ABSTRACT
Douglas Farrow has recently published a major work on the doctrine of Jesus' ascension, and in particular the impact of this doctrine on understandings of the church. Plainly, Farrow sees the eucharist as straight-forwardly determinative of the being of the church – it seems to be in eucharistic worship alone that the church is identifiable. The suspicion is that the eucharist is being loaded with more freight than it can safely bear – especially with any New Testament mandate. Farrow has two central complaints about Karl Barth's ascension theology, around which one can find clustered a large number of critical comments. Farrow complains that Barth clamps ontology and soteriology together too strongly, and the obvious implication is that Farrow wants to separate them to some degree. The ontological reality of Jesus' being as both divine and human forms the necessary presupposition for soteriology.
