Jesus had.  Nicodemus does not understand Jesus’ statement and when he asks for clarification Jesus tells him that the new birth is the work of the Holy Spirit, and is like the wind which blows where it blows, and can be identified by its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it going (Jn. 3:8).  If the new birth is the work of the Holy Spirit, it is not something Jesus calls for from us.  Jesus does identify in this same passage where our responsibility lies and that is to believe in Him.  MacArthur’s attempt to confuse the simplicity of what is conveyed in this part of the interview involves a textbook example of the meaning of eisegesis “In order to look at the bronze snake on the pole, they had to drag themselves to where they could see it.  They were in no position to glance flippantly at the pole and then proceed with lives of rebellion.” (p. 46) Exposition like this makes one wonder what the expositor was smoking at the time he wrote it.  Oddly, MacArthur’s treatment of the new birth in this chapter is very much at odds with his Reformed theology in which regeneration is very much a sovereign act of the Holy Spirit.

Less oddly, he divorces regeneration from baptism.  With regards to the water of John 3:5 he writes “This has nothing to do with water or baptism – H2O. It cannot be accomplished by a bath” (p. 40).  This comes from his Hyper-Protestantism.  That regeneration is a work that the Holy Spirit accomplishes, that baptism is the sign and seal of this work, and that as a Gospel Sacrament it is used instrumentally to convey the grace it signifies is not merely the Roman understanding but the Catholic understanding of the entire Church of the first millennium.  It is also the understanding of the Lutherans, Anglicans, and even the more orthodox of the Reformed.  Dr. Luther and the English Reformers saw no contradiction between this and their doctrine of justification because there is no contradiction.  There is no contradiction for two reasons, a) Baptism is a Sacrament not a work, and b) the role of Sacraments such as Baptism in salvation is not the same as that of faith.  Faith is the instrument we use to appropriate the gifts God gives us in His grace.  Sacraments and the Church that administers them are like the Word proclaimed the instruments that God uses to give us those gifts.

If in his error discussed in the previous paragraph MacArthur departs from where the traditions of the Magisterial Reformation are in full agreement with Rome and not only Rome but the entire Catholic tradition when it comes to assurance of salvation he departs from the Reformation tradition on what was one of the most important issues in the Reformation and one on which Dr. Luther and Calvin very much disagreed with Rome.  “Genuine assurance comes from seeing the Holy Spirit’s transforming work in one’s life, not from clinging to the memory of some experience” (p. 23).  This statement is true in what it denies.  Assurance does not come from “clinging to the memory of some experience.”  It is very, very, wrong in what it affirms.  This is because assurance and faith are the same thing.  It says so explicitly in the Bible.  St. Paul in Hebrews 11:1 writes “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.”  While I am quoting the Authorized Bible and very much hold the position that translations of the last century or so are in general greatly inferior to it in this case where they generally have “assurance” where the Authorized has “substance” or “certainty” in the case of the NASB (the NIV uses “assurance” where the Authorized uses “evidence”) it is helpful in making the meaning of the verse clearer.  Faith is assurance or certainty of its object and content. The Holy Spirit’s transforming work in our lives manifests itself in works.  Saying that assurance comes seeing this transformation, then, is the same thing as saying that we must put our faith in our works.  That assurance is faith, and that faith/assurance is not to be placed in our works or anything else in us but in Jesus Christ as He is proclaimed in the Gospel was Dr. Luther’s position and remains the Lutheran view to this day.  John Calvin taught the same thing.  Both men told their flocks not to look for assurance within themselves but to find it outside themselves in Jesus Christ.  John Calvin famously wrote “But if we are elected in him, we cannot find the certainty of our election in ourselves; and not even in God the Father, if we look at him apart from the Son. Christ, then, is the mirror in which we ought, and in which, without deception, we may contemplate our election. For since it is into his body that the Father has decreed to ingraft those whom from eternity he wished to be his, that he may regard as sons all whom he acknowledges to be his members, if we are in communion with Christ, we have proof sufficiently clear and strong that we are written in the Book of Life.“  (Institutes of the Christian Religion, 3.24.5) MacArthur’s Puritanical view of assurance is a greater departure from the Pauline and Reformation doctrine of salvation by faith and not by works than that of Rome.

