Chapter 26

The Ascension and the Permanent Incarnation

Christ Remains God and Man Forever

Introduction

Right now, as you read these words, there is a man in heaven. Not a memory of a man. Not the idea of a man. A real human being — with a real human body and a real human soul — is seated at the right hand of the Father. His name is Jesus of Nazareth. The same Jesus who walked the dusty roads of Galilee, who wept at Lazarus's tomb, who bled and died on a Roman cross, is alive and human in the presence of God. And He always will be.

This is one of the most stunning claims in Christian theology, and I think we often miss just how remarkable it is. The Incarnation was not a costume the Son of God put on for thirty-three years and then took off when the work was done. It was not a temporary arrangement that ended at the cross, or even at the resurrection. The Son of God became human, and He stayed human. He is human now. He will be human a thousand years from now. He will be human ten thousand ages into eternity.¹

In this chapter I want to argue that this glorious truth — the permanent incarnation of the Son — creates serious problems for any physicalist account of Christ's human nature. If a human being is nothing but a physical organism, then we have to ask some hard questions about what exactly is going on at the right hand of the Father. Where is Christ's body? How does a physical organism exist in the divine presence? What does it mean for a purely physical being to be permanently united to the eternal Son? On a body-soul dualism — where Christ has a glorified body united to a genuine human soul — the doctrine of the permanent incarnation makes coherent sense. On physicalism, it strains to the point of breaking.

The Bodily Ascension: Acts 1:9–11

Let's begin with the event itself. Forty days after the resurrection, Jesus gathered His disciples on a hillside near Jerusalem and was visibly taken up into heaven. Luke describes the scene with great care:

And when he had said these things, as they were looking on, he was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight. And while they were gazing into heaven as he went, behold, two men stood by them in white robes, and said, "Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking into heaven? This Jesus, who was taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven." (Acts 1:9–11, ESV)

Two details in the Greek deserve a closer look. First, "he was lifted up" translates epērthē (ἐπήρθη) — a passive verb, meaning He was the one being raised. The action belongs to the Father; Jesus does not levitate by His own initiative but is exalted by the Father's hand. Second, the "cloud" (nephelē, νεφέλη) is not weather. Throughout the Bible, the cloud is the visible sign of God's glorious presence — the cloud of the Exodus (Exodus 13:21), the cloud at Sinai (Exodus 19:16), the cloud filling the temple (1 Kings 8:10), the cloud at the Transfiguration (Matthew 17:5). When the cloud receives Jesus, He is being received into the divine presence as a man.²

Notice what the angels say: "This Jesus . . . will come in the same way as you saw him go." The same Jesus. Bodily ascended. Bodily returning. The man who left will be the man who comes back. This is not a spiritualized parting in which Jesus's "earthly form" dissolves while His "heavenly self" carries on. The disciples watched a real human being rise up into the sky, and the angels promise that a real human being will descend from the sky one day to judge the living and the dead.³

This matters enormously for our argument. The ascension is a bodily event. Whatever we say about Christ's continuing humanity, we must say it about a real, embodied human being. He did not leave His humanity behind on Easter morning. He carried it with Him into heaven.

The Permanent Incarnation: 1 Timothy 2:5 and Hebrews 7:24–25

Two passages in the Pastoral and Hebrews letters anchor the doctrine that Christ is still human, even now, and will be forever. The first is one of the most beautiful sentences in the New Testament:

For there is one God, and there is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus, who gave himself as a ransom for all. (1 Timothy 2:5–6a, ESV)

Read that carefully. Paul does not say "there was one mediator." He says there is one mediator, and that mediator is "the man (anthrōpos, ἄνθρωπος) Christ Jesus." Right now, today, in heaven, there is a man mediating between God and humanity. The present tense is not casual. It is the heart of the verse. As the great Reformed theologian J. I. Packer put it, drawing on this very passage, the Son became incarnate to be "the man Christ Jesus" forever — prophet, priest, and king for His people in a relationship that "would not end."⁴

The second passage drives the point home with even more force:

but he holds his priesthood permanently, because he continues forever. Consequently, he is able to save to the uttermost those who draw near to God through him, since he always lives to make intercession for them. (Hebrews 7:24–25, ESV)

The word translated "permanently" here is aparabaton (ἀπαράβατον), which carries the sense of "non-transferable" or "unchangeable." Christ's priesthood is not a contract that can be re-assigned. He holds it Himself, in His own person, because He continues forever. And the priesthood is a human office. A priest must be "taken from among men" (Hebrews 5:1). When Hebrews tells us that Christ holds His priesthood permanently because He continues forever, the writer is saying that Christ continues forever as a human priest. The man who offered Himself once for all on the cross is the same man who is now interceding for us at the Father's right hand.⁵

Several other passages point in the same direction. Philippians 3:21 promises that Christ "will transform our lowly body to be like his glorious body" — a body He still has and will still have at His return. Revelation 1:13–18 shows John a vision of the risen Christ as "one like a son of man," still bearing a glorified human form, who says, "I died, and behold I am alive forevermore." Romans 6:9 declares that "Christ, being raised from the dead, will never die again." The witness of the New Testament is unanimous: the man Jesus Christ is now and will always be.

