Christ’s dead limb

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.