Robert Jenson On The Ascension
by Victor Lee Austin
from LF Spring 2022
Anyone who enjoyed conversations with Robert Jenson feels the inadequacy of writing a critique of even a small portion of his thought. In living conversation, I found Jens always about three steps ahead of me, and only upon reflection—and that sometimes long delayed—did I realize where he was going. Now that he is gone from us, we have only his written words, which perforce lack the dialectical nimbleness of ongoing conversation; they are simply marks on a page.
Although it is a hard judgment for me to make, nonetheless Jens’s written words seem blind to an important aspect of the doctrine of the Ascension. My heart suspects that I am simply failing to understand him; that if he were present, Jens would be able to enlighten me. Still, Jens is also well remembered for his love of vigorous disagreement. Emboldened by that recollection, I proceed.
Heaven—God’s Pad in Creation
A typical exposition of Jens’s views on the Ascension is given in a 1994 essay delightfully titled “Autobiographical Reflections on the Relation of Theology, Science, and Philosophy; or, You Wonder Where the Body Went.” Jens asserts that theology has “usually” considered that God needs to have a “place in his creation” and that that place is what is meant by “heaven.” He puts it in a formulation that he evidently enjoyed repeating: “Heaven is God’s pad within his creation.”
If heaven is God’s place in creation, where is that place? Jens notes the congeniality of the “ptolemaic mapping of the universe” to this question. He gives a sympathetic and subtle exposition of that mapping, pointing out that although the earth resides in the center of the concentric heavenly spheres, the earth is not the most important place in the universe. In fact, the further one moves outward from the earth, the more the heavenly spheres become “lighter and more glorious,” each having a higher “ontological dignity.” The outermost “shell,” as Jens calls the spheres, has “the highest ontological dignity,” and is—or was—a good place for Christians to locate God’s heaven. This is a “sophisticated and successful” resolution to the matter at hand: God gets a place that is ontologically quite different from the material earth, and yet at the same time it is a place that is within creation and thus reachable from the earth.
It also answers questions raised by the Resurrection and the Ascension. If Jesus is risen bodily, his risen body needs a place. That place is heaven. It provides a place for His body—for Him—to be between His resurrection appearances. And it is where His body remains when those appearances come to an end (which is, I believe, what Jens basically understands the Ascension to be—namely, the cessation of resurrection appearances).
Insofar as theology was wedded to an understanding of heaven as God’s place in the universe and of that place as being the outermost shell of the universe, the Copernican revolution, which made the universe homogeneous (without material or ontological gradients), struck a blow to the heart of that theology. There is no place for heaven in the Copernican universe, thus no place for the body of the risen Christ to be in the intervals between his comings to us.
At this point Jens notes that eucharistic theology already had the tools to deal with the problem posed by the Copernican understanding of the universe. To the question of how the risen body of Christ comes to be “present on the eucharistic altar,” he notes the point made by Aquinas, that Christ does not become eucharistically present by means of spatial transportation. This point would rule out moving from heaven, the outermost sphere of the universe, to an altar on Earth. Instead, medieval theology held that the eucharistic reality was “supernatural,” that is, Christ “simply is both in heaven and on the altar.” The guarantee of this was taken to be implicit in the authorization of the church’s ministry.
The Reformers rejected the ministerial claims, and either “denied the eucharistic bodily presence” or, with Luther, “denied the traditional understanding of heaven.” For Luther et al., heaven just is “the places of Jesus’s sacramental presence to us.” This is in effect a denial that heaven “is a ‘place’ strictly speaking at all.” And thus there could be no problem posed by Copernicus.
Further developing this line of thought, Jens asks whether theology might dispense altogether with the notion of heaven. He is tempted “to say that the space occupied by the bread and cup, and by the space-occupying aspects of the church’s sacraments and sacramental life generally, is God’s pad in his creation.” Such a move “would redefine heaven christologically,” meaning the Creator is never present to creatures apart from Jesus Christ; and that “the church was constitutive for the reality of creation: if no church then no big bang.” In general, Jens opposes any disentangling of theology from philosophy, science, metaphysics, and so on.
