Between Babel and Beast
(America and Empires in Biblical Perspective)

The Glory of Kings: A Festschrift for James B. Jordan

Fyodor Dostoevsky
(Christian Encounters Series)

Athanasius
(Foundations of Theological Exegesis and Christian Spirituality)

The Four: A Survey of the Gospels

Defending Constantine: The Twilight of an Empire and the Dawn of Christendom

From Behind the Veil: The Epistles of John

Deep Exegesis:The Mystery of Reading Scripture

Jane Austen
(A Biography)

Solomon Among the Postmoderns

The Baptized Body

1 & 2 Kings
Brazos Theological Commentary

The Promise Of His Appearing: An Exposition Of Second Peter

A Great Mystery: Fourteen Wedding Sermons

Deep Comedy: Trinity, Tragedy, And Hope In Western Literature

Miniatures & Morals: The Christian Novels of Jane Austen

The Priesthood of the Plebs: A Theology of Baptism

A Son To Me: An Exposition of 1 & 2 Samuel

Against Christianity

From Silence to Song: The Davidic Liturgical Revolution

Ascent to Love: A Guide to Dante's Divine Comedy

Blessed Are the Hungry: Meditations on the Lord's Supper

A House For My Name: A Survey of the Old Testament

Heroes of the City of Man: A Christian Guide to Select Ancient Literature

Brightest Heaven of Invention: A Christian Guide To Six Shakespeare Plays

Wise Words: Family Stories That Bring the Proverbs to Life

The Kingdom and the Power: Rediscovering the Centrality of the Church

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Theology - Christology Theology - Eschatology: Ascension where?

Douglas Farrow is making a career out of the ascension.  Not a bad thing to make a career of.  In his freshly published sequel to Ascension and Ecclesia: On the Significance of the Doctrine of the Ascension for Ecclesiology and Christian Cosmology, entitled simply Ascension Theology, Farrow defends the bodily ascension of the Risen Jesus of Nazareth as an essential doctrine of orthodoxy, against both ancient (Origen) and modern (Kant, Schleiermacher, Hegel) doubters.

Along the way, Farrow insists that, if the ascension is bodily, and if Jesus ascends with all His creaturehood intact, then the ascension must be to a place: “It in the resurrection Jesus is already transfigured and transformed . . . in the ascension he is also translated or relocated.  That is, he is taken up and placed by God he properly belongs, just as God once took Adam and put him in Eden.”  But where is said place?  The answer must be “stubbornly independent of any merely natural cosmology or anthropology,” but must just as stubbornly resist the Origenist temptation to mentalize and psychologize.

Where then?  Farrow suggests that eschatology answers: “the entry of which we are speaking does not entail admission to an already existing place but the creation of a new one.  . . . it entails the creation of a new time and place and mode of life, and that not ex nihilo . . . but ex vetere.”  It is “not somewhere in this world” nor “an ‘outside’ to which one escapes.”  Rather, “it exists by virtue of the transformation of reconstitution of this world in the Spirit.”  This “time and place which Jesus occupies are those in which, and by way of which, God’s sovereign act of recreation is extended through him to all times and places.”