Appendix A
Christ’s Saving Reach into the Realm of the Dead
Every Sunday, in churches all over the world, Christians stand and recite one of the oldest lines in the faith. They say it together, sometimes without thinking much about it. The line is short. It sits between the cross and the empty tomb. And it says something stunning.
He descended to the dead.
That line is in the Apostles’ Creed. It has been there since at least the fourth century.1 In some older English versions it reads, “He descended into hell.” The Latin behind it is descendit ad inferos (“he went down to the lower regions”). It does not mean Christ went to the place of final punishment. It means he entered the realm of the dead. He went where dead people go.
Think about what that claim means. The Son of God did not stop at the cross. He did not leap from death straight to heaven. Between his last breath and his first risen step, something happened. Christ entered the world of the dead. And there, according to the New Testament, he did something.
He proclaimed.
Not all Christians know what that line in the creed refers to. Some skip over it. Some churches leave it out of the recitation. Wayne Grudem has argued that it should be removed from the creed entirely.50 But it has been there for more than sixteen hundred years. And the belief it captures is older than the creed itself.
This appendix traces that proclamation through the key biblical texts. It then follows the trail into the earliest centuries of the church. The verse-chapters in this book have shown, text by text, that none of the major “deadline passages” forecloses grace at the moment of death. Now we come to something different. We come to the positive case. We come to Scripture showing Christ doing the very thing the opponents say cannot be done: carrying the gospel past the grave and into the realm of the dead.
If Christ himself did that, then the case for saving grace beyond death is not built on silence. It is built on the action of the Savior himself.
Plain Words
The descent (also called “the harrowing of hell” or the descensus): the belief that Christ, between his death and resurrection, entered the realm of the dead. Hades (Greek Hadēs): the waiting-place of the dead in the intermediate state, not the final Lake of Fire; developed fully in Appendix C. Proclaimed (Greek ekēryxen, from kēryssō): to announce, herald, preach. In the New Testament this word almost always refers to preaching the gospel.
The clearest statement of the descent sits in a short, dense, and much-debated passage near the end of Peter’s first letter. Here is the text:
For Christ also suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh but made alive in the spirit, in which he went and proclaimed to the spirits in prison, because they formerly did not obey, when God’s patience waited in the days of Noah, while the ark was being built, in which a few, that is, eight persons, were brought safely through water. (1 Peter 3:18–20, ESV)
Martin Luther, who was not easily stumped by Scripture, called this “a wonderful text” and “a more obscure passage perhaps than any other in the New Testament, so that I do not know for a certainty just what Peter means.”2 Robert Mounce goes further, calling 1 Peter 3:18–22 “widely recognized as perhaps the most difficult to understand in the whole New Testament.”3 The difficulty has not stopped interpreters from trying. It has only multiplied the options.
Let me walk through the text carefully.
Christ was “put to death in the flesh” (Greek thanatōtheis sarki) “but made alive in the spirit” (Greek zōopoiethēis pneumati). The two phrases stand in contrast. The flesh died. But in the realm of the spirit, Christ was made alive.4
Then Peter adds something remarkable. “In which” (Greek en hō, referring to the spirit) “he went” (Greek poreutheis, an aorist participle of poreuomai, “to go, travel”) “and proclaimed” (Greek ekēryxen) “to the spirits in prison” (Greek tois en phylakē pneumasin).5
Look at the sequence. Christ died in the flesh. He was made alive in the spirit. And in that spiritual state he went somewhere and proclaimed something to spirits who were in prison. That is what the text says, in the most natural word order.
The question is: Who are these spirits? Where is this prison? What did Christ proclaim? And when did he do it?
These are not idle questions. How we answer them shapes everything. If Christ proclaimed salvation to the dead, then Scripture itself shows the gospel reaching beyond the grave. If the proclamation was only a victory announcement to angels, then the text says nothing about human beings after death. And if Christ never went anywhere at all, if the “going” happened through Noah in the deep past, then the entire descent tradition rests on a misreading.
Each of these readings has serious scholars behind it. I owe the reader a fair hearing of each one before I make my case for the third.
Over the centuries, scholars have offered three main answers. Each one tries to explain who the spirits are and what Christ said to them.
The first reading: Christ preached through Noah to his living contemporaries. On this view, the “Spirit” in verse 18 is the preexistent Spirit of Christ. Christ, through Noah, preached to the people who were alive before the Flood. They rejected the message. Now they are “spirits in prison” because they are dead and confined. This reading is most closely linked to Wayne Grudem and, before him, to Augustine.6
The second reading: Christ proclaimed triumph to fallen angels. On this view, the “spirits in prison” are not human beings at all. They are the fallen angels of Genesis 6:1–4, now held in the underworld (compare 2 Peter 2:4 and Jude 6). Christ’s “proclamation” is not an offer of salvation but a victory announcement. This view draws heavily on the Jewish tradition of 1 Enoch. It is held by many contemporary scholars, including J. Ramsey Michaels and Thomas Schreiner.7
The third reading: Christ descended to the dead and proclaimed the gospel. On this view, Christ, between his death and resurrection, entered the realm of the dead and preached to the human beings held there. The spirits in prison are the disobedient dead. The message is the good news of salvation. This was the dominant view in the early church and is held by scholars such as William Dalton, Peter Davids, and Bo Reicke.8
I believe the third reading stands on the strongest ground. Let me show why, and why the first reading, in particular, cannot bear the weight placed on it.
Grudem’s view has real appeal. It avoids the theological discomfort of a “second chance” for the dead. And it rests on a real feature of Peter’s letter: Noah is mentioned, and the Spirit of Christ is a biblical idea (see 1 Peter 1:11). But the problems are serious. Let me walk through them one at a time.
Problem one: the natural sequence of the verbs. Peter lays out a clear chain. Christ was put to death. He was made alive. He went. He proclaimed. The word “went” (Greek poreutheis) points forward in time from the death and the making-alive. It does not jump backward to Noah’s day.9 As Beilby observes, the passage follows what scholars call the doctrinal formula of the early church: crucifixion, death, descent, resurrection, ascension. This formula runs from 1 Peter 3:18 all the way through 3:22.10 Reading the “going” as a trip to Noah’s era breaks that chain at its center.
