PMW 2026-063 Gerrit Scott Dawson

Gentry note:

The following is excerpted from Dawson’s excellent study: Gerrit Scott Dawson, Jesus Ascended: The Meaning of Christ’s Continuing Incarnation (Phillipsburg, N.J.: P & R, 2004), pp 146–47. I highly commend this book as a counter to hyper-preterism’s etherealizing Jesus resurrection body as he ascends into heaven. The continuing incarnation of Jesus (rather than a thirty-year incarnation) has also been held by orthodox Christians.

Dawson writes:

The balance required for properly loving the world as part of the mission for Christ without being co-opted by the world in its resistance to God has never been easy to maintain…. [As one example Dawson warns against “withdrawal from the world,” as follows:]

First, the church has always had a tendency to withdraw from this fallen, violent, broken world. Even after the resurrection, Peter and John went back to fishing until Jesus met them on the shore (John 21;3). Perhaps they thought the risen Jesus had simple departed, leaving them on their own. That would have been an ascension without any hope of return. But Jesus corrected their understanding as he gave them the mission of feeding his lambs (John 21:15), being his witnesses to all the earth (Acts 1:8) and making new disciples (Matt 28:18). In these descriptions of Jesus’ giving the disciples a mission to enact in the world, we also hear of promises he left them. The departing Jesus is he who said “I am with you always’ (Matthew 28:20), who assured the disciples that he would come again (John 12;22i–3) and of whom the angels said ‘This same Jesus who has been taken from you into heaven will come back in the same way you have seen him go into heaven’ (Acts 1:11). The absence and the presence are always maintained so that the church is sent into the world with hope.

What could cause Christ’s people, then, to justify a withdrawal from this world as they wait for his return? Farrow asserts that a spiritualizing of the ascension can have as one of its consequences a shrinking back from the material world into a spirituality of mind. This occurred particularly when the church was influenced by Gnosticism and its disdain for the body and the material world. For example, under such a spell, Origen… began to consider Jesus’ ascension as an ascension of the mind, in which he slipped off the body of flesh, making the incarnation merely a ‘drop-in’ affair and thus ‘limiting Christ’s bodily humanity to a brief soteriological phase.’ [1] We can see such spiritualizing even today, whether it is the extreme of the New Age psychologizing of the entire Jesus story or simply the picking and choosing of aspects of Jesus’ life and teaching that occurs in American hybrid spirituality….

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The neglect of what the ascension means has surely contributed to spiritualizing tendencies even in Evangelical quarters of the church. We simply do not think of Jesus still knit to our humanity, and so we think very little of what the reality means to how Jesus even now values this flesh of ours, these lives of our neighbours, this earth which we consume as yet one more disposable commodity. A weak view, therefore of the ascension in the flesh and the continuing incarnation of Christ can contribute to a spiritualizing of the Christian life, with an atomistic view of the church places such stress on individual spirituality that the inevitable result is an indifference to the needs and suffering of the world. Farrow laments, ‘The true Gnostic… denies all obligation to the world … [because] the spiritual person rises above the affairs of a world destined for destruction.”

Gentry concluding note:

On pp. 32-33 in his book Dawson well notes:  “Incredulity over  the ascension, because the account asserts it to be such a visible, outward event, exposes those who also doubt whether the entire Christian worldview could be true, because of its emphases on the goodness of creation and the importance of matter.”

And as Cornelius Van Til argued: Theology is a seamless garment. Once you start unraveling it in one place, the whole eventually becomes unraveled. Hyper-preterism involves enough errors just on its foundational, defining level (no future physical second coming, no future physical resurrection of the flesh, and no future final judgment at the end of history). But hyper-preterism does not stop there. Historic orthodox theology is naked and open before the eyes of the hyper-preterists bent on its destruction.

Note

1. On p. 32 Dawson points out that Origen (d 254) was anathematized in the sixth century for implying, among other things, that ‘after the resurrection the body of the Lord was ethereal.” Cited from “The Anathemas Against Origen” in The Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 2d. series, 14:10.

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