HistoricalChristian.Faith

The Formula of Concord on the Intermediate State (the Descent into Hell)

Dates: 1577 (Solid Declaration; published in the Book of Concord, 1580) · Wikipedia
Summary: The Formula of Concord (1577) is the last of the Lutheran confessional documents, drafted to settle the controversies that divided Lutherans after Luther's death. Its ninth article, "Christ's Descent into Hell," makes Luther's 1533 Torgau reading confessionally binding: the whole person of Christ, God and man, descended after his burial and conquered the devil and destroyed the power of hell. Just as deliberately, it refuses to settle how this happened — that question is "reserved until the other world" — and so confessionalizes both the victorious descent and the studied refusal to speculate that marked Luther's sermon.

Claims & evidence

The whole Christ descended after burial and destroyed hell's power

we simply believe that the entire person, God and man, after the burial descended into hell, conquered the devil, destroyed the power of hell, and took from the devil all his might

— Solid Declaration, Art. IX (Of the Descent of Christ to Hell), bookofconcord.org. The confession distinguishes "the burial and descent of Christ to hell … as different articles," so the descent is a real act of the whole undivided person — not a figure for the grave, and not (as Calvin read it) the soul's bearing of divine wrath on the cross — and its substance is conquest: the defeat of the devil and the breaking of hell's power.

The article rests on Luther's 1533 Torgau sermon

we abide … by the simplicity of our Christian faith, whereof Dr. Luther has spoken in his sermon, delivered in the castle at Torgau in the year 1533, where he directs us to this article of the Apostles' Creed

— Solid Declaration, Art. IX, bookofconcord.org. Faced with "dissimilar explanations of the article … found" among "the ancient Christian teachers of the Church, as well as in some among our teachers," the Formula does not adjudicate them but defers wholesale to Luther's Torgau sermon as the churches' guide — the one place a Lutheran symbol rests an article on a single dated sermon.

How it happened is left a mystery, to be revealed hereafter

But how this occurred we should … reserve until the other world, where not only this point, but also still others will be revealed

— Solid Declaration, Art. IX, bookofconcord.org. The companion Epitome Art. IX (bookofconcord.org) urges the same restraint — "there should be no disputation concerning it, but … it should be believed and taught only in the simplest manner" — because the article "cannot be comprehended by the senses or by our reason, but must be grasped by faith alone." What the believer needs to know is the benefit: that Christ "destroyed hell for all believers, and delivered them from the power of death and of the devil."

Notes

• The Formula's reticence is itself a position. It deliberately leaves open the very questions that had divided the later Lutherans — whether the descent belongs to Christ's humiliation (a final stage of suffering) or to his exaltation (the first act of his triumph), and whether it occurred before or after his death — and confesses only the bare victorious fact. By directing the churches to the mature Luther of 1533, the drafters tilted toward the descent as triumph.
• On the timeline this is the third Reformation reading of the descent, alongside Calvin's "torments of the damned on the cross" and the Catholic emptying-of-the-limbus-patrum (Aquinas). It bears directly on the descent-clause argument: where Grudem and Piper would drop the creed's "he descended into hell," the Lutheran confession not only retains it but builds a whole article on it.
• The Solid Declaration is the fuller of the Formula's two parts; the briefer Epitome states the same doctrine. Both were adopted in 1577 and printed in the Book of Concord (1580). English quotations here follow the standard Triglot Concordia rendering.