Reclaiming the Harrowing of Hell

 

Holy Saturday, Trinitarian Love, and the Anglican Confrontation with Evil

Introduction

Among the articles of the Apostles’ Creed, few are as neglected, or as theologically explosive, as the confession, “He descended into hell.” For many Anglicans, this clause is recited liturgically but seldom explored doctrinally. Yet in an age marked by systemic injustice, traumatic loss, social fragmentation, and acute experiences of abandonment, the Church’s relative silence regarding Christ’s descent has left a notable gap in its theological account of evil. Anglican theology, shaped by restraint and proportion, has often preferred to speak of evil in moral and pastoral terms (sin, injustice, corruption, brokenness) without always pressing into its cosmic, eschatological, and Christological depth. 

This post argues that reclaiming the doctrine of the harrowing of hell, especially through Rowan Williams’s reading of Hans Urs von Balthasar, offers Anglican theology a profound and necessary resource for confronting evil. The descent into hell is far more than an optional mythological appendix to the Creed. It is a revelation of divine love in the depths of godlessness. It reframes the problem of evil, treating it less as an abstract puzzle to be solved than as a reality into which God has descended. In doing so, it grounds Christian hope in God’s presence within evil and victory through it, rather than in escape from evil.

The central claim of this essay is that the harrowing of hell reveals the deepest truth about God and evil: that God’s love is such that it can sustain itself even in the place where God seems absent, and that this capacity is rooted in the eternal, self-giving life of the Trinity. In recovering this doctrine, Anglican theology can move beyond moral description toward a fully Christological and Trinitarian account of evil, one that names its horror without granting it ultimacy.

I. Anglican Grammar and the Naming of Evil

Anglican theology begins with a certain grammar. We refuse to absolutize evil; and, we refuse to trivialize evil. Evil is not some sort of rival metaphysical principle. But neither is it illusory. Evil is parasitic upon the good. Evil is distortion of the good which God has made. Article I of the Thirty-Nine Articles rules out any dualistic cosmology when it says that God is “the Maker, and Preserver of all things both visible and invisible.”  Evil has no self-subsisting ontology. It is privation, corruption, and disorder within creation.

Yet this metaphysical restraint stops well short of moral trivialization. Anglican theology insists that evil must be named truthfully and responsibly. Evil is too important to trivialize and too horrible to sensationalize.

Theology will not exhaustively explain evil, or make it completely intelligible in a way that defuses its horror. But it must enable moral judgment: to discern evil as violation and aberration, to define responsibility without reduction, to nurture hope without evasion. This Anglican grammar finds liturgical expression in the Prayer Book. The General Confession confesses both sin of commission and sin of omission: "We have done those things which we ought not to have done; and we have left undone those things which we ought to have done."  Such language assumes that evil is real, that not only individuals but communities can be lost and in need of repentance, and that grace does not need to be denied. Evil is not simply private vice; it is social distortion, institutional sin, and ancestral captivity.

Yet Anglican theology will not be complete if it stops at moral and pastoral categories. Moral theology can chart evil’s ways. But dogmatic theology must address the issues of death, abandonment, the powers, and the silence of God. This is precisely where the doctrine of the descent into hell becomes critical.

II. Scriptural Background: Descent, the Dead, and the Defeat of the Powers

The descent ad inferna is hardly some late truncation added onto the gospel. It grows out of a network of scriptural texts that have been read together by the Church for centuries. The most straightforward texts are 1 Peter 3: 18-20 (“He was killed in the flesh but made alive in the Spirit, and in the Spirit he went and proclaimed to the spirits in prison”) and 1 Peter 4:6 (“the gospel was preached to the dead”). These passages are brief and mysterious, yet they provided early Christians a language for discussing Christ’s work among the dead. 

Acts 2 is just as important. Peter quotes Psalm 16 and declares that Christ “was not deserted to Hades, nor did his flesh see decomposition” (Acts 2:27, 31). Christ truly experienced the state of death, but death could not contain him. Ephesians 4: 8-10 echoes this language of Christ going “down to the lower regions of the earth,” before ascending to fill all things. Matthew 12: 40 even quotes Jonah’s three days in the belly of the fish as a type of the Son of Man who will be “in the midst of the earth.” Romans 10:6-7 alludes to a going down “into the abyss.” None of these passages in and of themselves contain a fully developed doctrine. Together they make up the biblical foundation that supported the Church’s confession.

