Cyril of Alexandria on the Star-Studded Expanse of the Heavens, and on the Ascension of Jesus

This is the twenty-seventh follow-up entry to the post, “Gagarin and the Seven Heavens”.

The previous posts ranged across a number of authors at different times and places and religious affiliations, and were not organized well into any outline, so I ordered them; further, the follow-up posts were becoming so numerous, and the text block listing and briefly introducing them was so large, that they were soon going to take up more space than the posts themselves. Thus, I organized and listed them here.

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Norman Geisler on the Ascension of Jesus

This is the twenty-sixth follow-up post to Gagarin and the Seven Heavens. The evangelical Protestant apologist Norman Geisler died on the 1st of July, 2019. He was 86 years old. While he had a PhD in philosophy, he is not remembered for his contributions to that field, but applied his philosophical training to the defense of the school positions peculiar to the religious tribe of evangelical Protestant Christians — inerrantism of the Bible and such. I read him a little bit when I was nineteen, and promptly moved on to Pannenberg and Nietzsche. Most of Geisler strikes me as strangely preoccupied with something like sales — preconceiving the Bible to be a document that is divinely pristine and unerring (but confirming the historically specific tribal assumptions of evangelical Protestants), a document that is understood to be a foundation of truth, and vindicating it against anyone who would deny its normativity or trustworthiness (in the sense that Geisler wants it to be trustworthy). Recently, I recently came across his four-volume “Systematic Theology,” and wondered: what does he say about the ascension of Jesus? So I dug through it. Here is what I found.

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N. T. Wright on the Ascension of Jesus and Heaven

This is the twenty-fourth follow-up to the post, “Gagarin and the Seven Heavens“. Previously we focused on the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams. Here, we focus on an Anglican theologian from the more Evangelical side of the Anglican Church.

The previous follow-up posts were becoming so numerous —and the text block listing and introducing them was so large— that they were soon going to take up more space than the posts themselves. Thus, I organized and listed them here.

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Rowan Williams on the Ascension of Jesus

This is the twenty-third follow-up entry to the post, “Gagarin and the Seven Heavens”; here we look at a short entry on the ascension of Jesus by Rowan Williams (published in a theological dictionary), and some homilies by the same either touching on the ascension or else delivered on or about the Feast of the Ascension.

The previous posts ranged across a number of authors at different times and places and religious affiliations, and were not organized well into any outline, so I ordered them; further, the follow-up posts were becoming so numerous, and the text block listing and briefly introducing them was so large, that they were soon going to take up more space than the posts themselves. Thus, I organized and listed them here.

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Joseph Ratzinger (Emeritus Pope Benedict XVI), 1: on the Ascension of Jesus, and on Heaven — against Bultmann

This is the twentieth follow-up to the post, “Gagarin and the Seven Heavens“.

The previous posts were not organized well before, so I ordered them; further, they were becoming so numerous, and the text block listing and introducing them was so large, that they were soon going to take up more space than the posts themselves. Thus, I organized and listed them here.

Continue reading