The Doctrinal Formula of 1 Peter 3:18–22
Crucifixion (3:18a): “Christ also suffered once for sins.” Death (3:18b): “put to death in the flesh.” Descent (3:18c–19): “made alive in the spirit, in which he went and proclaimed to the spirits in prison.” Resurrection (3:21): “through the resurrection of Jesus Christ.” Ascension (3:22): “who has gone into heaven and is at the right hand of God.” The movement runs forward. To relocate the “going” back to Noah’s day pulls one link out of a chain that holds together only if the events proceed in order.
Problem two: “in the days of Noah” marks the time of the disobedience, not the time of the preaching. The Greek reads: “who formerly did not obey, when God’s patience waited in the days of Noah” (Greek apeithēsasin pote hote apexedecheto hē tou theou makrothymia en hēmerais Nōe). The phrase “in the days of Noah” modifies the disobedience, not the proclamation. It tells us when the spirits disobeyed. It does not tell us when Christ preached.11 Grudem’s reading must bend the grammar so that Noah’s era is the setting of both the disobedience and the preaching. The text does not say that.
Problem three: the preexistence-through-Noah idea is not stated. Peter says nothing about Christ preaching through Noah. He says Christ “went” and “proclaimed.” To make this a case of Christ acting through Noah in the deep past, the reader must supply an idea that Peter left out entirely.12 As Henry Alford put it long ago, “not a word is indicated by St. Peter on the very far-off lying allusion to the fact that the Spirit of Christ preached to Noah.”13
Problem four: the word “spirits” fits the dead better than living people. When Peter wants to refer to living human beings, he calls them people, not “spirits.” The word “spirits” (Greek pneumata) is a natural way to speak of the dead. Hebrews 12:23 uses the same word for “the spirits of the righteous made perfect.”14 Grudem himself acknowledges this usage but argues that Peter is describing them by their present state. The text, however, gives no signal that we should read the word that way. A straightforward reading takes “spirits in prison” as a description of who they were when Christ came to them.
Jonathan, after surveying the passage at length, reaches the same conclusion. He notes that reading the text as a doctrinal formula “makes it very difficult to see the descent as anything other than the descent of Christ into Hades.” MacCulloch is even more direct: “No other interpretation than that of the work of the discarnate Spirit of Christ in Hades seems natural and self-evident here.”15
The fallen-angels reading is the most popular among scholars today, partly because of the influence of Dalton’s major study and its use of the 1 Enoch tradition. But it has its own weaknesses.
First, while the word “spirits” can refer to angelic beings, it is not limited to them. Peter’s own letter never uses it this way. And as Beilby notes, if the “spirits in prison” are already-judged fallen angels, the proclamation becomes odd. Why announce condemnation to beings already condemned? Why bypass Satan, who is not yet imprisoned? Peter warns about the devil two chapters later: “Your enemy the devil prowls around like a roaring lion” (1 Peter 5:8). If anyone needs a message of defeat, it is the lion still prowling. Not the angels already chained.16
Second, the word translated “proclaimed” (Greek ekēryxen) is a problem for this view. Schreiner, who favors the angels reading, admits that this is its “greatest difficulty.”17 In the New Testament, kēryssō is almost always used for preaching good news. It means heralding, announcing salvation. If Peter wanted to say “announced judgment,” he had other words he could have used.
Third, this reading does not connect well with 1 Peter 4:6. That verse speaks of the gospel being preached “even to those who are dead.” If the spirits in 3:19 are fallen angels, then 4:6 is about a completely different group. It becomes an unrelated claim about human beings. But the two passages sit close together in the same letter. It is far more natural to see them as two statements about the same theme: the gospel reaches even the dead.18
Fourth, it is odd that the proclamation is made only to some of the angels. Their sin happened long ago. They have already been judged. Why would Christ go to announce their defeat when they already know they have lost?
Fifth, this view assumes that the “going” in 3:19 is the same as the “going” in 3:22. That would place the preaching after the ascension, not between death and resurrection. But the doctrinal formula runs in order: death, descent, resurrection, ascension. Moving the preaching to after the ascension breaks the chain. It requires Christ to return to the underworld after he has already risen. That is a stretch the text does not invite.
The simplest and strongest reading is that Christ, between his death and resurrection, entered the realm of the dead and proclaimed salvation to the disobedient spirits held there. The “spirits in prison” are human dead. The “prison” is Hades, the holding place of the dead in the intermediate state (see Appendix C). The “proclamation” is the good news. And the reference to Noah’s generation is representative. These were among the worst sinners in Old Testament memory. If the gospel reached them, it can reach anyone. Peter may also simply be identifying the specific group he has in mind.
Why mention Noah’s generation in particular? One likely reason: Peter is building a typology of baptism. The very next verse (3:21) says, “Baptism, which corresponds to this, now saves you.” Noah’s flood was a type of baptism. The water that destroyed the wicked also saved the eight. In the same way, Christ’s descent through death and back became the pattern for the believer’s passage through the waters of baptism into life. The disobedient of Noah’s day fit the typology. They are not mentioned because they are the only ones Christ visited. They are mentioned because they fit the illustration.
