Because the doctrine rests so heavily on a single, syntactically difficult verse in First Peter, its precise meaning has been debated within Christian theology for many centuries: some readings understand it as Christ proclaiming victory to righteous figures from the Hebrew Bible who died before his coming, others as an offer of a further chance at salvation to those who had died in disobedience, and still others connect the passage to a quite different context involving spirits associated with the flood narrative in Genesis, a reading with little direct connection to the events of Holy Saturday at all.
Some Protestant traditions, uncomfortable with the doctrinal weight placed on so contested a text, have reinterpreted or, in a minority of confessional statements, omitted the descent clause from their own versions of the creed, or have reinterpreted it as referring simply to Jesus's ordinary death and burial rather than to any further activity in the realm of the dead.
The observance is kept liturgically on Holy Saturday, the day between Good Friday and Easter Sunday, traditionally treated in much of Christian practice as a day of quiet waiting and, in Eastern tradition especially, as already anticipating the resurrection through the theological content of the descent itself, a transitional day whose liturgical character differs noticeably from the more clearly defined observances surrounding it.