He ascended into heaven

The Text

The resurrected body of Jesus, having appeared to his disciples over the course of forty days, went up. Not metaphorically. The clause names a real movement of a real body — the same body that hung on a Roman cross, was sealed in a Roman tomb, ate broiled fish in the upper room — into a state and a place we cannot now reach. The ascension is, with the resurrection, one of the two events the church confesses that change the world’s geography. Christ is no longer bodily present on earth in the way he was for those forty days. He has ascended. Where he has gone is the doctrinal question this clause opens.

Translation Notes

Ascendit / anelthonta. Both Latin and Greek use ordinary verbs of vertical motion. Ascendere in Latin means simply “to climb, to go up”; anerchomai in Greek likewise. The creed does not use a specialized vocabulary of mystical or spiritual ascent. It describes an event in space-time terms that the disciples would have used of any motion upward. Acts 1:9 — “as they were watching, he was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight” — gives the visual: a real body, in real motion, disappearing into a real cloud.

Caelos / ouranous (plural). Both Latin and Greek read “heavens” in the plural, preserving the Hebrew idiom (šāmayim, plural in form) that the biblical writers inherited. The plural is not decorative. It carries the older cosmology of multiple heavens — the sky (where birds fly), the firmament (where the stars and planets move), and the heaven of heavens (the dwelling of God, beyond the visible). Paul, in 2 Corinthians 12:2, names a “third heaven” as the place where he was caught up in a vision. The schematization varies (some Jewish texts speak of seven heavens), but the underlying idea is that the heavens extend from the visible sky upward into the invisible dwelling of God, and that “heaven” in the most proper sense is the latter.

Heaven and sky. A small but important translation note. The Greek ouranos and Hebrew šāmayim do not distinguish between sky and heaven the way modern English does. When Acts 1:11 says the men of Galilee “looked into the sky,” and the angels say Jesus will return “in the same way you saw him go into heaven,” the Greek word is the same — ouranos. The ancient cosmology did not have our concept of “outer space” as a separate domain. The sky, the planets, the stars, and the heavenly throne were all part of the same continuum, ouranos. Modern readers should not assume that the clause is committing the church to a particular pre-modern cosmology; it is using the available cosmological vocabulary to describe an event whose theological substance does not depend on the cosmology.

Historical Context

The ascension narrative is told primarily in two New Testament texts. Luke 24:50–53 describes Jesus blessing his disciples and being carried up into heaven from Bethany. Acts 1:6–11 — by the same author — gives a fuller narrative: the forty days of post-resurrection appearances, the final commissioning, the cloud taking Jesus out of sight, the angels’ word that he will return in the same way he went. The Gospel of Mark’s longer ending (Mark 16:19) mentions the ascension briefly. The Pauline letters refer to the ascended Christ frequently (Eph. 1:20; 4:8–10; Phil. 2:9; Col. 3:1; 1 Tim. 3:16) but do not narrate the event.

The forty-day chronology in Acts 1 establishes a separation between resurrection and ascension that some early Christian traditions did not always make. The Gospel of John, in particular, can read as if the resurrection and ascension are one event in two aspects (cf. John 20:17, “do not hold me, for I have not yet ascended”). The Lukan / Acts chronology — resurrection, forty days of appearances, ascension, ten more days, Pentecost — became the standard pattern, and the Christian liturgical year is built around it: Easter, Ascension (forty days later), Pentecost (ten days after that).

The ascension was a confessed doctrine from the earliest period. The pre-creedal hymn in Philippians 2:9–11 — “God highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name above every name” — already presupposes the ascension as the public exaltation of the crucified. The Apostles’ Creed and Nicene Creed alike preserve the clause as essential.

The polemical context for the clause is, again, double.

Against Gnostic spiritualizing. Some Gnostic groups taught that the resurrection had effectively been the ascension — that the immaterial Christ had simply returned to the spiritual realm at the moment of death, and the post-resurrection appearances were spiritual visions rather than bodily encounters. The ascension as a separate event, of the resurrected body, refuses this. Jesus did not become bodiless at the cross or at the third day. He remained embodied; the body that ascended is the body that rose.

Against later kenotic confusions. The kenotic theologians of the 19th century (Gottfried Thomasius, Charles Gore) argued that the incarnation involved the Son emptying himself of divine attributes that he resumed at the ascension. The patristic tradition resisted this: the Son did not cease to be God in the incarnation, and the ascension is not the Son’s return to divinity. The ascension is the public exaltation of the human nature — Jesus’ embodied humanity — to the place that the divine Son had always shared with the Father.

