On the Thirty-Nine Articles. Oliver O'Donovan

event. In the theology of the Pauline epistles it remains, more often than not, undifferentiated from the resurrection. The ascension, we must judge, does not stand over against the resurrection as the resurrection stands over against the crucifixion; it does not add a new element to the story which was not present before, but unfolds the implications of what is present already in the resurrection. Are we, then, to agree with Barth’s statement that ‘the empty tomb and the ascension are merely signs of the Easter event, just as the Virgin Birth is merely a sign of the nativity’?1 No. For, as Barth himself elsewhere wished to say, what the ascension shows us of the meaning of Christ’s triumph is distinct: it is the mark which defines one side of the resurrection, the elevation of Christ to the Father, and therefore stands in contrast to the landmark which defines the other side, the empty tomb. In between them, holding the two boundary-marks together into one triumphant happening, are the actual appearances of the risen Christ throughout the forty days.

      This raises the question of how we are to understand the ascension as an event. Can the statement, ‘he ascended into heaven’, stand alongside the statements, ‘he was crucified, died and was buried’ and, ‘on the third day he rose again’? However problematic the statement of the resurrection may seem to be, the problems posed by the ascension are of a much more fundamental kind. For ‘heaven’, ‘God’s throne’ and ‘the right hand of the Father’ are not places that can be mapped topographically within space. The verb ‘ascended’, like the verb ‘came down’ in the Creed, can refer to no form of spatial movement known to man.

      The conventional modern metaphysic, which is a popularized version of Kant’s, knows of only one other way to interpret these terms of place and movement, to which a phenomenal sense is so evidently inapplicable. It refers them to a realm of noumenal or mental reality. This idealist solution, which has proved popular among twentieth-century theologians, is the foundation for the suspicion, which has often been voiced against them, that they have in mind the conversion of Christian faith into a species of humanism. For whatever is not susceptible to location within our universe of space and time is assigned to Mind; but Mind turns out in the end either to be, or to be extremely like, the human mind, vested, for metaphysical purposes, in the robes of infinity. Classical Christianity knew of another possibility. Space and time are dimensions of our created universe; but God is not located within them, but beyond, as a craftsman is beyond the dimensions of what he has made. Modern idealism itself, of course, posits a kind of ‘beyond’; but it posits it on the basis of that experience of transcendence which the human mind can know in thinking. The classical solution was not so ready to absolutize the experience of thinking. Even when it used it as an analogue, it understood that it must still point yet further ‘beyond’, for the thinking mind, too, belonged in the here-and-now of creation. We shall not go wrong, then, in saying that the classical concept of transcendence was objective at points where the modern one is subjective.

      Even in speaking of the transcendence of space and time I have used a spatial term, ‘beyond’. In doing so I will not have been misunderstood; for when we use such terms in phrases of transcendence, ‘outside space and time’, ‘before time began’, or ‘above the highest heavens’, our context indicates clearly enough that it is not a spatial ‘outside’ or a temporal ‘before’, but a metaphysical one. Yet in thinking of transcendence we are forced to use these spatial and temporal analogues, because we are ourselves spatial and temporal creatures and cannot think apart from the dimensions in which we live. Our imaginations are visual. Indeed, it is a famous problem of philosophy that we cannot even think of time itself without thinking of it spatially, as a line, a circle, a flowing stream or something such. If we have difficulty in thinking even of time, in which we exist and which we experience immediately, without the aid of spatial images, it is not surprising that spatial images are necessary to help us think of what transcends space and time.

      Christians believe that God, in the person of his Son, has established communication between his being and our created space-time order. How else can we speak of this communication except as ‘coming’ and ‘going’, as ‘up’ and ‘down’? We say that Christ ‘came down from Heaven’ and ‘ascended into Heaven’, yet do not think of the incarnation and ascension as journeys through space from one location to another, like a journey between the earth and the moon. As Athanasius said wittily: ‘When Christ sat on the right hand of the Father, he did not put the Father on his left.’2