On Ascending to Heaven

Q. What do we mean when we say that he ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father?

A. We mean that Jesus took our human nature into heaven where he now reigns with the Father and intercedes for us.

The Ascension probably receives far less attention than it deserves. It is, after all, one of the Church’s principal feasts, a day that supersedes all other celebrations. It is an article of both the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds. It receives its own question and answer in the Catechism. And yet despite all these reasons why the Ascension, both as a doctrine and as a commemoration, should receive significant attention in the Christian life, it is almost forgotten by most—at the very least I think it would be relatively uncontroversial that it is the most neglected of The Episcopal Church’s principal feasts.

There is certainly a significant weirdness to the story of Jesus ascending, at least in the more extensive form in the book of Acts, of him gathering the apostles in front of him so he can get one last bit of teaching in before he seems to lift up off the ground and float higher and higher into the air until he disappears from sight, enveloped in a cloud. Even among the many stories in the Bible that strain credulity, this one seems outlandishly myth-like, a relic of a pre-scientific time. Indeed, the late Episcopal Bishop John Shelby Spong argued in an interview in the Toronto Star from 2007 that “A modern person knows that if you rise up off the Earth (as in the ascension), you don’t go to heaven. You go into orbit.” While I argued in an earlier post that the Virgin Birth probably occasions occasions more finger cross, even among otherwise orthodox modern Christians, when the creeds are recited, my guess is that’s more to do with how the Virgin Birth is wrapped up with sex. That particular affirmation chafes against not only modern scientific sensibilities, but, and likely more importantly, seemingly against our more hedonistic ones as well—at least insofar as the Virgin Birth is popularly presented as a condensation of the inherent sinfulness of sex.

But the Virgin Birth is not completely inconceivable even on contemporary naturalistic explanations—it is unlikely, improbable, incredible—but not incomprehensible. The Ascension, on the other hand, feels more like a category mistake, something that is only conceivable as possible in an outdated model of the physical universe. As Spong implies, the ancient audience would have understood Heaven as in or beyond the heavens, that Heaven was a place at the outer reaches of a spherical physical universe or the uppermost reaches of a three tiered physical universe. Insofar as we know, flat Earthers excepted, that the physical universe just isn’t set up that way, how can we possibly see the story in Luke and Acts as anything but a literary fabrication, a story, perhaps an innocent conjecture or perhaps an intentional falsehood, that ancient peoples (mistakenly) took literally but that at best can serve as a merely metaphoric or symbolic occasion for some theological truth. Moreover, does not the fact that this “event” appears only in one source, the Luke-Acts narrative (which, while two books in our Bible, is one continuous story by one author), make it an even more likely candidate for being a literary fabrication than even the Virgin Birth with its two source attestation, or the bodily resurrection, assumed throughout the New Testament? The Ascension, then, is a close New Testament analogue to the Genesis account(s) of creation, a story explaining some phenomenon that one could be excused for taking more or less literally in a prescientific world but which we now cannot take as a literal rendering of the underlying phenomenon described.

However, I think one can affirm the insight someone like Bishop Spong offered, namely that we know heaven is not “up there” and that Jesus wouldn’t have gotten there by just going up, without concluding that we must see the Ascension as merely offering theological fodder for a metaphorical overlay of what is essentially a closed naturalistic world. Looking back to Genesis, one can affirm a range of possible ways of interpreting phenomenon underlying the six days of creation. The base phenomenon that underlies this story seems to be something like “there is a world around us that came to be as it is today.” The Genesis account(s) could be read as an entirely metaphorical gloss on a world that in fact has no cause outside itself where “God” is merely a poetic description of a human projected sense of order or value. But one can just as easily read it as a symbolic (and, in the case of Genesis 1, likely liturgical) explanation for a robustly orthodox understanding of a radically transcendent, uncreated and very real (perhaps hyperreal), personal Ground of Being bringing everything that is not that Being into existence out of nothing. One can assume a similar range of realities lying behind the phenomenon “Jesus having been present bodily with his disciples in a way largely continuous with other human bodily presences and then this presence ending” described by the Luke-Acts narrative of the Ascension. One could say this was merely a metaphorical way of trying to deal with the change in presence that occurs with the complete cessation of life assumed in a closed naturalistic system as happening at death. But one could also say this is a literary description, reconstructed in the then-contemporary understanding of the architecture of the cosmos, of Jesus’ having been taken bodily (with his resurrected spiritual body) from this plane of existence to the plane of existence of the New Creation or Kingdom of God, something conceivable today as more akin to traveling to another dimension.

