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. Continue reading
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