When the creed goes on to say that Christ descended into hell, does that mean that He descended into the limbus, where there is neither joy nor sorrow, so that He might liberate the patriarchs from there? Or does it mean that He descended into the place of the damned? Not at all! For first of all, it is undisputed that the patriarchs experienced joy and comfort even before the death of Christ, as we see in the story of Abraham and Lazarus in Luke 16[:19–26]. Furthermore, nowhere in Scripture is the word “hell” ever taken to mean limbus.
The origin of the limbus error is that many thought, and still do think, that sins were not forgiven prior to the suffering of Christ. But Christ’s suffering possessed its power from eternity. For “Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever” (Heb. 13:8). In Romans 4[:7], Paul defines justification using the words of David: “Blessed are those whose iniquities are forgiven” [Ps. 32:1]. Thereore, in the time of David, before Christ had yet suffered, sins were forgiven through trust in the future sacrifice of Christ. In the same chapter, Paul says that we obtain forgiveness of sins and happiness no differently than Abraham, the father of all believers. Hence we read in Matthew 8[:11] that “many will come from east and west and sit down with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven.”
As this error, namely, that the patriarchs had no forgiveness of sins prior to the suffering of Christ, gained strength against Scripture, another error emerged from it—the limbus. For it was too difficult to push the patriarchs into hell, since, as they themselves say, there is no redemption from hell. However, they did not dare to place them in eternal happiness since, based on the fact that Christ had not yet suffered, they thought that the patriarchs’ sins were not yet forgiven. Therefore, they invented a middle place, in which there was neither happiness nor sorrow, which the Scholastics called the limbus (in German, dasvorgebeude der Hellen), a kind of porch to hell. The devil was trying to obscure the magnitude of the efficacy of Christ’s sacrifice by denying that the patriarchs in the Old Testament had forgiveness of sins through faith in the sacrifice to come. Therefore, he fabricated the limbus for them, just as he invented purgatory for those faithful ones who have died after Christ suffered. That, too, was intended to take away the power of cleansing sin from the suffering of Christ, which contradicts the clear Word of God (1 John 1:7).
Second, we should not say, either, that Christ descended into hell, that is, the place of the damned, in order to vanquish death and the devil there on our behalf or to suffer new torments. Christ both vanquished Satan through His own death and, after His death, suffered no more torments by which to deliver us from Satan’s power, as Hebrews 2[:14–15] testifies: “That through death He might destroy him who had the power of death, that is, the devil, and release those who through fear of death were all their lifetime subject to bondage” (see also Col. 2:14–15). Luke the Evangelist testifies that Christ handed over His spirit to the custody of the Father [Luke 23:46]. Third, the descent into hell cannot be properly taken, either, as the display in hell of Christ’s victory, for that belongs to the exaltation, which began only in His resurrection. The descent into hell, however, belongs to the humiliation, as Peter expressly teaches in Acts 2[:25–27], when he quotes the words of David. When some of the ancient fathers reflected on these things, they concluded that hell should be understood here simply as “the grave.” But if it were nothing more than that, it would not have been necessary to repeat in the articles more obscurely what had already been stated more clearly.
Caspar Olevianus | An Exposition of the Apostles’ Creed, trans. Lyle Bierma, Classic Reformed Theology (Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage Books, 2009), 86–87. (HT: Jim Lincoln on X)
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