Heaven—the Future toward Which God Aims
When the first volume of Jens’s Systematic Theology appeared in 1997, the index lacked any referent to the Ascension, although the chapter on the Resurrection included the moves we have already seen, albeit in more intense theological prose. Here as before, Jens speaks of heaven as “the created place for the presence of God,” yet he prefaces that with a different way of putting it—namely, that heaven “is the created future’s presence to God.” Just as the triune God has a future which is particularly associated with the Holy Spirit, so the created world has a future, often envisioned by humans under the influence of that Spirit: an apocalyptic reality that is present to God and which could be called heaven. Jens describes this move more plainly in his late-in-life Princeton lectures: “Heaven is that future toward which God aims, the kingdom of God.” Whither then has Jesus ascended? Into the future—God’s future. The “where” becomes simultaneously a “when.”
In his systematics, Jens continues with the “where” question. The resurrection is claimed to be bodily; bodies need spaces; thus where does the ascended body go? The Ptolemaic universe’s outermost, “least earthly” sphere was no longer available for Christian appropriation as “made and reserved by God for his own place within his creation.” Copernicus seems to have given us a universe in which there could be no place for Jesus to go. Rather than abandon the teaching (and assert a merely spiritual ascension, whatever it might mean for a spirit to ascend), Jens points out that the church since the latter years of the first millennium had held that the body of Christ came to be present “on the altar of Eucharist,” and that it did so without “spatial motion” which would mean without traveling from the outermost Ptolemaic sphere.
Exploring how Christ’s body could do so, Jens turns in his systematics to arguments developed by such Lutherans as Johannes Brenz. Heaven is not “spatially related to other parts of the created universe. . . . Christ does not need to get from heaven to the earthly churches.” Jens seems to concede theological difficulties in the way this school sets forth its profound insights, so he goes back to St. Paul. “Christ’s body” seems to need “no spatial heaven and is not restricted in its presence by created spatial distance.” If these claims that follow from the resurrection narratives of the Bible are true, then where is it? Paul, “who taught us that Christ’s risen home is the heaven of the apocalypses,” never refers to Christ’s body except as “the Eucharist’s loaf and cup and the church assembled around them.” And what this means is given by unpacking the notion of a body as the availability of persons to other persons and to themselves. Heaven, at the end of this line of thought, “is where God takes space in his creation to be present to the whole of it; he does that in the church.”
The Ascension and the Heavenly Session
In the following decade, Jens’s contribution to a Festschrift for his friend Wallace Alston continued to address the Ascension along these familiar lines. Pressed, it seems, by Douglas Farrow’s work on the Ascension, Jens now interprets the Ascension through its connection to the Session—Jesus’s sitting at and ruling from the right hand of the Father. In order “to be there he must somehow have gotten there. . . . the Ascension [is] the precondition of the Session, and the Session the point of the Ascension.”
The Ptolemaic universe is again described, showing its “plausible . . . cosmic topography” in which the outermost sphere of the universe could be taken as God’s “pied à terre with his creatures.” Copernicus’s universe subsequently deprived theology of any such place. In addition, the Scriptures raise the question of where Jesus was between His resurrection appearances; it won’t work to suppose that He was simply “dwell[ing] on earth until the Ascension,” for he “strangely appears to and disappears” from the disciples’ sight. Yet if he “appeared from and withdrew to heaven” there is no scriptural suggestion that he needed movement up or down.
