takes a slightly different form. It’s often referred to as the “Harrowing of Hell,”
an old English term that meant “to despoil” or “to undo” something, as farmers
in those days did when they flattened out their land with a tool called a harrow.
This vision of Christ’s descent was summed up powerfully in the Vespers
antiphon of Holy Saturday in the Orthodox liturgy, where it says, “Hell reigns,
but not forever.” Eastern iconography—in contrast with the Western images,
which emphasize flames and torture—often pictures Jesus pulling souls out of
hell, not thrusting them into it. (Google it if you doubt me.) What a completely
different message! No wonder Easter is a so much bigger and more celebrated
feast in the Eastern church, where the congregation voluntarily cheers and
shouts with delight, “Christ is risen! Christ is risen indeed!” (The underlying
message is that we are too!)
In his commentary on the Apostles’ Creed, Pope Benedict admits that the
phrase “descended into hell” was problematic, confusing, and based on
mythological language.*10 He concludes that if Christ indeed went there, he
could have done nothing but undo the place; he would have stopped its
functioning, just as he did when he “harrowed” the money changers in the
temple.*11 Hell and Christ cannot coexist, he seems to say. We must see Jesus as
triumphing over hell and emptying it out. Many of our Easter hymns and
sermons actually say as much, but most of us never really accepted the enormity
of this message. “He destroyed death,” we sing, often without really seeming to
mean it.
Such bad theology has its roots in organizing a worldview around the
retributive notion of justice, as we discussed earlier, distinguishing it from
restorative justice (a fancy term for healing). Jesus neither practiced nor taught
retribution, but that is what imperial theology prefers—clear winners and clear
losers. Top-down worldviews can’t resist the tidy dualisms of an in-and-out, us-
and-them worldview. But Jesus roundly rejects such notions in both his parables
and his teachings—for example, when he says, “Whoever is not against us is for
us” (Mark 9:40), and that “God causes his sun to rise on bad as well as good, and
causes it to rain on honest and dishonest men alike” (Matthew 5:45), and when
he makes outsiders and outliers the heroes of most of his stories.
Desert Fathers and Mothers of the first centuries of Christianity offered a
common response when confronted with the notion of a God who eternally
punishes his enemies, or the possibility that any of us could experience
happiness in heaven while others we knew and loved were being tortured
nonstop in hell. Some of them said, without indulging in any theological