Being “modern scientific people” who cannot take the historicity of either Genesis or the Ascension in no way seems to necessitate, then, rejecting the larger convictions of historic orthodoxy as those like Spong assert. And in fact being such kinds of people does not get us off the hook for recognizing the real significance of the event underlying the Luke-Acts accounts (something that clearly seems assumed by all the New Testament; despite universally affirming the bodily resurrection, nowhere does the New Testament seem to affirm that Jesus continued to be present with believers in the way Matthew, Luke, and John describe him immediately after the resurrection event). The Ascension is not a commemoration with such significance merely because it is assumed to be a historical even in Jesus’ life. In fact both the creeds and our calendar of commemorations, especially principal ones, leave out far far more actual historical events in Jesus’ life than they include. The Ascension, the transitioning of Jesus from his discernibly and visibly human embodied form in this fallen state into a resurrected and glorified bodily form directly in God’s presence/Heaven, or in the New Creation, or the Kingdom of God, in a place that has been transformed, purified of the Sin and its distorting effects, is the culmination of Christ’s saving work. It demonstrates that in Christ, in sharing his resurrection life, we are offered a transformed form of existence that can itself be glorified and enter into the direct presence of God—which is, after all, our created end and purpose.

It is actually highly significant that Luke-Acts offers the only descriptive account of the Ascension (two accounts actually—one concluding Luke and, almost like a “last-time-on…” recap, again in the opening of Acts), because the Luke-Acts is the only source in the New Testament that gives a narrative description of the emergence and spread of the Church and sees it as an explicit extension and recapitulation of the earthly ministry of Jesus. The Ascension is the event that facilitates the birth of the Church, of followers of Jesus taking on the actuality of the ministerial and evangelical presence of Christ in the world. The Ascension makes space for sanctification in the Spirit, enabling the Church to represent Christ by re-presenting Christ through members being transubstantiated into Him.

In concluding this exploration, though, I do think it’s worth returning to the Luke-Acts description was merely a literary fiction—certainly I hope I’ve made the case that the Ascension can still function as a real event with real orthodox theological significance even if there wasn’t a time when Jesus went out to a field with his friends and float up into the sky. At the same time, I don’t think we have to rule out the possibility that Jesus’ conclusion of his immediate post-resurrection ministry happened more or less as Luke-Acts describes it. I don’t think we need to dwell on it too much, nor expect adherence to the strict historicity of Jesus going into a field to float away, as a test of adherence to the creeds (though I do think we need to affirm the Ascension in that Jesus literally, if analogically, did appear bodily after the resurrection and then stop appearing that way as he transitioned to being fully in the “space” and “time” of the New Creation), I don’t think we should expect people to reject it to be serious or intellectual about their faith, either. It seems eminently plausible that Christ would depart in a way that had pedagogical value for his followers. To go “up,” even if it meant a gradual “phasing” into another “dimension” rather than just floating to another tier of the same world, would have been understood by those first century disciples as Jesus going to the place in the direct and immediate presence of God, of going to Heaven. Just as we do not hold that one must fully inhabit the worldview of a first century person to learn from and be conformed to Christ, neither can we expect the opposite, that Christ’s first explicit followers should have had the model of the physical world available to a twenty-first century moderately well-educated American. Christ conformed his teaching, both in word and in act, to the context in which he taught—and even in this particular contextualizing, he still was able to communicate by this pedagogical act, if it did happen as Luke-Acts describes it, in a way that is still intelligible to us. Certainly, we know that Christ could not just just kept going up and up (a point that the story actually never says happened), but we can appreciate the point that he went to a “higher” form of reality. And we can do this all while affirming the literal significance of the Ascension without rejecting a modern scientific model of the universe.

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