This time through, Jens brings up the notion of heaven as “a realm, as Calvin put it, altogether ‘outside the universe,’” into which the Ascension would be “a purely metaphysical journey.” Jens judges this move unsatisfactory. If the view that he says most Protestant theologians hold is true—the view that the risen Christ is outside the universe—then Christ must be “detach[ed]” from space. If so, there seems to be no sense in affirming a bodily resurrection, for a body “must have its space.” As before, Jens bemoans that this line of thought leads commonly to a view of the risen Christ (and thus the ascended Christ) as a merely spiritual being. “In any case, putting heaven outside our universe seems to undo the biblical notion of heaven,” Jens goes on—we note the definite article on “biblical notion of heaven”—which is to “locate God in it with respect to us.” Heaven is in Scripture “always a region to the boundary of which we in our universe can point.”
Then, initiating a line of thought new to this essay, Jens expounds the “ancient theological maxim” that “God is his own space” thus: “However creation may be spatially structured, the space that God is and the space he creates differ as Creator and creature, and so do not themselves overlap.” He introduces this claim in order to make sense of “the right hand of God the Father Almighty,” the place of Jesus’s Session.
That creedal Almighty points to the creation “on which he [Christ, at the right hand] may exercise his might”; thus, heaven “is wherever Christ is when the Father works through him on creatures.” Jens then invokes God’s simplicity—His work and His presence can be “distinguished only for our apprehension”—to conclude “that heaven is where God is when he sets out to come to us.” The argument here turns to scriptural passages that center on Sinai, the Temple, or the appearance of an angel of the Lord, to see God’s movement to us as being both a movement to creation and within creation. The places in the world from which God’s movement begins are heaven; and once again the argument moves to the church and its sacraments. Yet at the end of this section, Jens concedes the lack of any “knockdown argument” on this point. “Reformed and Lutheran versions of Reformation have from their beginning been divided about the Ascension” on account of “two apparently incompatible general construals of reality.”
The essay concludes with observations on the importance of the Ascension. It is threefold, Jens asserts. First, it means that Jesus’s disciples can continue to talk with and rely on Him as before, but with a difference: To address Jesus as “Lord” when He is in heaven means He is “Lord of all.” “The risen Lord’s universal lordship, his rule from God’s place, is an inner consequence of his Resurrection.” Second, the move into heaven “must be an ‘ascension’ because it is a bodily risen human person who enters heaven from earth.” Third, from “the right hand of the Father, the man Jesus of Nazareth rules all things.” Each of these claims is problematic in the world’s eyes—the last one is frankly scandalous—and yet they are proper consequences of Christian thinking. Which is to say—and here I fully agree with Jens—they are true.
Jenson’s Reading of Ptolemy
In critique, I begin by saying that I think Jens has Ptolemy wrong. Now it may be that there were “ptolemaic” understandings of reality that were divorced from Ptolemy’s own thought; this transfer often happens in the history of ideas. And it may be that Jens does not mean to investigate Ptolemy’s own thought. Nonetheless, had he done so, he would have found that Ptolemy’s understanding is that stuff that changes and moves about and gets born and dies, stuff like rocks and water and plants and all the rest, exists only in the sublunar sphere. From the moon (the closest heavenly thing to the earth) out to the farthest heaven, the situation is fundamentally different. The Ptolemaic universe is not one of physical and ontological gradation; it is rather radically bifurcated.
Beyond it all is God: perfect and unchanging. “Heavenly beings,” from the moon to the stars, are like God in that they move in perfect (i.e., uniform and circular) motion; they are “eternal and impassible,” i.e., unchanging, while being at the same time (and in this unlike God) “sensible” in that we can see them. Their motion is circular but in a really quite complex way, a combination of circles imposed one upon another, discoverable only through reflection following upon careful observation and mathematical study. For instance, the stars move in a sphere around the earth every day. In addition, the planets, the sun, and the moon have a superimposed motion in the opposite direction along a different axis.
