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“He Descended to the Dead”: An Evangelical Theology of Holy Saturday is unavailable, but you can change that!

“I believe he descended to the dead.” The descent of Jesus Christ to the dead has been a fundamental tenet of the Christian faith, as indicated by its inclusion in both the Apostles’ and Athanasian Creeds. Falling between remembrance of Christ’s death on Good Friday and of his resurrection on Easter Sunday, this affirmation has been a cause for Christian worship and reflection on Holy Saturday...

Figure 2.2. The Place of the Dead (Hades, Sheol) When the New Testament talks about Jesus’ descent and all that is accomplished in it, we need to keep this conceptual background in mind. It is to those particular NT texts that we now turn. In sum, these texts teach that when Christ died, he experienced death as all humans do: his body was buried, and his human soul went (“descended”) to the place of the dead. He descended to the righteous compartment of the dead (“paradise,” Lk 23:43), but
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