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49 CHAPTER 5 The Damnation of Christ’s Soul An Incomprehensible Judgment The creedal item of Christ’s “Descent into Hell” (descensus ad infernos) is at the heart of one of the “lesser but vigorous controversies of the Reformation era”1 (late sixteenth to early seventeenth century), where the last, crucial determinants of the scapegoat’s semantic formation are evident. A single chapter of that long-running debate over how literally Protestants should interpret the confession that Christ “descended into hell” stands out for the extended disputation of Day of Atonement typologies it contains. In an acrimonious exchange of treatises between the exiled Puritan leader Henry Jacob and the Anglican bishop of Winchester, Thomas Bilson, a good deal of the patristic record on the scapegoat is rehearsed and contested . The mystery of the expression “Azazel” is noted, the sages consulted, and the fathers weighed in the balance. Major theologies at stake in the “Descensus controversy” keep the rhetoric sober. That sermonizing genius calling the tune nearly everywhere else in English scapegoat interpretation here falls silent. The dispute begins with a sermon preached at Paul’s Cross in 1597 by the reverend Thomas Bilson, who refutes the opinion of “some conceited and too much addicted to nouelties,” who spare not “to vrge the suffering of the verie paines of hell in the soul of Christ on the crosse, as the chiefest part, and maine ground of our Redemption by Christ.”2 At this early moment in the 50 Chapter 5 debate Bilson is merely picking a fight with Calvin and his followers, who interpreted the descent into hell as Christ’s bearing in his soul God’s wrath against fallen humankind. What, precisely, does Calvin say? In places he merely repeats the metaphors of “satisfaction” for sin as “debt,” so that a number of commentators think he remains more or less within the ambit of Anselm’s thinking on the atonement; in others he writes of Christ having been judged and punished in the place of sinners, using forensic language to evoke the desperation of the human predicament before God and the legally substitutive character of Christ’s death. “The curse caused by our guilt was awaiting us at God’s heavenly judgment seat,” Calvin writes. “Accordingly, Scripture first relates Christ’s condemnation before Pontius Pilate . . . to teach us that the penalty to which we were subject had been imposed upon this righteous man.”3 Christ’s trial is important for its orderly disposition of the facts in the case, the significance of which then appears most plainly: To take away our condemnation, it was not enough for him to suffer any kind of death: to make satisfaction for our redemption a form of death had to be chosen in which he might free us both by transferring our condemnation to himself and by taking our guilt upon himself. If he had been murdered by thieves or slain in an insurrection by a raging mob, in such a death there would have been no evidence of satisfaction. But when he was arraigned before the judgment seat as a criminal, accused and pressed by testimony, and condemned by the mouth of the judge to die—we know by these proofs that he took the role of a guilty man and evildoer. Thus we shall behold the person of a sinner and evildoer represented in Christ, yet from his shining innocence it will at the same time be obvious that he was burdened with another’s sin rather than his own. He therefore suffered under Pontius Pilate, and by the governor’s official sentence was reckoned among criminals. Yet not so—for he was declared righteous by his judge at the same time, when Pilate affirmed that he “found no cause for complaint in him” [John 18:38]. This is our acquittal: the guilt that held us liable for punishment has been transferred to the head of the Son of God [Isa. 53:12]. We must, above all, remember this substitution, lest we tremble and remain anxious throughout life—as if God’s righteous vengeance, which the Son of God has taken upon himself, still hung over us.4 It is clear that Calvin, like Aquinas, reckons satisfaction in terms of actual punishment, and for this meaning the picture of Christ condemned to die The Damnation of Christ’s Soul 51 before a court of law is crucial. With a nearly theatrical deliberation Calvin shows us Christ in two aspects...

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