Lines of Interpretation

Patristic

Tradition: Irenaeus, Against Heresies III.16–22; Athanasius, On the Incarnation §§ 25–32; Augustine, Sermons 261–265 (Ascension sermons)

The patristic reading insists on two simultaneous claims. First, the ascension is bodily: the same flesh that died and rose has ascended, and it now sits in the heavens at the right hand of the Father. Second, the ascension is representative: by taking human nature into the divine glory, the ascended Christ has opened the way for humanity itself to follow. Athanasius’s formula echoes here: what was not assumed was not healed — and the ascension is the public proof that the humanity assumed has been healed and exalted.

Augustine’s Ascension sermons (261–265) develop the second theme richly. Christ has not abandoned us by ascending; he has gone before us. Ipse remansit nobiscum cum ascendisset, nos cum eo iam in caelo sumus, cum nondum quod promittitur in carne nostra impletum est — “He remained with us even after his ascension, and we are already with him in heaven, even though what is promised has not yet been fulfilled in our flesh.” The ascended Christ is not absent; he is present in his church, and his church is, in him, already present in heaven.

Strengths

• Holds bodily realism and representative significance together
• The Augustinian formulation has shaped two thousand years of ascension preaching with unmatched depth

Weaknesses

• The patristic discussions of the location of the ascended body sometimes assumed a cosmology that the modern church can no longer share without translation
• Some patristic accounts of the heavenly geography went into speculative detail the New Testament itself does not warrant

Scholastic

Tradition: Aquinas, Summa Theologiae III, qq. 57–58

Aquinas treats the ascension in two questions: the ascension itself (q. 57) and the session at the Father’s right hand (q. 58, taken up in the next annotation). The fittingness arguments for the ascension (q. 57, art. 1) include that it was fitting Christ should ascend because his glorified body required a place fitting its dignity; that it was fitting he should ascend to prepare a place for those who follow him; that it was fitting he should ascend in order to send the Spirit, who could not come while Christ remained visibly present (John 16:7); and that it was fitting he should ascend in order to be high priest in the heavenly sanctuary (Heb. 4:14, 8:1, 9:24).

Strengths

• The integration of ascension and Pentecost (q. 57, art. 1, fourth reason) is one of the most theologically generative moves in the Summa
• Holds the priesthood theology of Hebrews together with the ascension narrative of Acts

Weaknesses

• The fittingness arguments, while powerful, are post hoc — they explain why what happened was right, not why it had to happen
• Aquinas’s reliance on a now-obsolete cosmology (the empyrean heaven, the location of the glorified body) needs translation

Lutheran

Tradition: Luther, On the Lord’s Supper (1528); Formula of Concord (1577), Article VII

The Lutheran tradition uses the ascension to defend the doctrine of Christ’s bodily presence in the Lord’s Supper. If Christ in his ascended body sits at the Father’s right hand, and if “the right hand of God” is everywhere (not a localized place), then the ascended body of Christ can be — and is — present in the Supper wherever the church gathers. This is the Lutheran doctrine of the ubiquity of Christ’s body, grounded in a strong reading of the communicatio idiomatum (the communication of properties between Christ’s two natures).

Strengths

• Refuses to let the ascension be read as Christ’s removal from us; the ascended Lord is more present, not less
• Provides a coherent eucharistic theology grounded in christology

Weaknesses

• The Lutheran ubiquity doctrine was sharply contested by the Reformed (Calvin in particular), who argued that it confuses the two natures
• The strongest forms of the communicatio idiomatum can be heard as collapsing the distinction between Christ’s humanity and divinity

Reformed — The extra Calvinisticum

Tradition: Calvin, Institutes II.13.4; IV.17.30; the Reformed scholastics (Turretin, Institutes of Elenctic Theology)

The Reformed tradition’s response to the Lutheran ubiquity doctrine is the famous extra Calvinisticum: while the divine Son is united to the human nature of Christ in the hypostatic union, the divine Son is not bounded by that human nature. The eternal Son is, in a sense, both fully in the man Jesus and fully sustaining the universe (sustinens omnia verbo virtutis suae, Heb. 1:3). The ascended body of Christ is locally present in heaven — it does not become ubiquitous — but the divine Son who is united to that body is everywhere, and is therefore really present to the believer in the Supper, even though the body itself is not locally on the table.

