Ascended in Glory

by Donald T. Williams

"Et ascendit in coelum"; "And he ascended into heaven." —The Nicene Creed

After being crucified, dead, and buried, and after rising on the third day according to the Scriptures, Jesus ascended into heaven.

Skeptics love to cite this affirmation as evidence that the early Christians believed in a three-story universe and hence were purveying myth, not history. But let's look at Acts 1 in the context of the canon of Scripture. Jesus was received by a cloud. Were the disciples projecting his trajectory away from the earth into outer space to a physical third storey of the universe? Was that really their understanding of what they saw?

Well, what if this "cloud" were not just a random stratus or cumulonimbus that just happened to be floating above the Mount of Olives? Remember the pillar of cloud that was the symbol of God's presence with Israel in the wilderness? The cloud on top of Mount Sinai? The cloud of the Shekinah that overshadowed the Tabernacle at its dedication? That appeared again at the dedication of the Temple? How about the cloud that three of the disciples had been enveloped by on the Mount of Transfiguration, out of which a Voice had proclaimed of Jesus, "This is my beloved Son"?

Jesus went back to the Father, back, in other words, to a visible symbol of the presence of God, back to where he had come from after completing his mission here on earth. If you read the Bible on its own terms, instead of importing other terms into it, the statement is not mythological; it is spiritual. Trying to figure out the astrophysics of the Ascension is an exercise in missing the point.

Donald T. Williams is Professor Emeritus of Toccoa Falls College. He stays permanently camped out on the borders between serious scholarship and pastoral ministry, between theology and literature, and between Narnia and Middle-Earth. He is the author of fourteen books, including Answers from Aslan: The Enduring Apologetics of C. S. Lewis (DeWard, 2023). He is a contributing editor of Touchstone.

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