By Father Thomas Hopko
We all become the bride of Christ, and we all relate to each other. We do not cease being who we are, because even the risen Christ, when He is raised, is still Jesus of Nazareth. In John’s Gospel, and in the Gospels generally, he even shows the continuity by showing the wounds in His hands. That causes some difficulty for some people, because they say, if He is raised into eternal life and is really healed, why is He still bearing the wounds? But I believe, personally, the reason for that is simply pedagogical and evangelical. In other words, the Gospel wants to insist that the risen Christ is not someone other than Jesus who was crucified.
And by the way, there are some Christians, even modern Christians, who say Jesus of Nazareth is one thing and the Christ is another. There is the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith and they are not the same person, they are not the same reality. But we Orthodox Christians say, oh no, Jesus of Nazareth is the Christ, and when He is raised He is revealed as the Christ, but it is Jesus who is the Christ, and it is the same one who was put to death and was crucified. That is certainly the witness of the canonical Scriptures of Orthodox Christianity.
What we want to see now, though, is this. The descent into Hades simply means He really died and destroyed death by dying and liberated all those who were held captive by death, and He gave Himself as a ransom to death, abandoned on the cross by the Father into death, but He was not abandoned in the sense that He was tormented by demons and that He was tormented by evils and that He tasted the agonies of hell, and that is part of His kenosis , that is part of His humiliation, that when He died He experienced what it is to be in hell. I believe for us Orthodox Christians that would be blasphemy to claim such a thing. It would just be crazy to claim such a thing. He really died, but he was never “in hell.” All the holy fathers and modern writers like Hierotheos Vlachos and others would claim, there is no place, it is a condition.
If we would define hell as separation from God, this is not biblical. I do not believe that is biblical at all, and in fact, it is important even to note that in some translations of the Scripture, like the Revised Standard Version, because they think of hell and the punishment as separation from God, they even put in the Bible the term separation from God, that they are afflicted by being separated from God. But the text of the Scripture does not speak about separation. It does not speak about separation at all.
For example, in the second letter of Paul to the Thessalonians, it says, “When the Lord Jesus comes in His Parousia from heaven at the end with His mighty angels and flaming fire,” that flaming fire is the fire of the Godhead. We Orthodox Christians do not believe in material hellfire. We do not believe that God is a Nebuchadnezzar, stoking up flames to burn sinners in. No, that is not our teaching.
~Thomas Hopko, The Descent of Jesus into Hades, http://www.ancientfaith.com/podcasts/hopko/the_descent_of_jesus_into_hades.
