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Christ’s dead limb
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 April 2025
Abstract
Is Christ hypostatically united to his human nature during Holy Saturday? If so, how, given that he is (in effect) an object whose parts are in different ‘places’? In this article, I argue that God the Son does indeed remain hypostatically united to his human nature during Holy Saturday and that this is salvifically salient. One way to construe this ongoing union through somatic death is by means of the analogy of a ‘dead limb’ – Christ’s human body being that limb. I set out several ways of making sense of this claim consistent with a broadly orthodox account of the hypostatic union as a contribution to the theology of Holy Saturday and the intermediate state more broadly.
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- © The Author(s), 2025. Published by Cambridge University Press
References
1 Peter Lombard, The Sentences, Book 3: On the Incarnation of the Word, trans. Guilio Silano (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 2008), 3.22.2 (71), p. 95.
2 Standard biblical references used to support the doctrine include Acts 2:24, Eph. 4:9, and 1 Pet. 3:19. The dogmatic basis for the doctrine is, of course, the clause in the Apostles’ Creed which reads ‘descendit ad inferos, tertia die resurrexit a mortuis’ (‘he descended to the dead, [and] rose again on the third day’). One of the most accessible recent overviews of the history and development of the doctrine can be found in Preston McDaniel Hill and Catherine Ella Laufer, ‘Jesus’ Descent into Hell’, in Brendan N. Wolfe et al. (eds.), St Andrews Encyclopaedia of Theology, https://www.saet.ac.uk/Christianity/JesusDescentintoHell. A thorough recent treatment of the doctrine in Roman Catholicism can be found in Alyssa Lyra Pitstick, Light in Darkness: Hans Urs von Balthasar and the Catholic Doctrine of Christ’s Descent into Hell (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2007). The doctrine is not merely the preserve of Roman Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, or high church Anglicanism, however. For a recent evangelical retrieval of the doctrine, see Matthew Y. Emerson, ‘He Descended to the Dead’: An Evangelical Theology of Holy Saturday (Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2019).
3 I will not enter into the question of whether the resurrected human body is numerically the same as the body that dies. On the face of it, the Pauline notion of a spirit-powered resurrection body (soma pneumatikon) in 1 Corinthians 15 suggests something very different from our current terrestrial bodies. But his account is more indicative than definitive.
4 As the Catechism of the Catholic Church puts it, ‘Christ went down into the depths of death so that ‘the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God, and those who hear will live’.| Jesus, ‘the Author of life’, by dying destroyed ‘him who has the power of death, that is, the devil, and [delivered] all those who through fear of death were subject to lifelong bondage’. Henceforth the risen Christ holds ‘the keys of Death and Hades’, so that ‘at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth’. Catechism of the Catholic Church, §635; https://www.vatican.va/archive/ENG0015/__P1R.HTM. There is some dispute about this in Reformed theology, but it seems to me that the atonement is not complete until Christ is resurrected. For discussion of the variety of views found in the theologians of the magisterial Reformation, see Joe Mock, ‘The Reformers and the Descendit Clause’, Westminster Theological Journal 83 (2021), pp. 275–97.
5 According to the ecumenical principle of the inseparable operations of the Trinity ad extra, the work of salvation is also traditionally thought to be the work of the whole Trinity, not just of God the Son (though according to the doctrine of appropriations a given divine work may be said to terminate upon a given divine person). Though this is an important consideration, our focus here is on the incarnation and the divine person who becomes incarnate. For more on the inseparable operations principle, see Oliver D. Crisp, The Word Enfleshed: Exploring the Person and Work of Christ (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2016), and Adonis Vidu, The Same God Who Works All Things: Inseparable Operations in Trinitarian Theology (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2021).
6 Lombard, The Sentences, Book 3, 3.22.2 (71), pp. 94–5.
7 As is well known, Karl Barth has a very different ‘take’ on death and resurrection, including the death of Christ. But his views are a) difficult to make sense of as a whole, and b) eccentric as far as the history of the topic in Christian theology is concerned. Though fascinating, I cannot deal here with his position, laid out in §46 of his Church Dogmatics. For recent discussion of his views see Marc Cortez, Embodied Souls, Ensouled Bodies (London: T&T Clark, 2008); idem, ‘Physicalism, the Incarnation, and Holy Saturday: A Conversation with Karl Barth’, in R. Keith Loftin and Joshua. R. Farris (eds.), Christian Physicalism? Philosophical Theological Criticisms (London: Lexington Books, 2018), pp. 137–52; and David Lauber, Barth on the Descent into Hell: God, Atonement, and the Christian Life (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004).