Strengths

• Preserves the integrity of Christ’s human nature, including its proper locality
• Maintains a strong eucharistic theology while respecting the distinction of natures

Weaknesses

• The extra Calvinisticum has been criticized as introducing a “second Logos” — the divine Son operating outside the incarnate flesh — that the patristic tradition would not have endorsed
• Reformed eucharistic theology has often been read as weaker than Lutheran on Christ’s real presence, though the better Reformed treatments do not deserve the reduction

Modern — Ascension and Ecclesia

Tradition: T. F. Torrance, Space, Time, and Resurrection (1976); Douglas Farrow, Ascension and Ecclesia (1999); Ascension Theology (2011)

Farrow’s Ascension and Ecclesia is the major recent ecumenical treatment of the ascension. Farrow argues that the modern church has under-emphasized the ascension — treating it as a footnote to the resurrection — and that this neglect has had serious consequences for ecclesiology and eschatology. If Christ is ascended — bodily, locally, somewhere — then the church on earth is constituted by the absence of its Lord even as it lives by his presence in Word, Spirit, and sacrament. The ascension creates the ecclesiological space in which the church exists as a sign of the kingdom rather than its consummation.

T. F. Torrance’s Space, Time, and Resurrection gives the careful theological-physics treatment: the ascension does not require us to imagine Jesus’ body somewhere up in the visible cosmos; it requires us to confess that there is a real place — beyond our space-time but related to it — where the embodied Christ now reigns.

Strengths

• Recovers a doctrine the modern church has often allowed to slip
• Addresses the theology-and-cosmology question directly and helpfully

Weaknesses

• Farrow’s ecclesiology has been criticized as overly Augustinian-Catholic for some Protestant readers
• Torrance’s “real place beyond space-time” is theologically careful but pastorally difficult to communicate

Wesleyan Voice

Wesley’s confession of the ascension is matter-of-fact and bodily. The Articles of Religion (1784), Article III, names the ascension explicitly: Christ “took again his body, with all things appertaining to the perfection of man’s nature, wherewith he ascended into heaven, and there sitteth until he return to judge all men at the last day.” The article is among the Restrictive Rules. The bodily ascension is settled Methodist doctrine.

Wesley does not develop the ascension as extensively in his sermons as he develops the cross, justification, or sanctification. He follows the patristic-Anglican tradition without elaborate philosophical apparatus. His Notes on Acts 1:9–11 — the locus classicus of the narrative — gloss the verses with bodily realism, refusing to spiritualize either the going up or the promise of return.

Where Wesley does press the ascension theologically is in his use of Hebrews to develop the heavenly priesthood of Christ. The ascended Christ is the great high priest who, having offered himself once for all on the cross, now intercedes for the believer in the heavenly sanctuary (Heb. 4:14–16; 7:25). This is the doctrinal grounding for Wesley’s strong language about Christ’s continual mediation — the believer comes to the Father always through the Son, and the ascended Son always intercedes for the believer. The ascension is not Christ’s departure; it is his enthronement as the eternal advocate of the church.

The practical Wesleyan posture: confess the bodily ascension; trust the heavenly priesthood; pray through the ascended Christ as the New Testament instructs; live in the confidence that the One who ascended is the One who returns.

Hymnody

The Wesleys’ hymnody on the ascension is rich, often weaving it with the resurrection as one movement of glorification.

“Hail the day that sees him rise” (Charles, 1739) is the great Wesleyan Ascension hymn. “Hail the day that sees him rise, / Alleluia! / To his throne above the skies; / Alleluia! / Christ, awhile to mortals given, / Alleluia! / Reascends his native heaven. / Alleluia!” Each stanza names a different facet — the conquest of the grave, the entry into heaven, the heavenly intercession, the believer’s hope.

“See the conqueror mounts in triumph” (Christopher Wordsworth, 1862) — not Wesleyan but widely sung in Methodist churches — develops the same conqueror-king theme.

“All hail the power of Jesus’ name” (Edward Perronet, 1779–1780) — a contemporary of the Wesleys and often associated with Methodist hymnody — gives the universal-Lordship dimension: “Crown him, ye martyrs of our God / Who from his altar call; / Extol the Stem of Jesse’s Rod, / And crown him Lord of all.”

The 1780 Collection’s sections on Easter and the gospel often roll resurrection and ascension together; the Wesleys did not always treat them as separate hymnic moments. The combined theological-hymnic act is the public exaltation of the crucified.

