Tuesday, May 01, 2007

Christ Everywhere = Christ Nowhere

"What is sacrificed for the sake of this Christus praesens, as Calvin noticed long ago, is his specificity as a particular man. Christ everywhere really means Jesus of Nazareth nowhere. In the ascension he becomes [out of place] in the most literal sense: he is unnatural, absurd, for he has no place of his own. (Vague talk among modern theologians about 'a change of state, not of place' hardly alleviates that difficulty, however effective it may be in turning aside impolite inquiries as to Jesus' actual whereabouts.)" - Douglas Farrow, Ascension and Ecclesia

I will qualify this quote by saying that Farrow is not arguing against the doctrine of the ascension, far from it. Rather, he is arguing against a particular interpretation of what it means for Jesus to be ascended. How often do we associate (or confuse, as it were) the presence of the Holy Spirit in our lives with the presence of Christ? The reality of Jesus as a man should cause us to carefully consider how we understand Scripture's (namely Paul's) language of "Christ in you." As much as we talk about Christ's death and resurrection as a man, we often forget that He ascended as a man and remains a man even at the right hand of the Father. I'm looking foward to the rest of this book.

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