Henry Alford, one of the greatest Greek commentators of the nineteenth century, drew exactly this conclusion. He wrote that we should accept what Scripture gives us “even if we’re uncomfortable with the message.” He said that with “the great majority of commentators, ancient and modern,” he understood these words to say that Christ, “in his disembodied state, did go to the place of detention of departed spirits, and did there announce his work of redemption, preach salvation in fact, to the disembodied spirits of those who refused to obey the voice of God.” And then Alford asked the question the traditionalist must answer: “who shall say, that the blessed act was confined to them?”19
Burnfield, drawing on the long tradition of the church, puts it plainly. He notes that the view that Christ “descended into hell to preach to the dead was the view almost universally adopted by the early Christian church.” In support, he cites the broad witness of Eusebius, Athanasius, Ambrose, Jerome, and many others who held that Christ went to Hades to proclaim salvation to the lost.19
Burnfield on the Plain Meaning
Here we have a clear picture of postmortem evangelism where Christ is said to be preaching to people in hades who are obviously dead. That Christ descended into hell to preach to the dead was the view “almost universally adopted by the early Christian church.” — David Burnfield, Patristic Universalism, ch. 5, “Christ’s Descent into Hell”
Frederic William Farrar, the great Victorian scholar, was even more blunt. He wrote that the passage’s plain meaning is that Christ descended to Hades to proclaim the gospel to the once-disobedient dead, and that the many attempts to explain it away “arise from that spirit of system which would fain be more orthodox than Scripture itself, and would exclude every ground of future hope from the revelation of a love too loving for hearts trained in bitter theologies.”20
Beilby, after a careful survey, reaches a measured conclusion. He writes that if the internal evidence of these Petrine passages is “allowed to speak for itself, without automatically being ruled out by a priori assumptions, then it would be very difficult to claim that Scripture rules out such a view.”21
I agree. The burden of proof has shifted. Those who deny that 1 Peter 3:18–20 teaches a descent and proclamation to the dead must explain away the natural reading, the doctrinal formula, the word choices, and the broad early-church consensus. That is a heavy load.
Just a few verses later, Peter says something even harder to avoid.
For this is why the gospel was preached even to those who are dead, that though judged in the flesh the way people are, they might live in the spirit the way God does. (1 Peter 4:6, ESV)
The key phrase is short and direct: “the gospel was preached even to those who are dead” (Greek nekrois euēngelisthē). The word for “dead” is nekrois, the standard Greek word for physically dead people. The word for “preached” is euēngelisthē, the aorist passive of euangelizō, “to bring good news.” This is not a generic “announcement.” It is the gospel. Preached. To dead people.22
Predictably, there are attempts to read “the dead” as something other than dead people.
Attempt one: “the now-dead.” On this view, Peter means people who heard the gospel while they were still alive but who are now dead. The NIV takes this approach. It inserts the word “now” before “dead”: “the gospel was preached even to those who are now dead.” But as Burnfield observes, the word “now” is not in the Greek.23 It was added by the translators because their theology told them there can be no preaching after death. The NIV’s own footnote says as much.
Attempt two: “the spiritually dead.” On this view, “dead” is a metaphor for spiritual deadness. But the context makes that reading impossible. Verse 5 says God is ready “to judge the living and the dead.” In that phrase, “dead” clearly means physically dead. When “dead” appears again in the very next verse, there is no signal that Peter has switched meanings.24
The straightforward reading: the dead are dead. Peter means that the gospel was proclaimed to people who are physically dead. Bigg states flatly that “dead” here “must be taken in the obvious sense of the word; they were dead at the time when the announcement was made.”25 Alford agrees. In his careful commentary, he explains that the dead in 4:6 are the same as the “spirits in prison” of 3:19. Christ is ready to judge the dead, he says, “and with reason; for even they have not been without opportunity of receiving his gospel.”26
Hronich agrees. He argues that “the dead” in 4:6 refers to “all the dead from the beginning of time, all that are to stand before the judgment seat of Christ.” Horrell puts the same point in different words: “God can justly judge all people, both the living and the dead, since the gospel has been announced to all, to the dead as well as the living.”27
An Insight Worth Pausing On
Notice the logic Peter builds. God will judge the living and the dead (4:5). For this reason the gospel was preached even to the dead (4:6). Peter is not making a random aside. He is explaining why God’s judgment of the dead is fair. It is fair because even the dead have heard the gospel. If no proclamation had ever reached the dead, the judgment of the dead would raise a question about justice. Peter answers that question before anyone can ask it.
The connection between 1 Peter 3:19 and 4:6 is hard to miss. Both are in the same letter. Both speak of a proclamation reaching those who would otherwise seem beyond reach. As Beilby puts it, “if Christ can announce his own victory to the imprisoned spirits in 3:18–19 then the idea of Christ announcing the good news about himself to the human dead is no less plausible.”28
Schreiner raises one further objection. He notes that the verb in 4:6 is passive: “the gospel was preached.” This might mean it was not Christ who did the preaching but human beings. But this is a stretch. As Beilby responds, the passive voice does not require a human agent. It may suggest that the preaching is an extension of the same divine activity described in 3:18–19. Christ proclaimed in one passage. The gospel was proclaimed in the other. The simplest link is that both describe the same reality from different angles.28
Jonathan reaches a similar view. He notes that Erickson, though cautious, agrees two things must be shown for the Petrine passages to support a saving offer to the dead. First, that Christ actually preached the gospel in Hades. Second, that this offer is not a one-time event limited to that specific group but extends in principle to all who die without hearing the gospel. Jonathan argues the first point is well supported by the text. The second point follows from the character of God. A God who is no respecter of persons (Acts 10:34) would not limit such an offer to one generation of sinners. He would not leave all others without hope.28
Farrar draws the sharpest conclusion: “If Christ preached to dead men who were once disobedient, then Scripture shows us that the moment of death does not necessarily involve a final and hopeless torment for every sinful soul.”29
Paul offers a second window into the descent in his letter to the Ephesians.
