Christians enjoy here and now a hidden life of fellowship with the Father and the Son which nothing, not even death itself, can touch—for it is the life of the world to come begun already, the life of heaven tasted here on earth. The explanation of this experience, which all God’s people know in some measure, is that believers have actually passed through death (not as a physical but as a personal and psychic event) into the eternal life which lies beyond.

The Apostles’ Creed

I believe in God the Father almighty, maker of heaven and earth; and in Jesus Christ his only Son our Lord, who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead, and buried: he descended into hell; the third day he rose again from the dead; he ascended into heaven, and sitteth on the right hand of God the Father almighty; from thence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead. I believe in the Holy Spirit; the holy catholic church; the communion of saints; the forgiveness of sins; the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting.

What Heaven Means

“He ascended” echoes Jesus’s “I ascend” (John 20:17; cf. John 6:62). “Into heaven” echoes “taken up from you into heaven,” the angels’ words in the ascension story (Acts 1:11). But what is “heaven”? Is it the sky or outer space? Does the Creed mean that Jesus was the first astronaut? No, both it and the Bible are making a different point.

“Heaven” in the Bible means three things: (1)The endless, self-sustaining life of God. In this sense, God always dwelt “in heaven,” even when there was no earth. (2) The state of angels or men as they share the life of God, whether in foretaste now or in fullness hereafter. In this sense, the Christian’s reward, treasure, and inheritance are all “in heaven,” and heaven is shorthand for the Christian’s final hope. (3) The sky, which, being above us and more like infinity than anything else we know, is an emblem in space and time of God’s eternal life, just as the rainbow is an emblem of his everlasting covenant (see Gen. 9:8–17).

Bible and Creed proclaim that in the ascension, forty days after his rising, Jesus entered heaven in sense 2 in a new and momentous way: thenceforth he “sitteth on the right hand of God the Father almighty,” ruling all things in his Father’s name and with his Father’s almightiness for the long-term good of his people. “On the right hand of God” signifies not a palatial location but a regal function (see Acts 2:33ff.; Rom. 8:34; Eph. 1:20ff.; Heb. 1:3, 13; Heb. 10:12ff.; Heb. 12:2). He “ascended far above the heavens” (that is, reentered his preincarnate life, a life unrestricted by anything created) “that he might fill all things” (that is, make his kingly power effective everywhere; see Eph. 4:10). “Ascended” is, of course, a pictureword implying exaltation (“going up!”) to a condition of supreme dignity and power.

The Ascension

What happened at the ascension, then, was not that Jesus became a spaceman, but that his disciples were shown a sign, just as at the transfiguration. As C. S. Lewis put it, “they saw first a short vertical movement and then a vague luminosity (that is what “cloud” presumably means . . . ) and then nothing.”

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