Theology: A crucial question for the Church: "Where is Jesus now?"

Ascension and Ecclesia – On the Significance of the Doctrine of the Ascension for Ecclesiology and Christian Cosmology
By Douglas Farrow
Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1999
(356 pages, $34.00, paperback)

reviewed by S.N.D.

The next two books we review seek to lessen a deficiency in the Church that Douglas Farrow, quoting I Timothy 3:16, describes as follows:

…it is remarkable…how little mention the ascension gets these days. Once it was seen as the climax of the mystery of Christ:

He was made known in the flesh,
vindicated in the Spirit,
beheld by angels,
preached among the nations,
believed on in the world,
taken up in glory.

In Ascension and Ecclesia – On the Significance of the Doctrine of the Ascension for Ecclesiology and Christian Cosmology, the most significant study of the ascension in many years, Farrow seeks to restore the ascended Jesus to His rightful place in the Church’s thought, and consequently in her self-understanding and life.

In his first chapter, Farrow argues that the Church must have a correct understanding of the ascension to correctly understand herself and her central rite, the Lord’s Supper. For it is at His table that she rediscovers her humble role as the unworthy bride redeemed by the death of her Groom, who is resurrected and, by the power of the Spirit, is present in this holy meal, but who is also, very significantly, truly and physically absent, and for whose return, “in like manner as ye have seen him go into heaven,” she must wait patiently and sacrificially .

But as Farrow amply documents in subsequent chapters, the Church and her theologians have had a hard time remaining faithful to the physical nature of Jesus’ departure, His real absence, and His continuing presence (in His glorified physical body!) at the right hand of the Father. Over and over they have tended to spiritualize or psychologize His ascension, with recurring vague notions about His dispersed, universal, “cosmic” presence that deny in subtle ways His ascended humanity and particularity. “Christ everywhere really means Jesus of Nazareth nowhere,” writes Farrow. Jesus becomes “unnatural, absurd, for he has no place of his own.”

Adhering to the stupendous witness of the New Testament (especially of the Hebrews epistle) to Jesus’ ascension and heavenly session, Irenaeus, the Church’s first theologian, got “ascension in the flesh” basically right. Origen got it terribly wrong, teaching an “ascension of the mind.” Even Augustine had early difficulty with an ascension in the flesh and wavered for a while between Irenaeus and Origen. Eventually he sided with Irenaeus but took a crucial “backwards step.” Among the early Reformers, Calvin got the ascension very right but with a limited worldview. Luther, however, made a “fateful decision” for a doctrine of the omnipresence of Christ.

In later centuries, matters worsened. In the last century, Barth made an important turn toward a correct understanding but “does stop short of the full-fledged theology of ascension in the flesh.” Barth’s proponent T. F. Torrance comes much closer.

Does it matter much? Yes it does. Farrow clearly shows that down through the centuries, when the Church’s vision of her physically ascended and glorified Savior diminishes, she tends to become impatient of His real absence at His table, to forget His certain return, to aggrandize to herself significance and glory that belong to Him, and to ignore the link between the gift of His real presence at His table (conveyed by the Holy Spirit) and sacrificial service. In one of his concluding paragraphs, though he speaks about the universal Church, Farrow also speaks pointedly to individual believers.