Therefore it says, “When he ascended on high he led a host of captives, and he gave gifts to men.” (In saying, “He ascended,” what does it mean but that he had also descended into the lower regions, the earth? He who descended is the one who also ascended far above all the heavens, that he might fill all things.) (Ephesians 4:8–10, ESV)
Paul is quoting Psalm 68:18, a victory psalm. He applies it to Christ. Christ ascended to heaven. But Paul notes the logic: if he went up, he must first have come down. And the phrase he uses for the destination of the downward journey is loaded: “the lower regions, the earth” (Greek ta katōtera merē tēs gēs).30
There are three proposals. The first says the descent is the incarnation: Christ came down from heaven to earth. The “lower regions” are the earth itself. This view goes back to Calvin and is common today.31
The second says the descent is the coming of the Spirit at Pentecost. Christ ascended and then came back down as the Spirit. Harris and Andrew Lincoln have argued for this position.32
The third says the descent is into the underworld, the realm of the dead. The “lower regions of the earth” is Hades. This was the dominant reading among the church fathers, including Tertullian, Irenaeus, Chrysostom, and Ambrosiaster.33
The third reading has strong support. Paul’s readers lived in a three-tier world: heaven above, the earth in the middle, and the underworld below. As Beilby argues, “it is extremely unlikely that Paul would use the phrase [descended to the lower, earthly regions] in such a cultural environment and expect his readers to understand by it anything other than a descent to the realm of the dead.”34
Burnfield notes this too. He points out that “one of the valid interpretations given by traditional sources is that Christ descended into hades,” and he cites the Bible Knowledge Commentary and Marvin Vincent, who defines the “lower parts of the earth” as “the under world. The reference is to Christ’s descent into hades.”35
Now, I want to be fair. Beilby rightly notes that even if Paul teaches a descent here, the main point of Ephesians 4 is not about salvation for the dead. It is about Christ’s lordship over all things. The passage is about the gifts Christ gives to his church. The descent serves a larger argument about Christ filling everything. So I do not build a full case for the saving offer on this text alone.36
But notice what the text does do. It establishes that no corner of the cosmos is outside Christ’s reach. He went up above all the heavens. He went down below the earth. His purpose was “that he might fill all things” (4:10). If Christ fills the realm of the dead with his presence, then the realm of the dead is not beyond the reach of grace.
The imagery of the captives deserves a closer look. Paul says Christ “led a host of captives” (Greek aichmalōteusen aichmalōsian). In the original psalm (Psalm 68:18), this described a victorious king parading conquered enemies. Paul applies it to Christ. On the descent reading, the captives are the souls of the dead whom Christ liberates from the power of death and Hades. He goes down. He conquers. He leads the freed prisoners upward in triumph. The image matches the Orthodox Easter icon: Christ standing on the shattered gates of Hades, pulling Adam and Eve out of their tombs.
Even scholars who prefer the incarnation reading admit that the passage teaches Christ’s sovereignty over the underworld. The echo of Philippians 2:10 is strong: “at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth.” Colossians 1:18 adds that Christ is “the firstborn from among the dead, so that in everything he might have the supremacy.” These are not throwaway lines. They insist that Christ’s lordship extends to every tier of the cosmos. The realm of the dead is included, not excluded.
Manis draws this out from the Eastern Orthodox tradition. The great Paschal icon shows Christ lifting Adam and Eve from their caskets, setting them free from Hades. As Manis puts it, so important was this idea that a reference to it appears in the Apostles’ Creed. And that creed is “notable both for its early adoption and its relatively minimal theology.” If the descent was counted among the basics of the faith, then the early church treated Christ’s entry into the realm of the dead as something that mattered to salvation. It was not a theological curiosity.37
Three shorter passages round out the biblical picture.
On the day of Pentecost, Peter quotes Psalm 16 and applies it to Christ:
For you will not abandon my soul to Hades, or let your Holy One see corruption. (Acts 2:27, ESV)
Peter explains that David was not speaking about himself (David died and his tomb was still there), but about Christ. The logic is clear: Christ went to Hades, but God did not leave him there. His soul was not abandoned to the realm of the dead. If Christ was never in Hades, the Psalm would be pointless to quote.38
Paul asks, “Who will descend into the abyss?” (Greek abyssos). He is adapting Deuteronomy 30:13 and adds a parenthetical gloss: “that is, to bring Christ up from the dead.” The “abyss” is the underworld. Paul assumes Christ was there. The point of the verse is that no one needs to make that journey. Christ has already gone down and come back up. But the assumption behind it is telling: Christ was in the abyss, among the dead.39
Jesus says, “For just as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the great fish, so will the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth.” The phrase “heart of the earth” echoes the language of Ephesians 4:9. It is another pointer to the intermediate state, to a place below the surface of the living world where Christ spent the time between his death and resurrection.40
None of these texts, on its own, proves a saving proclamation to the dead. But together with the 1 Peter and Ephesians passages, they build a picture. Christ entered the realm of the dead. He did not stay. And while he was there, according to 1 Peter, he proclaimed.
The early church saw even more texts pointing in this direction. Beilby notes that early Christians cited Hosea 13:14 (“Shall I ransom them from the power of Sheol? Shall I redeem them from death?”), Colossians 1:23 (“the gospel that you heard and that has been proclaimed to every creature under heaven”), and Philippians 2:10 (“at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth”) as evidence that Christ’s lordship and gospel extend to all three tiers of the cosmos. No layer of creation is left out.40
Burnfield lists still more passages the church used: Psalm 68:18, Psalm 69:33, Psalm 107:16, Isaiah 45:2–3, Zechariah 9:11–12, and Colossians 2:15. Each of these, in the eyes of the early fathers, pointed toward Christ’s activity among the dead.40
We should not overstate what any single supporting text proves. Some of these readings are stronger than others. But the cumulative weight matters. The New Testament does not give us a single, isolated proof text for the descent. It gives us a pattern: text after text assuming that Christ was in the realm of the dead, that his lordship reaches beneath the earth, and that the gospel’s scope is wider than the world of the living.
We have seen what the Bible says. Now let us see what the earliest Christians made of it. The descent was not a fringe belief. It was one of the most widely held doctrines in the early church. The question was never whether Christ descended. The question was what he did when he got there.
The evidence runs deep. It crosses geographic lines, theological schools, and centuries. From Rome to Alexandria, from Antioch to Carthage, the confession is the same: Christ went down. He proclaimed. And his proclamation had saving force.
The doctrine of the descent appears in Christian writing from very early on. Jonathan, surveying the evidence, notes that MacCulloch lists references in Polycarp (early to mid-second century), Justin Martyr (mid-second century), the Shepherd of Hermas, Irenaeus, Tertullian, and Hippolytus. Even the Gnostic Marcion, in his own twisted way, taught that Christ descended to deliver those in Hades.41
Dalton, the author of the standard monograph on the descent, argues that this was the most strongly represented view among the early fathers up until the time of Augustine.42 It was not a novelty. It was close to a consensus.