8 Note that the materialism in view here is a local materialism. That is, it is a materialism about human persons. I presume that the default position in the Christian tradition is substance dualism when it comes to a global picture of what there is, for Christians have traditionally believed that God is a spirit (John 4:24) and that there are created spirits, too (e.g., angels).
9 I will refer to ‘materialist’ views rather than ‘physicalist’ views in what follows, though the two terms are often used interchangeably. My reason for doing so is that in Christian theology there have been divines who have held that there are physical objects, but that these objects are not composed of matter. Clear examples of such a view can be found in the work of early modern idealists like Bishop George Berkeley and Jonathan Edwards. For a treatment of the incarnation from a Berkeleyian perspective, see Marc A. Hight and Joshua Bohannon, ‘The Son More Visible: Immaterialism and the Incarnation’, Modern Theology 26/1 (2010), pp. 120–48.
10 For discussion of the issues sketched here, see Oliver D. Crisp, Divinity and Humanity: The Incarnate Reconsidered (Cambridge: CUP, 2007); idem, The Word Enfleshed; Tim Pawl, In Defense of Conciliar Christology: A Philosophical Essay (Oxford: OUP, 2020), ch. 1; and the essays collected in Anna Marmadoro and Jonathan Hill (eds.), The Metaphysics of the Incarnation (Oxford: OUP, 2011).
11 At least, that is the story typical in Christian theology. I suppose that one could hold that souls cannot exist as separable substances apart from their bodies, as Aristotle and (perhaps) Barth seem to have thought. But that has not been a typical view in historic Christianity.
12 I will say something about hylomorphist views later in this essay, given that they are a complication to the picture being sketched here.
13 I am presuming that more than one metaphysical option about human personal ontology is plausible. That is a somewhat controversial assumption, but it seems to me that these matters are sufficiently mysterious that it is safer to maximise the options than to reduce them. Such a methodological desideratum appears even more prudent when we add in the complications attending Christology.
14 See, e.g., John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, 2 vols., ed. John T. McNeill, trans. Ford Lewis Battles (Philadelphia, PA: Westminster Press 1960 [1559]), 2.16. 8–12. See also Preston McDaniel Hill, ‘Feeling Forsaken: Christ’s Descent into Hell in the Theology of John Calvin (PhD Thesis, University of St Andrews, 2021); https://research-repository.st-andrews.ac.uk/handle/10023/23552.
15 That said, there is a resurgence of work on substance dualisms of various stripes, including defences of a substance dualist account of personal ontology relevant to our concerns here. See, e.g., the essays in Loftin and Farris (eds.), Christian Physicalism? Recent defences of substance dualism by Christian philosophers include Brandon Rickabaugh and J. P. Moreland, The Substance of Consciousness: A Comprehensive Defence of Contemporary Substance Dualism (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Blackwell, 2023); and Richard Swinburne, Mind, Brain, and Free Will (Oxford: OUP, 2013).
16 The Chalcedonian ‘definition’ of the person of Christ puts it like this: ‘We, then, following the holy Fathers … confess one and the same Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, the same perfect in Godhead and also perfect in manhood; truly God and truly man, of a reasonable [rational] soul and body’. The Greek phrase for ‘reasonable soul’ is psychēs logikēs, which was added to the statement in order to block the teaching of Apollinaris, who taught that God the Son took the place of a rational soul in Christ, who possessed only a human body (sōma) and animal soul (psychē alogos). For the Greek text and a (Victorian) English translation and critical apparatus, see Phillip Schaff (ed.), The Creeds of Christendom, Vol. II (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1877), pp. 63–5.
17 For discussion of this point in relation to three live options in Christian materialism, see Jason McMartin, ‘Holy Saturday and Christian Theological Anthropology’, in Loftin and Farris (eds.), Christian Physicalism?, pp. 117–36.
18 Richard Swinburne, The Christian God (Oxford: OUP, 1994), ch. 9.
19 Ibid., pp. 196–7. For a rather different account of patristic personal ontology, see Paul Gavrilyuk, ‘The Incorporeality of the Soul in Patristic Thought’ in Farris and Loftin (eds.), Christian Physicalism?, pp. 1–26.
20 See Oliver D. Crisp, God Incarnate: Explorations in Christology (London: T&T Clark, 2009), ch. 7.
21 For references to these different views in the Thomist literature, see Thomas Atkinson, ‘Christian Physicalism: Against the Medieval Divines’, in Loftin and Farris (eds.), Christian Physicalism?, pp. 27–42.
22 For a view of Christian hylomorphism similar to that outlined here, see Eleonore Stump, Aquinas (London: Routledge, 2003), ch. 6.
23 One consequence of this view that seems very strange to me is that at one moment a human person is identical with a material object, and at another moment that same person is identical with an immaterial object. It is difficult to understand how one and the same thing can undergo such a radical change over time.