One important distinction must be made at this point. When classical Christian theologians write that “he descended into hell,” they are not necessarily picturing Christ going to Gehenna in order to suffer as the final state of the damned. More frequently, they use language that refers to Hades or Sheol: death, the state of those who descend into death. Acts 2 uses the language of Hades specifically. This matters because “hell” for modern readers typically means final damnation, while patristic and creedal usage often referred more generally to the underworld, the grave, the realm of death. Understandably, the two meanings are blurred together by the traditional English translation. But the descent was about Christ’s full experience of death and his entry into the realm of death. It is not about speculations on infernal torment

And yet Scripture does not portray death in merely neutral terms. Death for Paul and the apocalyptic writers is part of the powers structure. Sin, death, flesh, and principalities are all tangled together. Death is a force that sustains the powers that be. Christ’s descent therefore has implications not only for the souls of the dead, but for his confrontation with death itself, and the powers that oppress his creation. Any Anglican recovery of the harrowing of hell will have to avoid sanitizing evil into moralism. Evil is systemic, supra-personal, and demonic. It’s seldom dramatic, but often entrenched in falsehoods, fear, domination, and the casual acceptance of death.

III. Creeds, Articles, and Prayer Book: The Anglican Witness

For Anglican theology to reclaim this doctrine, it must be demonstrated that this teaching belongs both to the Anglican formularies themselves and to general Christian tradition. The Apostles' Creed confesses that Christ "descended into hell." Article III of the Thirty-Nine Articles is even more explicit: "As Christ died for us, and was buried, so also is it to be believed, that he went down into Hell."  That statement matters. It shows that the descent is more than poetic or optional language; it is part of Anglican doctrinal identity.

Anglican reserve must therefore resist becoming theological amnesia. Moderation is one thing; silence where the formularies have spoken is another. If Article I helps locate evil within a non-dualistic doctrine of creation, Article III insists that Christ’s saving work extends into the depths of death itself.

The Prayer Book reinforces this witness. Holy Saturday is more than a blank day between Good Friday and Easter. It is the Church’s day of waiting at the tomb. The liturgical materials of the triduum, along with the burial rites and paschal collects, form the Church to inhabit silence, burial, expectation, and hope. One collect asks that all who have been “baptized into the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ” may continually put away the old life and take on the new.  Another prays for the departed by invoking the God “whose days are without end, and whose mercies cannot be numbered.”  The Prayer Book does not elaborate a detailed theology of Christ’s descent, but it gives the Church its atmosphere: death is real, burial is holy, waiting is faithful, and hope persists.

IV. Patristic Memory and the Harrowing of Hell

The early Church treated the descent as a central dimension of Christ’s victory, far from a minor afterthought. In the East especially, the icon of the Anastasis depicts Christ breaking the gates of Hades and raising Adam and Eve from their tombs. This image compresses an entire theology of salvation into one scene: Christ enters the place of captivity and seizes humanity by the hand.

The Fathers vary in language and emphasis, but several themes recur. Christ descends because he has truly died. He descends because salvation must reach those under the power of death. He descends because the scope of redemption answers the scope of the fall. And he descends because only what is assumed can be healed. Balthasar’s appeal to Irenaeus’s principle, that only what is endured is healed, intensifies rather than invents this patristic instinct. 

The ancient Holy Saturday homily preserved in the Liturgy of the Hours captures the tradition at its most arresting: “What is happening? Today there is a great silence on earth, a great silence and stillness, a great silence because the King sleeps.”  Here Holy Saturday is neither mere absence nor pure triumph. It is silence under tension. Christ enters the domain of death, seeks Adam, and wakes the sleepers. The East typically stresses the victorious harrowing; the West often dwells longer in burial and waiting. Anglican theology, precisely because of its historical capacity to receive from East and West alike, is well placed to let both notes sound.

V. Holy Saturday and the Theology of Waiting

Holy Saturday occupies an ambiguous place in Christian theology. Situated between the horror of the cross and the joy of the resurrection, it is often treated as a liturgical interval rather than a theological event. Hans Urs von Balthasar resists that tendency. In Mysterium Paschale, he argues that Holy Saturday is central to Christian soteriology because it names the interval in which Christ’s solidarity with the dead is disclosed in its fullest depth. 

Riyako Cecilia Hikota’s study of Balthasar is especially helpful here. She argues that Balthasar seeks to recover the “in-betweenness” of Holy Saturday as a day of transition, waiting, and hidden redemption.  Holy Saturday is thus neither a mere appendix to Good Friday nor a diminished Easter. It has its own theological weight. The Church waits; Mary waits; the world waits. Salvation includes event and outcome, and also interval, suspension, and silence.

This matters immensely for any theology of suffering. Good Friday has its cry of dereliction. Easter has its proclamation of victory. Holy Saturday alone gives dogmatic dignity to unresolved grief, delayed meaning, and trust without sight. It is the day on which faith exists without manifestation. That makes it indispensable for Christian reflection on evil. Many forms of suffering are suspended rather than dramatic. Many wounds endure on Saturday.