The Shepherd of Hermas is one of the earliest Christian texts outside the New Testament. It was widely read in the second century and was even considered Scripture by some communities. In Similitude 9.16, it offers a striking version of the descent. In this telling, it was not Christ but the apostles and teachers who descended and preached to the dead. The text says:
They preached also to those who had previously fallen asleep, and they themselves gave them the seal of the preaching.… They fell asleep in righteousness and in great purity, only they did not have this seal. — Shepherd of Hermas, Similitude 9.16 (trans. Holmes)
The “seal” is baptism. The apostles descended and baptized the righteous dead. The dead were “made alive” and “came to full knowledge of the name of the Son of God.”43 Whatever we make of the details, the core idea is clear: the early church believed a saving event occurred in the realm of the dead, and it involved the preaching of the gospel.
The strongest early voice for a full-scope descent is Clement of Alexandria. He was head of the catechetical school at Alexandria. Jerome called him the most learned of all the ancients. In his Stromata (6.6), Clement lays out the logic with striking force:
If, then, the Lord descended to Hades for no other end but to preach the Gospel, as He did descend; it was either to preach the Gospel to all or to the Hebrews only. If, accordingly, to all, then all who believe shall be saved, although they may be of the Gentiles, on making their profession there. — Clement of Alexandria, Stromata 6.6
Then Clement drives the point home. He asks why God, who clearly wanted to save Gentiles in this life, would restrict his reach in Hades. And he asks a question that should trouble anyone who believes grace stops at death:
If, then, He preached the Gospel to those in the flesh that they might not be condemned unjustly, how is it conceivable that He did not for the same cause preach the Gospel to those who had departed this life before His advent? — Clement of Alexandria, Stromata 6.6
Clement is pressing the fairness question. If God preaches to the living to give them a chance, why would he not give the same chance to the dead? And notice: Clement does not invent this idea. He reasons from the descent tradition that was already in place.44
Clement’s most famous student was Origen, the most prolific author of the early church. In Against Celsus (2.43), Origen responds to the pagan critic Celsus, who mocks the idea that Christ went to Hades to preach. Origen does not deny it. He affirms it. He writes that Christ, “when He became a soul, without the covering of the body, He dwelt among those souls which were without bodily covering, converting such of them as were willing to Himself.”45 Notice the qualifier: “such of them as were willing.” Even Origen, famous for his confident universalism, preserves freedom here. The offer reaches the dead. But it remains a genuine offer.
Hippolytus, a Roman presbyter and theologian, clearly accepted the descent. In a surviving fragment of his Easter Homily, he extends the scope of Christ’s preaching beyond the Old Testament saints. He writes: “For it behooved him to go and preach also to those who were in Hell [Sheol], namely those who have once been disobedient.”46 The echo of 1 Peter 3:19–20 is unmistakable. And the word “also” shows that Hippolytus did not limit the preaching to the righteous dead. The disobedient heard it too.
In his Commentary on John (11.2), Cyril, bishop of Alexandria, writes about Christ’s descent to Hades. He declares that “the proof of His love towards mankind was hereby rendered most complete by His giving salvation, I say, not merely to the quick, but also by His preaching remission of sins to those who were already dead.” Cyril roots the descent explicitly in God’s love and in his desire to save.47
Beilby surveys the whole tradition and draws an important summary. He notes that the pattern of preaching in Hades mirrors the pattern of preaching on earth. John the Baptist was the forerunner in life and, according to Hippolytus, in death as well. Clement says the apostles followed Christ into Hades, just as they followed him on earth. And Christ is “consistently described as ‘preaching’ to the souls in the underworld.” The result, in source after source, is described as “salvation,” “the remission of sins,” and “salvation from all evil.”47
Beilby makes a sharp point: anyone who wants to deny the saving significance of the descent must explain why the early fathers consistently used those words. If the preaching was only a victory announcement, not a saving offer, why did the fathers call it “salvation”?
Even Irenaeus, who limited the preaching to the Old Testament saints, clearly saw the descent as a saving event. He repeatedly quoted the Jeremiah logion (a text Justin Martyr attributed to Jeremiah but which was not found in the standard manuscripts): “The Lord God remembered His dead people of Israel who lay in the graves; and He descended to preach to them His own salvation, that they might be saved.”47
By the fourth and fifth centuries, the descent tradition had taken on vivid narrative form. The Gospel of Nicodemus (also called the Acts of Pilate) tells the story of Christ breaking open the gates of Hades, binding Satan, and leading the righteous dead into paradise. The scene is dramatic: Christ enters in blazing light. The darkness of the underworld flees. Adam and Eve are taken by the hand and raised up.48
This narrative is not Scripture, of course. But it reflects a tradition that was deeply embedded in the faith of the early church. The Orthodox tradition preserves it in its greatest icon of the resurrection, which does not show Christ climbing out of a tomb. It shows him standing on the broken gates of Hades, lifting the dead.
The Odes of Solomon, a collection of early Christian hymns, likely dating from the second century, also speak of the descent. The odist declares that Sheol “saw me and was shattered, and Death ejected me and many with me.” The imagery is of victory and liberation in the realm of the dead.49
What the Fathers Show Us
The early church was not unanimous about every detail. They debated who did the preaching (Christ alone, or the apostles too?). They debated who heard it (only the Old Testament saints, or the disobedient as well?). They debated the result (liberation, or announcement of judgment?). But on the core claim, they were close to one voice: Christ entered the realm of the dead, and something of saving importance happened there. Anyone who says that the tradition of the church forbids saving grace beyond death must reckon with this evidence.
Grudem has not only argued against the descent reading of 1 Peter 3:19. He has argued against the descent itself, going so far as to say that the line should be removed from the Apostles’ Creed. He writes that it is a later addition to the creed and that Scripture does not support it.50
I respect Grudem’s scholarship. His Systematic Theology is one of the finest introductions to the field. But here I think he is wrong on both counts.
