QUOTE : So, allow me a midrashic moment, a brief wondering; What if we understood Jesus "descending to the dead" not as going down to hell but as coming down to the unredeemed Earth? What if the realm of the dead wasn't the fiery underworld of our imaginations but rather this aching and weary planet? What if so many of us have been living in dread of hell, not recognizing that this world, with all its evidence of its "bondage to decay," as the Apostle Paul puts it in his letter to the Romans, is the very thing we've feared all along.