MacArthur, in my opinion, missed his true calling.  Instead of teaching the Bible, he should be peddling snake oil or selling used cars. — Gerry T. Neal

udem

The Fifth Article – The Victory of the Christ

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The Canadian Red Ensign

The Canadian Red Ensign

Friday, April 14, 2023

The Fifth Article – The Victory of the Christ

In our discussion of the fourth Article of the Creed we noted that the Creed speaks only to the what of the Son of God’s suffering, crucifixion, death, and burial for us, and not the question of how this accomplished our salvation.  We looked at the controversies that arose over this question long after the period which gave us the Apostles’ and Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creeds.    I mentioned that the late Eastern Orthodox Metropolitan Kallistos Ware had offered a number of helpful questions for evaluating the different theories or models proposed to answer this question and applied the first of those questions, “does in envision a change in God or us?” to the Anselmic model of satisfaction and subsequent models derived from Anselm’s such as the Reformation model of penal substitution and observed that the Metropolitan’s question shows us how far to take the language of analogy employed by these models.    Metropolitan Ware’s third question was “does it isolate the Cross from the Incarnation and the Resurrection?”    It is a weakness in the model if it does this and so it is good to observe again that in the Greek and Latin original texts of both Creeds the third, fourth, and fifth Articles are part of the same sentence.

That the Cross should not be isolated from the Resurrection is of particular importance when it comes to the subject of the Victory of the Christ.   The Cross should never be thought to have been a lost battle before a final victory.  In both the Cross and the Resurrection Jesus Christ is Victor.   On the Cross Christ’s victory was accomplished but concealed, in the Resurrection Christ’s victory is openly revealed.

It is important to keep this in mind when we consider the fifth Article of the Creed.   In the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed this Article reads καὶ ἀναστάντα τῇ τρίτῃ ἡμέρᾳ κατὰ τὰς γραφάς which is rendered in the English of the Book of Common Prayer as “and the third day he rose again according to the Scriptures”.   The phrase κατὰ τὰς γραφάς or “according to the Scriptures”, taken from St. Paul’s summary of the Gospel he preached in 1 Corinthians 15 was not present in the original Nicene Creed but was added by the Council of Constantinople.   The Apostles’ Creed does not include this phrase and it begins with a phrase not found in the conciliar Creed.   The Latin text of the Apostles’ Creed is descendit ad inferos, tertia die resurrexit a mortuis which in the English of the Book of Common Prayer is “He descended into hell. The third day he rose again from the dead.”    

While there are some who think that the traditional division of the Articles is mistaken in assigning descendit ad inferos to the fifth Article with the Resurrection rather than the fourth with the suffering, Crucifixion, death and burial, this viewpoint is wrong.   The descent belongs with the Resurrection as part of the open revelation of the victory of Christ.   We shall address this at length momentarily.   First, however, the Modern controversy over the descent clause and its translation needs to be addressed.

The traditional English translation of descendit ad inferos as we have seen is “He descended into hell”.   Squeamish Moderns dislike this translation and have suggested such alternatives as “He descended to the dead”.   While this would not be a mistranslation of the clause taken in isolation from what precedes and follows it, it is not a good translation of the clause in its context.    When, later in the clause “the dead” is incontrovertibly used to denote those from among whom He rose again, it is a mortuis in Latin, not ab inferorum.   This is the ordinary way of saying “the dead” in Latin.   The adjective inferus means “lower” or “below”, and the masculine plural when used as a substantive as it is in the Creed literally means “those below”.   This was understood by Latin speakers to mean the souls of the dead who were “those below” because they were in the underworld.    While it was more common to use the neuter plural to indicate the place and the masculine plural to indicate its inhabitants the one implied the other.   The traditional translation of “hell” is better than “the dead” here because following “was crucified, dead, and buried” and preceding “The third day he rose again from the dead”, “He descended to the dead” does not really say anything in English that is not already affirmed in these other clauses.