On the creedal question: the descendit ad inferos was added formally in the late fourth century, but the idea behind it is far older. It was already present in the writings of Polycarp, Justin, and the Shepherd of Hermas. The creed codified a belief that had been widely held for generations. As Jonathan notes in his survey of the patristic evidence, Selwyn writes, “The outstanding fact in the Patristic evidence before A.D. 190 is that despite the popularity of the doctrine of Christ’s ‘harrowing of hell,’ 1 Peter 3:18ff is never quoted as authority for it.” In other words, the belief existed before anyone tied it to 1 Peter.51 The tradition of the descent was so deeply rooted that it did not need a proof text to survive. It had one anyway.
On the scriptural question: I have now walked through four major texts (1 Peter 3:18–20; 1 Peter 4:6; Ephesians 4:8–10; Acts 2:27, 31) and three supporting ones (Romans 10:7; Matthew 12:40; Psalm 16). Not every text, taken alone, is a slam dunk. But together they paint a consistent picture. Christ entered the realm of the dead. He was not idle there. He proclaimed. The gospel reached even the dead.
Huidekoper, writing in the nineteenth century, captured the breadth of the early consensus: “In the second and third centuries, every branch and division of Christians, so far as their records enable us to judge, believed that Christ preached to the departed.” The breadth of that witness matters. This was not the peculiar teaching of one school or one theologian. It was a shared conviction of the church.51
Grudem may be right that the descent clause was a later formal addition to the creed. But removing it from the creed would not remove it from the faith. The doctrine is woven into the New Testament itself. And a faith that confesses Christ as Lord “of the living and the dead” (Romans 14:9) has no good reason to deny that he exercised that lordship among the dead.
Step back now and ask what all of this means for the central claim of Death Is Not the Deadline.
This book argues that God’s saving grace does not stop at the moment the heart goes still. It argues that the offer of Christ opens at the deathbed, continues through the intermediate state, and closes only at the final judgment. Every verse-chapter in this book takes one of the major “deadline texts” and shows that, read carefully, it does not teach what opponents claim.
The descent is not one of those negative arguments. It is a positive one. It is not a rebuttal of a proof text. It is Scripture showing us what Christ himself did. And what he did was go to the dead and proclaim.
Think about what that means. If 1 Peter 3:19 is right, Christ carried the gospel into the one place where, on the traditional reading, no gospel can go. He did not wait for the dead to come to him. He went to them. He crossed the barrier of death itself to announce good news.
And he did it for the worst sinners in Old Testament memory. Not for righteous Abraham or faithful Moses. For the people who were so evil that God sent a flood to wipe them out. If the gospel reached them, then no one is out of range. As Alford asked: “who shall say, that the blessed act was confined to them?”
This is not a novelty. It is not a modern invention designed to comfort people who lost loved ones outside the faith (though it does comfort them). It is a confession of the universal church. It is embedded in a creed recited for over sixteen hundred years. It is rooted in Scripture. And it is affirmed by the great voices of the earliest centuries of the faith.
Burnfield sums up the implication with force. In his treatment of the descent passages, he declares that there is nothing to prevent understanding texts like Isaiah 49:9 as supporting Christ’s descent into Hades. Isaiah pictures one who says to the bound, “Go forth,” and to those in darkness, “Show yourselves.” Since Hades is described as a prison and a place of darkness, the early church had good reason to see Christ as the one fulfilling that promise among the dead.52
And if Christ’s work in the realm of the dead is a pattern, not a one-time exception, then a saving encounter in the intermediate state is not a fringe idea. It is an extension of what Scripture already shows Christ doing. If the Son of God proclaimed to the spirits in prison, then the doctrine of a saving offer in Hades is not a theological innovation. It is a theological observation. It names what the New Testament already describes.
The reader who has followed the verse-chapters to this point will have seen, text by text, that none of the “deadline passages” forecloses grace at the moment of death. Now, in this appendix, we see something more. We see grace not merely surviving beyond death. We see it crossing the threshold, entering the realm of the dead, and speaking there.
And the early church knew it. From the Shepherd of Hermas in the second century to Cyril of Alexandria in the fifth, the voices are remarkably consistent. Christ entered the realm of the dead. He proclaimed. And the result was salvation.
The opponents who deny a saving offer after death must reckon with this. They must explain how the church could have confessed “he descended to the dead” for sixteen centuries if the descent had no saving purpose. They must explain why Clement of Alexandria saw injustice in withholding the gospel from the dead. They must explain why Origen said Christ converted souls in Hades “such of them as were willing.” They must explain why Peter himself said the gospel was preached even to the dead. And they must explain why none of the three leading attempts to soften that claim can stand up to the Greek.
I do not think they can explain all of this away. Not without doing violence to the text, to the tradition, and to the character of the God who sent his Son not only to the cross but through the grave and into the place of the dead.
That is what the descent means for this book. It means the grace that pursues us through the dying moment (see Chapter 24) and through the intermediate state (see Appendix C) is the same grace that Christ himself carried into Hades. It is the grace of a God who does not stop at the grave. It is the grace of a Savior who went all the way down.
And if he went all the way down, then there is no place beyond his reach.
↑ 1. The phrase descendit ad inferos first appears in the creed of Sirmium (359) and was later incorporated into the Apostles’ Creed. However, the belief behind it is much older, attested in second-century writings such as Justin Martyr, the Shepherd of Hermas, and Irenaeus. See J. N. D. Kelly, Early Christian Creeds, 3rd ed. (London: Longman, 1972), 378–83. Grudem argues the phrase appeared in only one of two versions of the creed preserved by Rufinus; see Wayne Grudem, “He Did Not Descend into Hell: A Plea for Following Scripture Instead of the Apostles’ Creed,” The Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 34, no. 1 (1991): 103.
↑ 2. Martin Luther, as cited in James Beilby, Postmortem Opportunity: A Biblical and Theological Assessment of Salvation After Death (Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2021), 143.
↑ 3. Robert H. Mounce, as cited in Beilby, Postmortem Opportunity, 143.
