This is the thirteenth follow-up to the post, “Gagarin and the Seven Heavens“. The first follow-up post (on Aphrahat) is here. The second follow-up post (on the cosmography involved in the Sinai narratives in the Hebrew Bible) is here. The third follow-up post (a long excerpt from Paul Tillich on divine omnipresence in a one-story universe vs. a three-story one) is here. The fourth follow-up post (on the ascent through the eight heavens in The Apocalypse of Abraham) is here.
The fifth follow-up post on Theodoret of Cyrus was broken up into several parts; follow-up post five-one is here, post five-two is here, post five-three is here, post five-four is here, post five-five is here, post five-six is here, and post five-seven is here.
Starting with the sixth follow-up post, I will focus (not indefinitely) on modern Protestant, then modern Catholic, then modern Orthodox interpretations either of the ascension of Jesus in Luke-Acts or of the nearly-identical articles from the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds that refer to Jesus’ ascension into heaven. I reserve the right to break this order.
First, Protestant responses. They are in no particular logical or chronological order, and encompass evangelical and Magisterial Protestants — though I start with Reformed and Evangelical authors who take a somewhat more “high view” of the Bible and biblical authority, and then move towards those Protestant thinkers and traditions that are wrestling in a more open and public way with Christian theology in the modern world. The sixth follow-up post (Dodds) is here, the seventh (Erickson) is here, the eighth (Grudem) is here, the ninth (Packer) is here, and the tenth (Polkinghorne) is here. The eleventh post (Jenson, 1) is here, and the twelfth post (Jenson 2) is here.
Into the Clarities 