Some evangelical teachers have rejected this clause and the doctrine of the Descent into Hell for reasons other than the Modern squeamishness referred to in the previous paragraph.   Wayne Grudem, past president of the Evangelical Theological Society and the author of a very popular one-volume Systematic Theology, has said that this clause should be removed from the Apostles’ Creed.   John Piper has said that he omits the phrase when reciting the Creed.   Both claim that the doctrine lacks Scriptural attestation, a position that can only be taken by those who assert that “Hell” can only refer to the punishment of those who finally reject their redemption in Jesus Christ and should not be used of the Hebrew שְׁאוֹל‎ (Sheol) or the Greek Ἅιδης (Hades), i.e., the underworld, the land of the dead.   This is an untenable and absurd position for many reasons.  For one thing, in Old English the word Hell had the same meaning as its Danish, Germanic, and Norse cognates which all derived it from their common proto-Germanic root, and that meaning was identical to that of the Hebrew Sheol and the Greek Hades.   For another, it retained this meaning after it came to be also used for what the Book of Revelation calls the Lake of Fire, and continues to have both meanings in the general culture to this day.  Finally, the concepts of Hades and the Lake of Fire while distinct are not so unrelated that a common term cannot serve for both.   Hades is the realm of the dead and death throughout the Scriptures is the punishment for sin (Gen. 2:17, Ez. 18:20, Rom. 6:23).   After the Book of Revelation describes Death and Hades as being cast into the Lake of Fire it says that the Lake of Fire is the Second Death.   That Jesus was in Hades between His death and Resurrection is a fact found in the very first Gospel sermon preached by St. Peter after the Holy Spirit descended upon the Apostles on Pentecost (Acts 2:24-31).

Grudem and Piper are both Reformed in their theology, that is to say, adherents of the version of Protestant theology enshrined in the canons of the Synod of Dort.   This type of theology is often called Calvinist, although it arguably owes more to Theodore Beza’s interpretation of John Calvin than to John Calvin himself.   Beza was an early proponent of excising the Descent clause from the Apostles’ Creed.   Calvin was not himself in favour of this, but his interpretation of the clause was very different from the traditional understanding.   He understood the Descent into Hell to refer to Christ’s suffering the penalty for sin as man’s substitute.   Interpreted in this manner, it must either a) refer to Christ’s sufferings on the Cross up to and including but completed by His death or b) mean that the payment for man’s sin was not complete when Jesus died and had to be completed in Hell.   The second of these is so obviously unacceptable that the only person I can think of who actually taught it was a very heretical televangelist.  Calvin understood it the first way.   If this is what “He descended into hell” means, however, then it is rather conspicuous for being the only item in a long list of otherwise consecutive events not to chronologically follow what preceded it.   Calvin’s fundamental error here was that he, with his lawyer’s mind, focused solely on Hell as a legal penalty for sin and so read the Descent into Hell as part of Christ’s Passion, His voluntary submission to suffering and death for us.   In a long tradition going back to the Fathers, however, the ancient Churches – including the ones that do not make liturgical use of the Apostles’ Creed – have understood it to be the first step in Christ’s Exaltation rather than the last in His Humiliation, as part of His Resurrection rather than His Passion.