↑ 4. The dative contrast sarki / pneumati likely denotes the realm or sphere of existence, not the instrument. Christ died in the realm of the flesh and was made alive in the realm of the spirit. See William J. Dalton, Christ’s Proclamation to the Spirits: A Study of 1 Peter 3:18–4:6, 2nd ed., Analecta Biblica 23 (Rome: Pontifical Biblical Institute, 1989), 124–34.
↑ 5. The aorist participle poreutheis (from poreuomai) is used again in 3:22 of Christ’s ascension: “who has gone [poreutheis] into heaven.” The parallel suggests a real journey in both cases—a going to a place, not a metaphorical activity.
↑ 6. Wayne Grudem, “Christ Preaching Through Noah: 1 Peter 3:19–20 in the Light of Dominant Themes in Jewish Literature,” in 1 Peter, Tyndale New Testament Commentaries (Leicester: IVP, 1997), 203–39. Augustine proposed the metaphorical-prison interpretation in Letter 164 to Evodius. See Stephen Jonathan, Grace beyond the Grave: Is There Hope for Those Who Die without Christ? (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2021), 52–53.
↑ 7. J. Ramsey Michaels, 1 Peter, WBC 49 (Waco: Word, 1988), 205–12; Thomas R. Schreiner, 1, 2 Peter, Jude, NAC 37 (Nashville: Broadman & Holman, 2003), 186–95. This view draws heavily on the Enochic tradition. See also E. G. Selwyn, The First Epistle of St. Peter, 2nd ed. (London: Macmillan, 1947), 314–62.
↑ 8. Dalton, Christ’s Proclamation, 15–41; Peter H. Davids, The First Epistle of Peter, NICNT (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1990), 136–44; Bo Reicke, The Disobedient Spirits and Christian Baptism, Acta Seminarii Neotestamentici Upsaliensis 13 (Copenhagen: Munksgaard, 1946). Reicke argues for a postmortem proclamation of salvation to the dead.
↑ 9. Beilby, Postmortem Opportunity, 146–47. Beilby demonstrates that the doctrinal formula of crucifixion, death, descent, resurrection, and ascension is present in 1 Peter 3:18–22, making a temporal regression to Noah’s era extremely unlikely.
↑ 10. Beilby, Postmortem Opportunity, 146–47.
↑ 11. The temporal clause hote apexedecheto hē tou theou makrothymia en hēmerais Nōe (“when God’s patience waited in the days of Noah”) modifies the participle apeithēsasin (“who disobeyed”), not the main verb ekēryxen (“he proclaimed”). The grammar locates the disobedience, not the preaching, in Noah’s time.
↑ 12. John Feinberg, “1 Peter 3:18–20, Ancient Mythology, and the Intermediate State,” Westminster Theological Journal 48, no. 2 (1986): 312, acknowledges the difficulty of the Augustinian-Grudem position in explaining the mechanics of the preexistent-Christ-through-Noah claim. Jonathan, Grace beyond the Grave, 55–56, concurs.
↑ 13. Henry Alford, The Greek Testament, vol. 4, 7th ed. (London: Rivingtons, 1877), 365. Cited in Burnfield, Patristic Universalism, ch. 5, “Christ’s Descent into Hell.”
↑ 14. Hebrews 12:23: “the spirits [pneumasi] of the righteous made perfect.” Grudem himself notes multiple New Testament uses of pneuma for human spirits; see Grudem, “Christ Preaching Through Noah,” 204–6.
↑ 15. Jonathan, Grace beyond the Grave, 57; J. A. MacCulloch, The Harrowing of Hell: A Comparative Study of an Early Christian Doctrine (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1930), 50.
↑ 16. Beilby, Postmortem Opportunity, 147–48. Beilby also notes that the doctrinal-formula structure of the passage works against the ascension timing that the fallen-angels view requires.
↑ 17. Schreiner, 1, 2 Peter, Jude, 192. The word kēryssō in the New Testament is “consistently used to refer to evangelistic preaching.” See also Burnfield, Patristic Universalism, ch. 5, citing Marvin Vincent: Peter uses the Greek word “in its ordinary New-Testament sense of proclaiming the Gospel.”
↑ 18. Beilby, Postmortem Opportunity, 154–55, notes the parallels between 3:18–19 and 4:6: in 3:18 Christ is put to death in the flesh and made alive in the spirit; in 4:6 the dead are judged “after the manner of persons in the flesh” but live “after the manner of God in the spirit.”
↑ 19. Burnfield, Patristic Universalism, ch. 5, “Christ’s Descent into Hell,” citing Haley for the “almost universally adopted” language, and listing Eusebius, Athanasius, Ambrose, Jerome, Epiphanius, Taylor Lewis, and Alfred Edersheim among the holders of the descent view.
↑ 20. Frederic William Farrar, as cited in Burnfield, Patristic Universalism, ch. 5.
↑ 21. Andrew Hronich, Once Loved, Always Loved: A Fresh Case for Universal Restoration, citing Beilby, Postmortem Opportunity. The passage is Hronich’s summation of Beilby’s conclusion on the Petrine passages.
↑ 22. The verb euēngelisthē is the aorist passive indicative of euangelizō, “to proclaim good news.” BDAG, s.v. euangelizō. Unlike the broader kēryssō, this word always carries the sense of a positive message.
↑ 23. Burnfield, Patristic Universalism, ch. 5, section on 1 Peter 4:6. The NIV’s own footnote acknowledges the insertion: “now” is not in the original text but was added to clarify what the translators believed Peter intended.
↑ 24. The “spiritually dead” reading is also ruled out by the grammar: the clause “judged in the flesh the way people are” requires physically embodied persons who have experienced physical death and physical judgment. See Davids, The First Epistle of Peter, 152–54.
↑ 25. Charles Bigg, The Epistles of St. Peter and St. Jude, ICC (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1901), 170. Cited in Burnfield, Patristic Universalism, ch. 5.
↑ 26. Alford, The Greek Testament, vol. 4, 375. Cited in Burnfield, Patristic Universalism, ch. 5, section on 1 Peter 4:6.
↑ 27. Andrew Hronich, Once Loved, Always Loved, ch. 3, citing D. G. Horrell. Hronich endorses the reading that “the dead” in 4:6 refers to the physically dead.
