Holy Saturday in Calvin’s Theology: Recovering a Forgotten Theme in Reformed Eschatology

Given the cottage-industry of research on John Calvin, it is surprising there are no substantial studies on his interpretation of Christ’s descent into hell despite the centrality of this theme in his thought. Some emerging studies have clarified that Calvin’s interpretation was not novel given his inherited tradition. However, it has not yet been clarified that Calvin primarily interpreted the descensus in relation to eschatological themes on soul-sleep, the intermediate state, and Holy Saturday. In this paper, I survey the eschatological context of Calvin’s descensus interpretation and show how this context was decisive for Calvin’s enduring opinion and included a robust theology of Holy Saturday. This eschatological evidence contradicts a widespread misunderstanding that Calvin reduced the descensus to a metaphor for the cross, which cannot be the case, since for Calvin the descensus refers to the soul of Christ and its relation to the state of souls after physical death.