2. The stages of Christ's exaltation.
(a) The quickening and resurrection.
Both Lutherans and Romanists distinguish between these two, making the former precede, and the latter follow, Christ's “preaching to the spirits in prison.” These views rest upon a misinterpretation of 1 Pet. 3:18-20. Lutherans teach that Christ descended into hell, to proclaim his triumph to evil spirits. But this is to give ἐκήρυξεν the unusual sense of proclaiming his triumph, instead of his gospel. Romanists teach that Christ entered the underworld to preach to Old Testament saints, that they might be saved. But the passage speaks only of the disobedient; it cannot be pressed into the support of a sacramental theory of the salvation of Old Testament believers. The passage does not assert the descent of Christ into the world of spirits, but only a work of the preïncarnate Logos in offering salvation, through Noah, to the world then about to perish.
Augustine, Ad Euodiam, ep. 99—“The spirits shut up in prison are the unbelievers who lived in the time of Noah, whose spirits or souls were shut up in the darkness of ignorance as in a prison; Christ preached to them, not in the flesh, for he was not yet incarnate, but in the spirit, that is, in his divine nature.” Calvin taught that Christ descended into the underworld and suffered the pains of the lost. But not all Calvinists hold with him here; see Princeton Essays, 1:153. Meyer, on Rom. 10:7, regards the question—“Who shall descend into the abyss? (that is, to bring Christ up from the dead)”—as an allusion to, and so indirectly a proof-text for, Christ's descent into the underworld. Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 211, favors a preaching to the dead: “During that time [the three days] he did not return to heaven and his Father.” But though John 20:17 is referred to for proof, is not this statement true only of his body? So far as the soul is concerned, Christ can say: “Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit,” and “To-day thou shalt be with me in Paradise”(Luke 23:43, 46).
Zahn and Dorner best represent the Lutheran view. Zahn, in Expositor, March, 1898: 216-223—“If Jesus was truly man, then his soul, after it left the body, entered into the fellowship of departed spirits.... If Jesus is he who lives forevermore and even his dying was his act, this carrying in the realm of the dead cannot be thought of as a purely passive condition, but must have been known to those who dwelt there..... If Jesus was the Redeemer of mankind, the generations of those who had passed away must have thus been brought into personal relation to him, his work and his kingdom, without waiting for the last day.”
Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:662 (Syst. Doct., 4:127), thinks “Christ's descent into Hades marks a new era of his pneumatic life, in which he shows himself free from the limitations of time and space.” He rejects “Luther's notion of a merely triumphal progress and proclamation of Christ. Before Christ,” he says, “there was no abode peopled by the damned. The descent was an application of the benefit of the atonement (implied in κηρύσσειν). The work was prophetic, not high-priestly nor kingly. Going to the spirits in prison is spoken of as a spontaneous act, not one of physical necessity. No power of Hades led him over into Hades. Deliverance from the limitations of a mortal body is already an indication of a higher stage of existence. Christ's soul is bodiless for a time—πνεῦμα only—as the departed were.
“The ceasing of this preaching is neither recorded, nor reasonably to be supposed,—indeed the ancient church supposed it carried on through the apostles. It expresses the universal significance of Christ for former generations and for the entire kingdom of the dead. No physical power is a limit to him. The gates of hell, or Hades, shall not prevail over or against him. The intermediate state is one of blessedness for him, and [pg 708]he can admit the penitent thief into it. Even those who were not laid hold of by Christ's historic manifestation in this earthly life still must, and may, be brought into relation with him, in order to be able to accept or to reject him. And thus the universal relation of Christ to humanity and the absoluteness of the Christian religion are confirmed.”So Dorner, for substance.
All this versus Strauss, who thought that the dying of vast masses of men, before and after Christ, who had not been brought into relation to Christ, proves that the Christian religion is not necessary to salvation, because not universal. For advocacy of Christ's preaching to the dead, see also Jahrbuch für d. Theol., 23:177-228; W. W. Patton, in N. Eng., July, 1882:460-478; John Miller, Problems Suggested by the Bible, part 1:93-98; part 2:38; Plumptre, The Spirits in Prison; Kendrick, in Bap. Rev., Apl. 1888; Clemen, Niedergefahren zu den Toten.
For the opposite view, see “No Preaching to the Dead,” in Princeton Rev., March, 1875:197; 1878:451-491; Hovey, in Bap. Quar., 4:486 sq., and Bib. Eschatology, 97-107; Love, Christ's Preaching to the Spirits in Prison; Cowles, in Bib. Sac., 1875:401; Hodge, Syst. Theol., 2:616-622; Salmond, in Popular Commentary; and Johnstone, Com., in loco. So Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, and Bishop Pearson. See also E. D. Morris, Is There Salvation after Death? and Wright, Relation of Death to Probation, 22:28—“If Christ preached to spirits in Hades, it may have been to demonstrate the hopelessness of adding in the other world to the privileges enjoyed in this. We do not read that it had any favorable effect upon the hearers. If men will not hear Moses and the Prophets, then they will not hear one risen from the dead. ‘Today thou shalt be with me in Paradise’ (Luke 23:43) was not comforting, if Christ was going that day to the realm of lost spirits. The antediluvians, however, were specially favored with Noah's preaching, and were specially wicked.”