VI. Balthasar and Rowan Williams: Presence in Godlessness

Balthasar’s account of Holy Saturday remains controversial, but it is fruitful precisely because it forces the Church to take with utmost seriousness the claim that Christ truly entered death. On his reading, the descent is more than a triumphant proclamation delivered from a place of untouched sovereignty. It is real participation in the condition of the dead, solidarity with those who are lost, and radical obedience extending even into the silence of death. His notorious phrase about the “obedience of a corpse” is intended to prevent any suggestion that Christ merely appears to die while remaining untouched by what death means for human beings. 

Rowan Williams’s reading of Balthasar is especially valuable because it locates this descent within a robustly Trinitarian framework. In “Balthasar and the Trinity,” Williams argues that the divine “hiding” manifested in the cross and Holy Saturday is no collapse of deity but a disclosure of what divine love eternally is.  God is made loving by no external suffering. Rather, because God is eternally self-giving love, God can be present in abandonment without ceasing to be God. The Father’s self-giving to the Son, and the Son’s eternal reception and return in the Spirit, constitute a life of ecstatic self-donation. The descent into hell is therefore no emergency improvisation within God. It is the historical manifestation of an eternal Trinitarian truth.

This bears directly on the problem of evil. If evil is experienced most acutely as godlessness, abandonment, and the collapse of meaning, then Holy Saturday declares that there too divine love can be. This arises from no confusion of evil with good, and from no illusion that abandonment is less than real. It arises because God’s love is strong enough to inhabit even its apparent opposite. In Williams’s rendering, God is most deeply revealed where God appears most absent. 

VII. Provision, Presence, and Power

The tradition of the harrowing of hell may be helpfully summarized under three headings: provision, presence, and power.

First, provision. The descent addresses a perennial theological question: what of those who died before Christ, or outside the visible historical reach of the gospel? The biblical hints in 1 Peter and the patristic imagination of Christ liberating the righteous dead express a fundamental conviction that God’s saving action is constrained by no historical accident. The descent is a sign of divine generosity and of the wideness of mercy.

Second, presence. Christ descends because he is fully present to the dead. He sends no mere message; he becomes one of them. The pastoral force of this is profound. There is no place of bereavement, despair, hidden suffering, or death that lies beyond Christ’s solidarity.

Third, power. The descent is also an act of victory. Christ’s presence among the dead is transformative presence. Death’s dominion is invaded from within. The risen Christ who declares in Revelation that he holds “the keys of Death and Hades” does so as one who has entered that realm and shattered its claim to finality.

The Eastern image of the harrowing captures this vividly. Christ stands above the ruined gates of Hades and raises Adam and Eve. The victory is representative, communal, and cosmic. Salvation is the undoing of humanity’s captivity, rather than the rescue of isolated souls.

VIII. Descent, Baptism, and the Church’s Participation

The doctrine of the descent belongs to sacramental theology and ecclesiology as much as to Christology. Christians are incorporated into Christ’s death and resurrection in baptism. Romans 6 speaks of being “buried with him by baptism into death,” so that believers may walk in newness of life. Hikota rightly notes that Holy Saturday gives distinctive shape to Christian discipleship because the baptized are drawn into Christ’s passage through death toward resurrection. 

This matters because the descent concerns more than what Christ did once in the realm of the dead. It also names the pattern of Christian existence now. The baptized live in-between: the old life has been judged, the new life has begun, but glory remains hidden. In that sense, Christian life bears the mark of Saturday. It is lived between accomplished redemption and unveiled fulfillment. Believers endure suffering, temptation, delay, and loss under the sign of a victory that is already real yet fully unseen. Holy Saturday becomes a grammar for discipleship, rather than a curiosity.

IX. The Universalism Question

Any serious account of the descent must face the question it seems naturally to provoke: if Christ descends to the dead and if no place is beyond his reach, does this imply universal salvation?

The doctrine carries no such requirement. It certainly expands the horizon of hope and forbids constricted accounts of grace. It insists that Christ’s saving action reaches into death itself and warns the Church against presuming narrow limits to mercy. But it falls short of dogmatically establishing that all are in fact saved. Hikota’s study shows that Balthasar’s treatment of Holy Saturday raises precisely this question while refusing a simplistic resolution. 

Anglican theology can speak here with clarity and reserve. The harrowing of hell authorizes hope, rather than presumption. It calls the Church to trust the wideness of divine mercy without dissolving judgment into sentiment. Evil lacks ultimacy, and judgment remains real. The descent therefore deepens Christian hope while preserving moral seriousness.

