Nicene Creed question

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EricCKS

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What exactly does it mean when it says in the prayer “He descended into hell, on the third day He ascended into heaven”

I have said it hundreds of times but never have really known what it means. Or, where it comes from.

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Eric
 
First, the “Decended into Hell” is from the older Apostles Creed (I’m always confusing the two especially when reciting one or the other) I’m sure there are better explanations however the simple one is this. It was the Church way of expressing that Jesus really died. We use the term Hell for the place of the damned, however, it was also understood as the place of the dead with no implications on salvation or not. I find it interesting that 2000 years later there are still the theories that Jesus really didn’t die on the cross, theories supposelly new to our time but actually are the same charges the Church faced 2000 years ago. I guess the old saying is right - “Nothing new under the Sun”.
 
I found that reading Dante’s Divine Comedy [although not inspired or canonical] helped me to understand this statement better. He describes several levels of hell, the outermost level being “limbo” where good people (as well as unbaptized infants) who lived before the time of Christ, reside. Though not damned, still unable to “see God”. It is to this level that Christ descends to retrieve the saints of the Old Testament.
Now, I fully realize this is not biblical, however, the concept was obviously fully developed in Dante’s time, which tells me that his elucidation of it was merely a formality. In other words, it seems to me to have been a universal belief and very, very old.
Dante is a good read… I highly recommend it.
Nianka
 
hell in the hebrew is sheol , in the greek Hades, or in other words the nether world, the graves of the dead
 
I think it’s Purgatory. I can’t be sure though, but didn’t it say that Jesus preached to the souls of the dead during this time in one of the epistles? This couldn’t be Heaven, as that happened later. It couldn’t be Hell (as we think of it today) because the souls of the damned cannot be saved. Hence, it can only mean Purgatory (?) since the souls there would benefit from Jesus’ prayers.

Notworthy
 
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