The point is: none of these objects is what we would call physical; there is not a sort of gradual movement away from matter and towards higher ontological density as you move further from the earth. There are the compound bodies that have matter and form (below the sphere of the moon, which is the heavenly sphere closest to the earth); and then there are heavenly bodies, which are purely simple. For vivid instance, we may just look at the drawings of Venus’ epicycle. Venus, like all the planets, does not move in a simple circle around the earth. Rather, it moves on a circle (the epicycle) whose center moves around the earth. In the case of Venus, the epicycle is nearly as big as the first circle. Were Venus in any sense material, it would be whiplashing violently on a cosmic roller-coaster ride, its greatest distance from earth being about ten times its closest approach. Ptolemy’s mathematical discoveries raise no practical problems precisely because his Venus does not have what we would call mass.
To bring the point home: To think of Jesus ascending in Ptolemy’s world would be to think of matter—Jesus body—going to a “place” where matter had never gone before. It would be hardly less of a stretch than to think of the Ascension as a movement from creation to creator.
Jenson on the Distinction between Creator and Creature
Second, I wonder whether Jens is radical enough in his distinction between creator and creature. He wants to push “the” biblical understanding of heaven as a place for God within creation; he sees this conception as necessary for God to relate to his creation.
I agree strongly with Jens that God has desired from the beginning to be in His creation and ultimately to be one with us. When that line of thought is drawn by such thinkers as Herbert McCabe, they emphasize that it is wrong to think of the creator as either inside or outside the creation, because to do so is to make the creator into a thing that can be placed alongside other things. God as creator is more mysterious than that. When Jens argues that God is His own space and that the space of the creator and the created space of creatures do not overlap, I want to add, “Neither do they not overlap.” Overlapping is what creatures might do; we have no way to understand what it might mean in terms of God in Himself.
Thus it seems to me the Ascension does not require that there be a space for Jesus’s body to go to. Rather, it is a doctrine about the mystery of God: that when He ascended, Jesus took matter, His own flesh and blood, into the being of God. This assertion cannot be grasped by any metaphysics, since metaphysics always has one foot in physics, in things that can change and be harmed and come into existence and so forth. But to lift a Jensonian question, so what if we cannot reconcile the Ascension to a distinction of that-which-is-created from that-which-is-the-creator? To recognize a mystery here means we are faced with something beyond human and creaturely understanding. It doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. I suppose at this point I am merely choosing differently among incompatible “general construals of reality.” So be it.
The Rule of the Ascended Jesus
Finally, the absence of political conceptuality in Jens’s understanding of the Ascension must be noted. Oliver O’Donovan—whose thinking is taken up by Douglas Farrow’s work on the Ascension—draws our attention to Jesus’s reign at the right hand of the Father. O’Donovan makes this reign contemporary: Jesus is the ruler of the universe now, a rule that is experienced directly in the church, indirectly in our civil orders. Because of the Ascension, as Farrow puts it, “the rulers of this world have been deprived of any claim to direct authority or to immediate power to rule. What is left to them is merely the vocation of rendering service to a provisional (and for that reason, if no other, a merciful) form of justice, while the reappearance of the one true Ruler and Judge is awaited.” Farrow says that Christ’s Session can be likened “to a period of transitional government.” When the church takes this claim seriously, it may resist injustices and “stand its own ground in the face of persecution.” “The church knows its King, and knows him to be the King of kings.”
By contrast, there is little political conceptuality at work in Jens’s account of the Ascension. Jesus, ruling all things at the right hand of God, is the one through whom the Father “works” on “creatures.” This is true as far as it goes, but lacks robustness. The Ascension is about a king taking his throne. No one can do everything, but still I miss this point, which seems to me fundamental, in Jens’s thought on the Ascension.
Conclusion
What to say in conclusion? Only that should the present author be granted grace to enter the heavenly realms (whether they be a “pad” in creation or not!), he looks forward to renewal of conversation with, and further enlightenment from, the servant of God Robert Jenson.
Victor Lee Austin is theologian-in-residence for the Episcopal Diocese of Dallas
NOTE
[1] For the full list of notes please see the upcoming spring 2022 issue or email us and we will provide them.