The Physicalist Problem (1): Location

Now we come to the difficulty. If Christ's human nature is nothing more than His physical body — if there is no immaterial soul, only flesh and bone and brain — then we have to ask a strange but unavoidable question. Where is His body?

The Bible's answer is that He is "at the right hand of the Father" (Romans 8:34; Hebrews 1:3; Mark 16:19). But what kind of place is that? Most theologians, evangelical and otherwise, do not think of God's right hand as a physical location somewhere in our universe. The phrase is a Hebrew idiom for the place of supreme honor and royal authority, the position of co-regent in the divine throne room. The throne room itself is in heaven — and heaven, in classical Christian thought, is not a part of physical space. It is a different kind of reality, a spiritual realm, the dwelling place of God and His angels.⁶

Here is the problem. On strict physicalism, a human being is a physical organism. Physical organisms have to be somewhere physical. They have to be in space and time, made of matter, governed by the laws of physics. So if Christ's "human nature" is just His physical body, then His human nature must be somewhere in physical space. But Scripture and Christian tradition have always insisted that He is not somewhere in physical space — He is in heaven, which is not a physical place.

The physicalist faces a hard choice. Either (a) the heavenly realm is a physical place after all — in which case Christ's body is somewhere in our universe, perhaps a galaxy far away, and the doctrine of heaven needs major revision — or (b) Christ's body has been transformed into something that can exist in a non-physical realm — in which case it is not really a physical body anymore in the sense the physicalist needs. Either horn dissolves the position. The first horn turns heaven into a corner of the cosmos; the second horn admits that human nature has a non-physical mode of existence after all, which is just dualism wearing different clothes.

On dualism, the puzzle dissolves. Christ's human soul, being immaterial, is naturally suited to existence in the divine presence. The soul does not need a physical address. And His glorified body has been transformed to operate in both realms — able to be touched and to eat fish on a Galilean beach (Luke 24:42–43; John 21:9–13), yet also able to pass through walls and ascend through clouds. The soul anchors Christ's permanent humanity in the spiritual realm; the glorified body, taken up at the ascension, remains forever joined to that soul.⁷

The Physicalist Problem (2): Continuity

A second difficulty has to do with sameness over time. The body Jesus had on Friday afternoon, hanging on the cross, had certain properties: it was vulnerable, it could be wounded, it eventually stopped breathing. The body the disciples encountered after Easter could appear and disappear (Luke 24:31), pass through locked doors (John 20:19), and ascend through the sky. These are not minor changes. They are deep alterations to what the body can do.

I treat the personal-identity problem in detail in Chapter 24, so I'll only summarize here. The point for our purposes is this: if Christ's human nature is only His body, and the body has been so radically transformed, then the natural question is whether the ascended Christ is the same man who died, or a profoundly altered being whose continuity with the pre-Easter Jesus is unclear. The traditional answer — that the soul provides continuity through the transformation — only works if there is a soul to do the work.⁸ On dualism, the same human soul that left the body on Good Friday was reunited with that body on Easter morning, and that body was then glorified and taken up. The soul is the thread of identity through every change. On physicalism, there is no thread. There is just a sequence of physical states — and the question of which sequence counts as "the same person" becomes deeply puzzling, especially when the later state is so different from the earlier one.

The Physicalist Problem (3): Permanence

The third problem is perhaps the most striking. The Incarnation is forever. Christ does not stop being human after a thousand years, or a million, or ten billion. He continues forever. But on physicalism, this means the eternal Son is permanently united to a physical organism. And physical organisms, by their nature, are subject to time, change, and decay. They age. They wear out. They are governed by the second law of thermodynamics, which says that closed physical systems trend toward disorder.

I know what the physicalist will say in reply: the glorified body is not a normal physical organism. It has been transformed; it is "imperishable" (1 Corinthians 15:42–44). Fair enough. But the more we say the glorified body is unlike ordinary physical bodies — immune to decay, untouched by time, capable of behaviors no biological organism can perform — the more we are admitting that human nature in its ultimate form is not really "physical" in the way physicalists usually mean. Andrew Loke notes that any account of Christ's glorified state must do justice to both genuine humanity and exalted glory; the kryptic model accomplishes this by retaining a real human consciousness (rooted in the human soul) while acknowledging that the glorified body has been radically transformed.⁹

The contributors to Christian Physicalism? press exactly this point against materialist Christology. If a "physical body" can pass through walls, exist outside ordinary space, never grow old, and remain joined to the eternal Son for all eternity, then "physical" has been stretched so far that it loses its ordinary meaning. At that point, the physicalist is no longer defending the view that humans are just physical organisms; he is defending the view that humans are physical organisms plus a list of extraordinary supernatural properties — which is, ironically, what dualists have been saying about the soul all along.¹⁰

The Heavenly Session and the Real Question

Behind all three of these problems lies a deeper question about the heavenly session itself. The Westminster Shorter Catechism summarizes the orthodox position: Christ "was crucified, dead, and buried, on the third day rose again from the dead, ascended into heaven, and sitteth at the right hand of God the Father." Sitteth. Present tense. He is now seated.