↑ 28. Beilby, Postmortem Opportunity, 155.
↑ 29. Frederic William Farrar, as cited in Burnfield, Patristic Universalism, ch. 5.
↑ 30. The genitive phrase tēs gēs can be read as a partitive genitive (“the lower parts of the earth,” i.e., beneath the earth) or as an appositional genitive (“the lower parts, namely, the earth”). The partitive reading yields a descent to the underworld; the appositional yields a descent to the earth (incarnation). See Harris, “The Ascent and Descent of Christ in Ephesians 4:9–10,” Bibliotheca Sacra 151 (1994): 198–214.
↑ 31. Andrew T. Lincoln, Ephesians, WBC 42 (Dallas: Word, 1990), 242–48. Lincoln argues for the incarnation view, understanding the descent as Christ’s descent from heaven to earth, not into the underworld.
↑ 32. Harris, “Ascent and Descent,” 214. Harris links Christ and the Spirit (cf. 2 Cor 3:17) and reads the descent as the return of the exalted Christ as the Spirit at Pentecost. Jonathan, Grace beyond the Grave, 67, discusses this as one of three viable interpretations.
↑ 33. Boros, The Mystery of Death, citing Chrysostom, Theodoret, Oecumenius, Tertullian, Victorinus, Ambrosiaster, Jerome, Pelagius, Bengel, Westcott, and many others who read the katabasis in Ephesians 4:9 as a descensus ad inferos. See The Mystery of Death, note 109.
↑ 34. Beilby, Postmortem Opportunity, 142, citing Frank Thielman. See also Hronich, Once Loved, Always Loved, ch. 3, who cites the same point.
↑ 35. Burnfield, Patristic Universalism, ch. 5, section on Ephesians 4:8–9. Burnfield cites both the Bible Knowledge Commentary and Marvin Vincent’s Word Studies in the New Testament.
↑ 36. Beilby, Postmortem Opportunity, 142–43. Even if Paul teaches a descent into Hades, the main point of Ephesians 4 is christological, not soteriological. The passage parallels Colossians 1:18 and Philippians 2:10 on Christ’s supremacy over all spheres.
↑ 37. R. Zachary Manis, Sinners in the Presence of a Loving God: An Essay on the Problem of Hell (New York: Oxford University Press, 2022), appendix. Manis notes the Paschal troparion of the Orthodox tradition: Christ “trampling down death by death.”
↑ 38. The citation of Psalm 16:10 (LXX Psalm 15:10) in Acts 2:27, 31 is Peter’s proof that the Psalm spoke of Christ, not David. The argument requires that Christ’s soul actually went to Hades and was then retrieved by God. See F. F. Bruce, The Book of Acts, rev. ed., NICNT (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1988), 68–69.
↑ 39. Paul adapts Deuteronomy 30:13 (“Who will cross the sea to get it?”) by substituting “the abyss” for “the sea.” Douglas Moo, The Epistle to the Romans, NICNT (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996), 654, notes the influence of Psalm 107:26 and that “sea” and “abyss” were often interchanged in the Old Testament and Judaism.
↑ 40. The phrase “the heart of the earth” (Greek en tē kardia tēs gēs) most naturally refers to the underworld or the realm of the dead. See D. A. Carson, Matthew, EBC 8 (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1984), 296.
↑ 41. Jonathan, Grace beyond the Grave, 185–86, summarizing MacCulloch, Harrowing, 83–84. On Marcion, see Irenaeus, Against Heresies 1.27.3; MacCulloch, Harrowing, 86–87.
↑ 42. Dalton, Christ’s Proclamation, 28. Jonathan, Grace beyond the Grave, 186, notes this finding and adds that even before Clement of Alexandria, the 1 Peter 3:19 text was not connected with the descent — “the belief existed before anyone tied it to 1 Peter.”
↑ 43. Shepherd of Hermas, Similitude 9.16, in Michael W. Holmes, ed. and trans., The Apostolic Fathers: Greek Texts and English Translations, 3rd ed. (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2007). The full citation: “They preached also to those who had previously fallen asleep, and they themselves gave them the seal of the preaching.… They fell asleep in righteousness and in great purity, only they did not have this seal.” Beilby, Postmortem Opportunity, 183–84, summarizes the passage and its significance.
↑ 44. Clement of Alexandria, Stromata 6.6; cited in Beilby, Postmortem Opportunity, 190–91. Jerome called Clement “the most learned of all the ancients.”
↑ 45. Origen, Against Celsus 2.43. Cited in Beilby, Postmortem Opportunity, 191–92.
↑ 46. Hippolytus, Easter Homily (preserved Syriac fragment). Cited in Beilby, Postmortem Opportunity, 192.
↑ 47. Cyril of Alexandria, Commentary on John 11.2. Cited in Beilby, Postmortem Opportunity, 192–93. The passage includes a clear reference to 1 Peter 3:19–20.
↑ 48. The Gospel of Nicodemus (also called the Acts of Pilate), Part II, chs. 17–27. The text is usually dated to the fourth or fifth century. See MacCulloch, Harrowing, 159–85, for a detailed analysis of the narrative.
↑ 49. Odes of Solomon 42:11–20. The Odes are usually dated to the late first or early second century. See James H. Charlesworth, The Odes of Solomon, rev. ed. (Missoula, MT: Scholars Press, 1977).
↑ 50. Grudem, “He Did Not Descend into Hell,” 103–13. Jonathan, Grace beyond the Grave, 186, responds that the creed codified an already-existing belief.
↑ 51. E. G. Selwyn, The First Epistle of St. Peter, 340. Cited in Jonathan, Grace beyond the Grave, 186. The point is that the descent tradition was so deeply rooted that it preceded the appeal to any specific proof text.
↑ 52. Burnfield, Patristic Universalism, ch. 5, section on Isaiah 49:9, 25. Burnfield notes that “the teaching is clearly consistent with this idea as we’re told those who are ‘bound’ will ‘Go forth’ and the ‘captives’ will be ‘rescued.’”