Pastoral and Liturgical Use

Some who watched the Apollo moon landings in 1969 remember the school assemblies, the wheeled-in televisions, the wonder of a human stepping onto another celestial body. Some have spent evenings in West Texas with telescopes, looking at the rings of Saturn, the moons of Jupiter, the Andromeda galaxy. The pictures from the Hubble and James Webb space telescopes show a universe more astonishing than any human imagination could have constructed. Space is real, and it is wonderful.

The ancients did not have our concept of space. They had the heavens — and the heavens included everything we mean by sky and space and more besides. The biblical writers, when they spoke of “heaven,” were not committing themselves to a particular astronomical theory. They were using the natural language of their world to point at the dwelling of God — which was not, for them, a place you could fly to with enough rocket fuel.

When the creed confesses He ascended into heaven, it is not asking us to imagine Jesus’ body somewhere out beyond Pluto, drifting through the Kuiper belt in glorified form. It is asking us to confess that the same bodily Christ who appeared to his disciples for forty days has been taken into a state and a place that is real, but not reachable by the methods that reach the moon. Heaven is not another planet. Heaven is not another solar system. Heaven is not a destination in our space-time at all. If God is the creator of heaven and earth — of all reality — then God is not one item within reality. The God in whom we live and move and have our being is the source of reality, and the place where Christ has gone is closer to God than it is to our cosmology.

This matters in a particular way. If a discovery were ever announced that the tomb of Jesus had been found — that someone had recovered the bones — the Christian faith would be falsified. The ascension is also that concrete. The body that rose from the tomb left the tomb empty; the body that ascended left the earth without leaving a corpse. The creed’s bodily realism cuts both ways: the body is real, and it is no longer here in the way that the bodies of other holy persons are here.

What does the ascension mean pastorally? Several things at once.

First: Christ is not absent. Augustine’s word holds. He remained with us even after his ascension, and we are with him in heaven, even though what is promised has not yet been fulfilled in our bodies. The ascended Christ is present to his church through the Spirit, the Word, the Eucharist, the company of the saints. He is not on a different planet; he is closer than he was, in a different way.

Second: Christ has gone ahead of us. The same humanity that he assumed at the conception has now been carried, in him, into the divine glory. The promise the ascension makes is that what has happened in the head will happen in the members. We will follow, in his body, where he has gone.

Third: the ascension makes the church the church. If Christ were still bodily present on earth in the way he was for forty days, the church would not need to exist as the body that bears his presence to the world. The Spirit could not have come (John 16:7); the Eucharist would be a memorial of a contemporary, not a participation in an absent-and-present Lord; the saints would not be necessary as the visible continuation of the Lord’s mission. The ascension creates the ecclesiological space in which the church lives.

Fourth: the ascension waits for the return. The angels’ word at Acts 1:11 is that he will come back in the same way he went. The clause about ascension and the clause about coming-to-judge are two halves of one eschatological reality. We confess the ascended Lord as the One who is returning. The waiting of Advent — for the first coming, and for the second — is the waiting of a church whose Lord has gone up and is coming back.

Further Reading

• Acts 1:1–11; Luke 24:50–53; Ephesians 1:20; 4:8–10; Philippians 2:9–11; Hebrews 4:14–16; 8:1–2; 9:24
• Irenaeus, Against Heresies III.16–22
• Tertullian, On the Resurrection of the Flesh
• Athanasius, On the Incarnation §§ 25–32
• Augustine, Sermons 261–265 (Ascension sermons); Tractates on John on the relevant passages
• Leo the Great, Sermons 73–74 (Ascension)
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae III, qq. 57–58
• Martin Luther, On the Lord’s Supper (1528); Formula of Concord (1577), Article VII
• John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion II.13.4; IV.17.30
• John Wesley, Explanatory Notes upon the New Testament on Acts 1:9–11; Hebrews 4–10
• The Articles of Religion of the United Methodist Church (1784), Article III
• Charles Wesley, “Hail the day that sees him rise” (1739)
• Edward Perronet, “All hail the power of Jesus’ name” (1779)
• A Collection of Hymns for the Use of the People Called Methodists (1780)
• T. F. Torrance, Space, Time, and Resurrection (Eerdmans, 1976)
• Douglas Farrow, Ascension and Ecclesia (T&T Clark, 1999); Ascension Theology (T&T Clark, 2011)
• Gerrit Scott Dawson, Jesus Ascended: The Meaning of Christ’s Continuing Incarnation (P&R, 2004) — careful Reformed-evangelical treatment
• Peter Atkins, Ascension Now (Liturgical, 2001) — Anglican pastoral treatment