X. Anglican Retrieval and Doctrinal Proportion

The Anglican tradition is particularly well suited to retrieve this doctrine because of its capacity to hold together truths often pulled apart. The via media at its best is disciplined proportion rather than compromise. The classical Anglican inheritance repeatedly described its theological temperament in terms of measure, breadth, and synthesis rather than reduction.  That is precisely what a doctrine like the descent requires.

An Anglican retrieval of the harrowing of hell should therefore do several things at once. It should affirm the scriptural roots of the doctrine without claiming more explicitness than the texts provide. It should honor the creeds and Article III without treating every later theological elaboration as equally binding. It should recover the patristic and liturgical imagination of the Church, especially the East-West interplay of victory and waiting. It should welcome Balthasar and Williams as powerful modern interpreters while distinguishing the doctrine itself from any one constructive account of it. And it should press the doctrine into pastoral service for an age in which evil is experienced as wrongdoing and also as dereliction, trauma, systemic death, and spiritual desolation.

In that respect, Balthasar should be received constructively but with care. Hikota’s work is helpful precisely because it shows both the richness and the difficulty of his account.  Anglican theology can profit from his seriousness about Holy Saturday and from Williams’s Trinitarian clarification without pretending that every feature of Balthasar’s interpretation is identical with the whole tradition as such.

XI. Holy Saturday and the Anglican Confrontation with Evil

The doctrine of the descent into hell transforms the Anglican account of evil because it prevents two equal and opposite failures. First, it prevents the Church from minimizing evil. Death, abandonment, the powers, and hell itself are more than mere metaphors for ordinary disappointment. The descent assumes that evil reaches into the deepest structures of existence. Second, it prevents the Church from granting evil ultimacy. The whole point of the descent is that Christ has entered precisely what seemed most closed to God and broken it open from within.

This is why the doctrine matters now. Modern discourse often oscillates between therapeutic reduction and apocalyptic sensationalism. Evil is either psychologized away or magnified into an all-explanatory category. The harrowing of hell offers a more disciplined Christian grammar. Evil is real, devastating, and frequently hidden in habits, institutions, and public powers. It can be demonic as well as social, structural as well as personal. Yet it is no rival principle and claims no final word. Christ has gone to its furthest horizon.

For Anglican theology, this means the Church can speak of evil with greater honesty and greater hope. It can say that God refuses to remain distant from the victims of history, the dead, the traumatized, or those who experience only silence. God in Christ has entered there. And because Christ has entered there, no human darkness is finally godless.

Conclusion

The clause “he descended into hell” is far from a marginal detail of the Creed. It is a revelation of the deepest truth about God. It declares that God is creator, judge, and redeemer, and also the one who enters into the darkest realities of creaturely existence before God: death, abandonment, silence, and the domain of the powers.

To reclaim the harrowing of hell is to give Anglican theology a fuller grammar for naming evil and a deeper dogmatic ground for hope. It is to say that evil is real, dreadful, and deeply embedded in human life, but holds no claim to ultimacy. God has gone where death reigns. Christ has entered the realm of the dead, borne the silence of Holy Saturday, confronted the powers, and shattered the gates from within.

This doctrine also teaches the Church how to live. Christian existence is more than Good Friday suffering or Easter jubilation. Much of it is lived on Saturday: in silence, in burial, in waiting, in trust without sight. Yet this waiting carries no emptiness. It is sustained by the knowledge that Christ has already gone ahead into the abyss and returned with the keys.

To confess that Christ descended into hell is therefore to confess something greater than the truth that no place lies beyond God’s reach; it is to confess that there is no depth of death, evil, or abandonment into which divine love is unable to descend. And that is why evil, however terrible, can never be the final truth of the world.

Bibliography

Balthasar, Hans Urs von. Mysterium Paschale: The Mystery of Easter. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1990.

The Book of Common Prayer and Administration of the Sacraments and Other Rites and Ceremonies of the Church. New York: Church Publishing, 2007.

Doyle, C. Andrew. Bedeviled and Beloved: An Anglican Naming of Evil, Responsibility, and Hope. Manuscript.

Hikota, Riyako Cecilia. And Still We Wait: Hans Urs von Balthasar’s Theology of Holy Saturday and Christian Discipleship. Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2018.

More, Paul Elmer, and Frank Leslie Cross, eds. Anglicanism: The Thought and Practice of the Church of England, Illustrated from the Religious Literature of the Seventeenth Century. Milwaukee: Morehouse Publishing, 1935.

Vatican. “From an Ancient Homily for Holy Saturday: The Lord’s Descent into Hell.” Accessed April 4, 2026.

Williams, Rowan. “Balthasar and the Trinity.” In The Cambridge Companion to Hans Urs von Balthasar, edited by Edward T. Oakes and David Moss, 37-50. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.