IT WAS ONE OF THE FIRST things that scandalized me about the faith I was being brought up on, was the line from the Apostles' creed "he descended into hell" because according to my infantile understanding of things, hell was NO place that God, Jesus would have gone to. Unfortunately, the cleric-centered governance of the pre-Vatican II Catholic church was largely unconcerned about any kind of extensive or detailed instruction into what Scripture or even Catholic doctrine held about such things. Such teaching was also done on the cheap so it was largely given over to teaching nuns who often, in those days, not now, didn't have much of an education in such things, themselves.
Though Protestants may, with some justification, note that Catholics of my generation, at that time, were not encouraged to read Scripture much or very deeply, I haven't noticed that Protestantism on the popular level has done a much better job, whether with Scripture reading or not.
So it had to wait decades for me to read what I should have read then, what should have been pointed out to us, then, a fuller meaning of the Incarnation and how fully and completely that enfleshment had to be - half-measures and token embodiment wouldn't have been real and the real thing is required. And as a consequence of that incomplete view of the Incarnation, the full meaning of the death and Resurrection couldn't start to have any clarity. But that's for tomorrow. For now, here is what Luke Timothy Johnson says on this in his book The Creed: What Christians Believe and Why It Matters
AND WAS BURIED
The final moment of Jesus' earthly existence noted by the creed is that he was buried. Once more, we find the tradition of Jesus' burial both in Paul and in the Gospels.
I will break in here to note that a lot of the As Seen On TV and on the internet "historical Jesus" stuff typically doesn't deal with the Epistles, concentrating on the Gospels and their alleged omissions and disagreements. The earliest expressions of such things are almost certainly found in the Pauline letters and much early material is also found in the other letters. I am especially interested in why what is generally, these days, for now, at least, is claimed to be the earliest of the Gospels, Mark, says so little about the death and entombment and Resurrection of Jesus. The answer to that is, of course, we don't know why. Whether it was an accident of the textual history of Mark's Gospel that left us with an incomplete version of the book or that being incomplete and vague was an intentional choice made by the Gospel writer can't be known. It has been pointed out that in the available text of Mark, as is not subject to such speculation, Jesus was not hesitant to predict something would happen very much like the accounts given by Paul and the other three Gospels, details in those books differing somewhat. As Luke Timothy Johnson points out, the fact of the burial is not among the points of difference among them.
Writing to the Corinthians around the year 54, Paul provides a summary of the good news that he ha himself received and had handed on to them, a "by which you are being saved if you held firmly to the message" (1 Cor 15:1-2). It begins, "that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, and that he was buried." Note that Paul reported this in an unadorned fashion. It is simply one of the "facts" about Jesus that he received from the first believers, therefore within some few years of Jesus' death He does not suggest that, like the death for sins and like the resurrection on the third day, these are matters predicted by scriptures.
The same matter-of-factness about the burial is found in the Gospel narratives, with several small variations (see Mark 15:43-47; Matt 27:55-66; Luke 25:50-55; John 19:58-42). More striking is the strong agreement on the basic characters and actions and above all on the fact of the burial itself. That Jesus was buried and remained in the tomb for some length of time certainly serves to confirm the reality o his death. Compare Martha's comment concerning her brother Lazarus, "Lord, already there is a stench because he has been dead four days: (John 11:52), and the resurrection of a body so thoroughly dead must also be regarded as an act of God.
But another dimension of the burial is equally ancient and important. The burial symbolizes Jesus' descent into the realm that in ancient cosmology was most removed from heaven or the place of God's dwelling. He goes "under the earth," which in the Psalms is called sheol, and in the Greek translation, hades. In Peter's speech at Pentecost, he quotes Psalm 16 in connection with Jesus' death: "You will not abandon my soul to hades, or let your Holy One see corruption" (acts 2:27).
I will break in here to note that one of the most important keys to understanding the meaning of the Scriptures is that, as human writing, human literature using human words, ideas, concepts and imagination (as in fact every bit of writing and scientific observation, calculation and analysis are) that, of course, such things would have to be presented in the human understanding of life, the world and the entire cosmos that was the common imaginative and intellectual understanding of their time.
What reads to us as a hopelessly naive view of the physical universe was merely the common intellectual currency by which those trying to explain their experience of the living, the executed, the buried and the Resurrected Jesus to their contemporaries and, perhaps as an after thought, those of us living two thousand years later, used to say it.
And we're just as bound by our current, entirely likely to be surpassed in the future conception of reality as they were.
Any modern reader, thinker, non-thinker or scoffer who believes that we, in our high sciencyness have surpassed such parochial vicissitudes only marks themselves as being as unsophisticated as those who believe you can read the Scriptures as you would a magazine article or newspaper journalism written at what used to be a 4th grade level of reading ability and taken as "objectively true." That is something that the materialist-atheist-devotee of scientism has in common with so, so many of those white evangelicals who they love to believe are so different from themselves.
This connection may help account for the conviction that Jesus, after his death, entered into the dungeons of the lower depths in order to free those most distant from the divine presence, a motif that was subsequently termed "the harrowing of hell" or, in the Apostles' Creed, "the descent into hell." In Ephesians 4:5, Paul asks cryptically, "When it says 'he ascended,' what does it mean but that he also descended into the lower parts of the earth?: The conviction is stated more clearly by 1 Peter 3:18-20:
"He was put to death in the flesh but made alive in the spirit, in which also he went and made a proclamation to the spirits in prison who in former times did not obey when God waited patiently in the days of Noah."
Peter continues, "For this is the reason the gospel was proclaimed even to the dead so that even though they had been judged in the flesh as everyone is judged, they might live in the spirit as God does" (1 Pet 4-6).
The descent of Jesus into hell is, in this view, an expression of God's universal will for salvation and a part of his cosmic victory, so that every tongue even those "under the earth should proclaim that Jesus is Lord (Phil 2:10). In terms of the movement of the creed, the burial represents the nadir of downward descent, the ultimate expression of Jesus' sharing the human condition even to the depositing of the flesh in the soil like a seed (John 12:24; see 1 Cor 15:55-41).
It's important to note that the common conception of what is being claimed by the Resurrection of Jesus wasn't just that his corpse was reanimated like a Frankenstein experiment, the glorified body of Jesus as described in the accounts that People left us is certainly not like that. His closest followers, Mary Magdalene, the disciples on the road to Emmaus, didn't recognize him when they first saw him. And his glorified body could appear and disappear, entering locked rooms, but also not what we'd consider to be a ghost or a spirit, he could cook and eat food. I don't remember who it was I heard or read recently who said they though it would be better to talk about him as "Glorified" instead of "Resurrected" because of the limited imagination that so many have of a merely reanimated corpse when that was not what was being talked about from the start.
As to today's theme, here is Philippians 2: 10-11
all beings in heaven, on earth, and in the world below
will fall on their knees,
11 and all will openly proclaim that Jesus Christ is Lord,
to the glory of God the Father.
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