To understand the traditional view of the Descent, it is best to personalize death, that is to say, to think of Death as a person.   Since St. Paul does this in 1 Corinthians 15 (vv. 26 and 55) and St. John does this in the Apocalypse (6:8) there should be no objections to this on Scriptural grounds.   Then think of Hell – in the sense of Hades, the underworld, as Death’s kingdom.   To be more precise, think of Hell as one of Death’s two kingdoms, the other being the Grave.   In the Grave Death holds the bodies of men captive, in Hell he holds captive their souls.  God decreed to man in his Innocence that if he disobeyed God he would die.   Thus Death has a claim on the bodies and souls of all who sin.   Adam sinned and passed sin on to his descendants so that Death claimed them all (Rom. 5:12ff – another passage in which Death is personalized).      Then the Son of God became Incarnate as a man.   Born of a Virgin, He was the promised Seed of the woman (Gen. 3:15), Who inherited human nature but not Adam’s sin, nor did He, although He endured Temptation (Matt. 4:1-11, Lk. 4:1-13, Mk. 1:13), sin Himself (Heb. 4:15).   Death, therefore, had no claim on Him.   He, however, Who was without sin, allowed the sins of the world to be placed upon Him (2 Cor. 5:21, I Peter. 2:24) and voluntarily submitted to arrest, trial, scourging, crucifixion, and death.   That His submission was voluntary is stressed in the Scriptures – the Prophet Isaiah declaring in prophecy that He would be led like a Lamb to the slaughter and open not His mouth (Isaiah 53:7) and He Himself told St. Peter in Gethsemane that He could call upon His Father to send more than twelve legions of angels to His rescue (Matt. 26:53).   This is important because, again, the Passion of the Christ was not a temporary defeat before the final victory, although it had that outer appearance.   The Passion was Christ’s Victory.  By voluntarily submitting to all this injustice He forced Death to claim the body and soul of Someone over Whom Death had no claim – and Who, being God as well as Man, Death could not possibly keep captive.   When Death claimed Him, he forfeited his claim on anybody else.   So when Christ entered Hell, Death’s kingdom, it was not as captive but Conqueror.   He had already defeated Death, and was now revealing that victory, first of all to those whom Death had held captive in Hell and whose liberty He had just secured.

This is the understanding of this event that can be found throughout the pages of the Patristic writings and in artistic depictions in Church buildings around the world.   The typical portrayal of the “Harrowing of Hell” in art features the Gates of Hell smashed to pieces, on top of a figure who may be either the personalized Death or the devil, with Christ, often standing on the smashed Gates, extending His arms to a procession of the captives He has liberated, led by Adam and Eve.

The next step in the revelation of Christ’s Victory was the Resurrection itself, linked with the Descent into Hell in the Apostles’ Creed, and the sole event mentioned in the fifth Article of the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed.   Unlike the Descent, historically controversy over the Resurrection had been between believers and unbelievers, over whether or not the event took place, rather than between believers over the interpretation of the event.   In the last century or so liberals have re-interpreted the Resurrection by saying that it meant that Jesus lived on in the hearts of His followers while His body remained in the Tomb but this too is a controversy between believers and unbelievers, since such liberals are not believers, but unbelievers trying to disguise their unbelief as faith.   If you do not believe that after Jesus literally died on the Cross, and was buried in the Tomb of Joseph of Arimathea, on the third day His spirit and body were re-united, His body was restored to life, and He left the Tomb empty of all but His grave clothes, you do not believe in the Resurrection.

In the Resurrection, Jesus was raised from the dead in His body, but not merely to the same state in which He was prior to His death.  His body also underwent a transformation.   The same will be true of everybody else in the Final Resurrection on the Last Day.   St. Paul in the fifteenth chapter of 1 Corinthians explains this in terms of the analogy of a grain planted as a seed.   The grain “dies” when it is planted, and springs to new life as a plant.   The Scriptures do not spell out all the details of the difference between pre-death and post-Resurrection life.  In His encounters with His followers after the Resurrection Jesus was recognizable, although in some instances, such as with Mary Magdalene in the garden outside the Tomb (Jn. 20:14-16) and the disciples on the road to Emmaus (Lk. 24:13-31) the recognition was not immediate.   This could indicate that His outward appearance was altered in some way, although the nail prints in His hands and the spear wound in His side remained (Jn. 20:27).   The most important difference is that prior to His death His body was mortal, after His Resurrection it was incorruptible, no longer subject to disease, decay and death.

