He descended into hell: an English Reformation controversy

During the Reformation of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, almost all of the reformers appealed in some way to the writings of the early fathers in their polemical debates against the Roman church. But the English church made the claim that their purpose was only to teach that which was taught by the fathers of the first five or six centuries. This thesis examines whether this was true concerning one of the most disputed doctrines of the English Reformation: Christ’s descent into hell.
We first define what the early church taught regarding the descent. In spite of later claims that the fathers offered diverging views on this doctrine, we found a broad consensus with only minor variations (those of Tertullian and Clement of Alexandria). We then trace the doctrine from the patristic era to the eve of the reformation in England. The broad consensus of the fathers was propagated throughout this period in the various adaptations of the so-called Gospel of Nicodemus. There were a few dissenting voices during the medieval period: Abelard denied a local descent, suggesting that Christ’s “power” descended; Nicholas of Cusa taught that Christ descended into hell to suffer; and Reginald Pecock questioned whether the doctrine was apostolic at all.
We then trace how the doctrine of Christ’s descent was taught in the successive reigns of the Tudors. The official formularies of the English church largely maintained the mainstream patristic view during the reigns of Henry VIII and Edward VI, but during the reign of Elizabeth I, pressures came from some of the continental reformers who had formulated new explanations for the creedal formulation. The central impetus behind this change was the assertion that Christ’s deliverance of the Old Testament saints from Sheol was conceptually too close to the Roman doctrine of souls being delivered from purgatory. Some in England sought to align the official teachings with one of these other continental views, but the established church resisted this urge and continued to insist upon a local descent of Christ to hell. By the end of the Elizabethan era, the Church of England maintained a local descent of Christ into hell, but the central purpose was to defeat the devil, not to deliver the Old Testament saints. This put the Church of England out of step with most of their continental counterparts on this doctrine; but it also meant that they had departed from an important aspect of the descent from the patristic era.