Was Christ damned?
A few days ago, I got this question from a friend: “Does Christ’s descent into hell count as damnation? Can someone who is sinless be damned?” This is an interesting question, and I thought it might be apt for a post here.
The first thing that needs to be said is that Christ was not damned. Yes, He carried our punishment of death, but He did not do so as if He was guilty. This is something which Church Fathers agree on, East and West. For examples, check out this Twitter thread by an Eastern Orthodox Christian.
Now, in my opinion, one of the best treatments of this is that of St. Anselm of Canterbury. Approximately a thousand years ago, in 1094-1098, Anselm authored a work on this topic, called Cur Deus Homo? (usually titled Why God Became a Man in English).
There, he lays out a doctrine of atonement which deals with the fact that the relationship between God and man has been damaged, and that this damage must be remedied in some way.1 His point is not that God is very offended or that God is bloodthirsty, but that we have lost our contact with God, that the relation itself is damaged. Furthermore, he emphasizes that God – who is unchanging and completely one with Himself – cannot just “look between his fingers” when bad things happen. Evil must be atoned in some way, the damage must be remedied – we must be reconciled to God.
Some might say that God can just forgive, but that reduces this to a juridical affair. The point, again, is not that it is only a rule or another that has been broken, but that the relation itself is damaged. And therefore, the relation must be restored. But this can only be done by a human being, since it was damaged by a human being. And this, Anselm says, can be done in two ways. You can atone for wrongdoing either through punishment of the perpetrator or through satisfaction, offered either by the perpetrator or by someone else on his behalf. He says aut poena aut satisfactio, “either punishment or satisfaction” (never both).2 You do not atone for guilt by punishing the innocent representative.
These ideas, however, were unfortunately conflated and in Calvinist soteriology you found the idea of a “transfer of penalty,” that Christ swapped and took our punishment not just in the sense that He bore it but that He was actively damned. One of the absolute worst examples of this is R.C. Sproul explaining the Calvinist view of atonement: “It was as if there was a cry from heaven—excuse my language, but I can be no more accurate than to say—it was as if Jesus heard the words “God Damn You.” Because that’s what it meant to be cursed, to be damned, to be under the anathema of a Father.” That is not the faith of the Church. Christ bore our punishment – but not as if He was guilty.
I think part of the problem here is that we tend to think of reconciliation as something exclusively juridical. We even use the word in our laws. When we ask for forgiveness, we’re asking for reconciliation. And all of this is central to the biblical use of the word. But the legal aspect is not the whole picture, nor the most important. The central thing about the reconciliation is that we, as creatures, become one with the one God, by God himself becoming man. Yes, he even took on everything for us. He was made “to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Corinthians 5:21). It does not mean that Jesus was a sinner, but that he bore all our sin, voluntarily, and made amends for us.
Christ put an end to death by dying and he made it complete in His resurrection, which is also the harrowing of hell. He did not atone for sin by being punished as the innocent representative. Anselm is not saying that Christ was punished as if He was guilty but that he mended or remedied the damage due to sin by living the true human life – in perfect obedience to God. Because sin is not just a juridical question – about something external to us – but a metaphysical question about what’s in us. Again, the problem is not just that a rule has been broken but that our relation to God – and to our fellow creatures – is damaged. And this, says Anselm, is why God had to become man, so that He could reconcile us to God, since we cannot – and will not – do so ourselves.
So no, Calvin is not following Anselm, he is actually conflating two opposite truths in him and therefore muddling the question. Christ’s descent into hell does not count as damnation. Rather, he took it upon Himself to experience all that is due to us and to sin, to heal it from the inside.
For treatments of this, see John D. Hannah, “Anselm on the Doctrine of Atonement” (Bibliotheca Sacra 135, 1978), 333-344; Paul J. LaChance, “Understanding Christ’s Satisfaction Today” (The Saint Anselm Journal 2:1, 2004), 60-66; Andrew Sutherland, “From Satisfaction to Penal Substitution: Debt as a Determinative Concept for Atonement Theology in Anselm and Charles Hodge” (The Saint Anselm Journal 13:1, 2017), 98-1082020. For those who know Nowegian, this is treated excellently in episode 26-27 (esp. 27) of the podcast Ulest by Peder Solberg, William Grosås, and Tore Hjalmar Sævik.
See LaChance, “Understanding Christ’s Satisfaction Today,” 61.