Like the Creation of the world, the Resurrection is represented in Scripture as an act in which the entire Trinity was involved.   While most often the Scriptures speak of God the Father as the Agent Who raised Jesus His Son from the dead, Jesus did speak of actively raising Himself from the dead (most obviously John 10:17-18 but this is also the import of His saying that He would raise the Temple in three days), and St. Peter speaks of the Holy Spirit as the Agent in the Resurrection (1 Pet. 3:18).   St. Paul also speaks of the Holy Spirit in connection with the Resurrection in Romans and his wording may suggest that the Spirit’s role was instrumental in a way similar to that of the Son in Creation.

When St. Paul wrote “That if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved” (Rom. 10: 9) he summarized the Gospel with the Resurrection.   The Resurrection is the one Gospel truth that contains all the others.   That God raised Jesus from the dead necessarily means that Jesus had to have died, and for Him to have died means that He had to have come down from Heaven and become Incarnate as a Man.   As well as encapsulating the entire Christian faith in a single truth, the Resurrection is the evidence of the truth of the faith.   When Jesus was asked for a sign to prove His claims for Himself and His authority to do the things He did it was the Resurrection to which He pointed when He spoke of Himself building up the Temple after three days and the sign of the prophet Jonah.   As the evidence for the truth of the Christian faith as a whole, the Resurrection remains one of the best attested facts of history being attested not only by an abundance of evidence of the legal-historical type – such as the eyewitness testimony summarized by St. Paul in 1 Corinthians 15  – but by nature itself.   The Resurrection took place on the third day after the Crucifixion, and the Crucifixion took place on the Jewish Passover, which falls on the Ides of the month the Hebrews originally called Aviv – spring.   Spring is the season in which the trees bud and grow leaves, the flowers bloom and the grass turns green, the birds come back and animals awake out of hibernation after winter, the season of coldness, barrenness, death and decay.   While rationalistic skeptics have tried to write the Resurrection off as another myth symbolizing the renewal of life and fertility in spring after the barrenness of winter, they got this exactly backwards.   The Resurrection of Jesus Christ is a historical event that occurred at a known time, in a known place, in a province of the largest empire of the civilized ancient world.  Therefore the natural renewal of life in springtime to which countless pagan myths point must itself have been made by nature’s Creator, God, to point to the Resurrection of His Son. (1)

The Resurrection of Jesus Christ is the basis of our hope as believers.   To the ancient pagans Hell – the underworld – was the final destiny of all people, the wicked and the just alike, after death.   In Homer’s Odyssey, Ulysses, visiting the underworld before death, encounters the other Greek heroes of the Trojan War, including Achilles, the greatest of the Greek heroes, who gloomily tells him that it is “better to serve on earth than rule in hell”.   The hope of the pagans, such as it was with this gloomy worldview, was to achieve glory that would survive them in this world.  In the Old Testament, Hell – Sheol –similarly awaits all after death, but there are passages that indicate that this is only a temporary destination.   Job expresses the hope that he will be raised from the dead, King David expresses similar hope in several of the Psalms, and Daniel spells out clearly that at the end of time the dead will be raised to either everlasting joy or everlasting shame depending on the outcome of the Last Judgement.   In Christianity, the Old Testament hope of resurrection was made solid and certain by the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, the first fruit of the Final Resurrection.   In the closing chapters of the Apocalypse St. John gives his vision of a new heaven – the heaven visible to the eye – and a new earth, that will replace the old heaven and earth, to which the New Jerusalem, the City of God, which is basically the same thing as the heaven that is invisible to the eye, i.e., the location of God’s throne, the place of His immediate presence, will descend to the earth, and so heaven and earth will be one Kingdom of God.   The hope of the believer is not bliss in a disembodied state but to be raised bodily to live in this Kingdom of God on the New Earth, or, as N. T. Wright puts it, not life after death, but life after life-after-death.   The Resurrection of Jesus Christ is the pledge to the believer of his certain hope to participate in this resurrection.   Indeed, even in this life we are told to consider ourselves, who have been baptized into Christ’s death, to be raised with Him into newness of life, and so His Resurrection is the basis of the faith in which we walk, as well as of our ultimate hope.

(1)    The realization of this is what brought C. S. Lewis to his conversion to Christian faith. — Gerry T. Neal