Does the Creed mean that Jesus was the first astronaut? What happened at the Ascension was not that Jesus became a spaceman, but that his disciples were shown a sign.
As C.S. Lewis put it, “They saw first a short vertical movement and then a vague luminously (that is what ‘cloud’ presumably means…) and then nothing.”
At the time of the early church, many claimed that Christ ascended spiritually, leaving his physical body behind. In such doctrines, the body is believed to be evil; and Jesus himself wanted nothing to do with physical life in the world. It was against such teaching that the early Christians proclaimed a gospel of Christ’s bodily incarnation, bodily suffering, bodily death, bodily resurrection, and bodily ascension.
Without the ascension of Jesus, the gospel possesses no present power. When Jesus sat down at the right hand of God, he inaugurated a new age of hope founded upon his completed ministry.
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