1 October 2025
"Rose again the third day, ascended into heaven"":
A Matter of Perspective
By Stefan Kaminski
In the last post on the Nicene Creed, we looked at the central mystery of the Christian faith: the Father sending His beloved Son as one amongst us, in order to redeem our fallen nature. What follows – the Resurrection and Ascension into heaven – is the indispensable verification of the truth of our faith.
As St Paul says, “If Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain” (1 Cor 15:14). This is the touchstone that marks out the Christian faith in a very particular way from the other monotheistic traditions. The Resurrection of Christ is not simply a formula that puts us in the category of “Christian”: it carries with it a radically new perspective on the world, a completely different way of seeing things.
Our society today, in both the UK and the wider West, suffers from a loss of this perspective. Indeed, one could call it a form of existential myopia. What we see all too clearly is the near-detail of the world, its break-down to an infinitesimal degree. In the pursuit of an autonomous human wisdom, modern Western thinking has over-exalted the place of the empirical sciences and grounded its hope in the power of scientific knowledge. What has revealed itself in the last decades is that this power is not only lacking in any wisdom, but can prove itself as unreliable as the vested interests that are all-too-often behind it. Thus, we arrive at such startling admissions as Richard Dawkins’ claim to be a cultural Christian.
So what gives Christianity the edge over post-modern secularism to an avowed atheist such as Professor Dawkins?
Many people, of faith or no faith, monotheistic or otherwise, admit the moral goodness of Christ’s teaching and example. This itself presents an interesting paradox. They are willing to somehow acknowledge the universal applicability of the teachings of a first-century Palestinian Jew, yet without any serious consideration for much of what He said. In fact, it’s positively necessary to discard a great part of His words as madness, insofar as these included claims of Divine Sonship and instructions to eat His flesh (cf. C. S. Lewis’ ‘trilemma’).
For the Christian, however, the indisputable guarantee of the truth of Christ’s teaching and example comes from the fact of His Resurrection, which He also proclaimed in advance: “He has risen as He said” (Mt 28:6). Of all that He said, the notion that He would rise from the dead three days after His death was the most practical expression of Our Lord’s claim to divinity: “When you have lifted up the Son of Man, then you will realise that I Am” (Jn 8:28). It was precisely this claim that was unacceptable to the Jews and for which He was executed, and the Resurrection is thus the most foundational verification of His Divinity.
Christ’s Ascension into heaven however, goes a step further in drawing our own selves into this Divine drama. If the Resurrection more immediately witnesses to His power over death, the Ascension places the seal on God’s intention for our bodily, human nature. That which was created in the beginning (cf. Gn 1) and which human pride corrupted (cf. Gn 3), has received a new promise of an even greater glory (cf. Phil 3:21). The Resurrection is the immediate means of our future, bodily transfiguration, but the Ascension confirms that this complete rehabilitation – or “new creation” (2 Cor 5:17) – of our human nature, body and soul, is for a future, heavenly state – “a new heaven and a new earth” (Rev. 21:1).
Courtesy of World History Encyclopedia: https://www.worldhistory.org/image/8037/anastasis-scene-in-chora-museum
These two, literally, earth-shattering events as professed in the Nicene Symbol, ground the Christian in a completely different perspective. What is immediate and visible becomes but an expression of an imperfect reality awaiting redemption; what the world considers as success becomes but a disposable measure of a passing breath. The Christian vision is, instead, focussed on what we yet see only “dimly” (cf. 1 Cor 13:12), but know to be true and lasting.
Neither does this mean that Christianity is hypermetropic: rather, it is entirely whole-sighted. The material realm is seen in its correct perspective, permitting a stability and certainty of goodness for our evaluative reasoning in the here and now. We call this wisdom. Maybe it is the remaining traces of this in Western culture that Richard Dawkins finds attractive.