ABSTRACT
Thomas Torrance has provided one of the few significant twentieth century treatments of Jesus' ascension. Like Karl Barth, Torrance reads Jesus' ascension in terms of His presence and absence, and in a thoroughly eschatological fashion – that is, Jesus' ascension and the absence it introduces always directs us forward toward His eschaton. The key difference from Barth's treatment lies in Torrance's adoption of the view that it is in the ascension that Christ's new humanity is taken up into the communion of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. For Torrance the absence of Jesus via His ascension is therefore specifically the absence of His risen humanity. The implication of a general distinction between the being of the man Jesus in history, and His being as the ascended One will be more fully explored below, in a discussion of Torrance's sequential reading of exaltation and humiliation.