What does it mean for a man to be seated at God's right hand? Theologians have answered this in several ways, but every orthodox answer involves the genuinely human Christ being genuinely present in the divine throne room as a person, not merely as a memory or a representation. He prays for us. He speaks for us. He carries our humanity into the very presence of God.¹¹

On a body-and-soul dualism, this is gloriously coherent. Christ's human soul, united to His glorified body and indivisibly joined to His divine person, is genuinely present in the heavenly realm. The soul is the natural seat of personal presence; the glorified body, transformed by resurrection power, accompanies the soul without constraining it to a single physical location. Christ as a whole human being is there, with His Father, interceding for us.

On strict physicalism, the heavenly session is much harder to make sense of. If Christ is His body and His body is somewhere physical, then His "presence" before the Father is reduced to a question of cosmic geography. If Christ's body has been so transformed that it transcends physical limitations, then the meaning of "physical" has been quietly emptied out. Either way, the doctrine of the heavenly session pulls us toward an immaterial dimension to Christ's humanity — toward a soul.

A Counterargument and Response

Let me steel-man the most thoughtful physicalist response. A careful Christian physicalist might say something like this: "Yes, the glorified body is mysterious and has properties unlike ordinary bodies. But that does not mean it is not physical. It is just a differently physical body — a body suited to the new creation, energized by the Spirit, but still material in some sense. We do not need to bring back the soul to make sense of it. We just need to admit that physical reality is bigger and stranger than we thought."

This is a serious response, and I respect it. But here is my reply. The question is not whether the glorified body has unusual properties. The question is whether physicalism, as a position about human nature, can do the explanatory work that the doctrine of the permanent incarnation requires. And on that, I think the answer is no. The properties the glorified body must have — including spatial flexibility, freedom from decay, intimate union with the eternal Son in the divine presence, perfect continuity of personal identity through radical change — are exactly the properties that classical theology has always said are characteristic of the soul (or the soul-body union). Calling them "physical" does not make them physical. It just relabels them. If physicalism's solution is to grant that human nature includes properties that are functionally indistinguishable from soul-properties, then physicalism has lost the debate while pretending to win it.¹²

The Chalcedonian Anthropology Connection

One last angle is worth raising before we close. Michael Wilkinson has argued that Christology must norm our anthropology. If Christ's human nature, as defined at Chalcedon, is "a body and rational soul," then a human being — full stop — is a body and rational soul. The man par excellence defines what it is to be a human being.¹³

Apply this principle to the permanent incarnation. The glorified, ascended, heavenly Christ — the man at the right hand of the Father — is the template for our own glorified humanity. We will be like Him (1 John 3:2; Philippians 3:21). If His permanent, glorified human nature includes a glorified body and a glorified human soul, then ours will too. And if ours will, then ours is — right now, in essentials — a body and a soul. Christology and anthropology are knit together at the level of Christ's permanent state. The ascended Christ is not just our Savior but our pattern. To deny the soul in human nature is not just to misread Genesis 2:7; it is to misread the man who is even now interceding for us in heaven.¹⁴

Conclusion

The ascension is not a strange appendix to the gospel story. It is the gospel's permanent crown. The same Jesus who was born of Mary, who walked the hills of Galilee, who suffered and died and rose again, has carried our humanity into the presence of God — and He has carried it there forever. He is, right now, the man Christ Jesus. He always will be.

I have argued in this chapter that this glorious truth pushes hard against any physicalist account of Christ's human nature. If His humanity is only a physical body, we cannot easily say where that body is, how it transitions through such radical transformation while remaining the same person, or how a physical organism can be permanently united to the eternal Son in a non-physical realm. The dualist alternative — that Christ has a glorified human soul united to a glorified human body — resolves these problems with elegance and theological depth. The soul provides continuity, presence in the spiritual realm, and the natural ground for the permanent incarnation. The glorified body, taken up at the ascension, remains forever joined to that soul, anchoring our hope of resurrection.

The doctrine of the permanent incarnation is one of the warmest doctrines in Christian faith. The Word made flesh is still flesh. The Son who became one of us is still one of us. And our great High Priest holds His priesthood permanently, because He continues forever. May we never trade that breathtaking truth for any anthropology that cannot hold its weight.