Having become something of a buzzword, ‘embodiment’ has captured the theological imaginations of many western theologians in recent decades, thanks, in large measure, to the pioneering work of feminist, womanist, and disability theologians.¹ Against cognitive or spiritualist conceptions of the human person, turns to embodiment seek to recapture “the importance of the body, the whole conglomerate of embodied identity that makes a person what he or she is.”² Humans exist, they insist, as bodies in relation.

To articulate embodied existence theologically, many have turned to the doctrine of the incarnation as an explicative theological tool. That God took on embodied human existence and its attendant vicissitudes has empowered those whose bodies are systemically marginalized and violated to profess that, in solidarity, God assumes and shares their condition.³ Furthermore, that God operates in bodily solidarity grants a dignity and irreducible goodness to bodies that human injustice cannot finally negate.

This theological impulse, while one I share, is not without its difficulties. Chief among these difficulties is the assertion that in the incarnation, “God is not changing God’s relation to us in Christ but changing our relation to God.”⁴ God has not suddenly deigned to dignify embodied existence in the incarnation, but has embodied that existence himself so to crucify and resurrect it so to stand in proper relation to him and others. While the Word’s assumption of our embodied life (Jn 1:14) is irreducibly a manifestation of God’s solidarity with fallen creatures, it is more than that: it is the manner by which the Word assumes in order to save.⁵ Our embodied existences are not good in se but have been wounded and marred by sin – our own and others – which requires our reconstitution: in short, our justification and sanctification.⁶ In Calvin’s words, “sin was taken away by his death; righteousness was revived and restored by his resurrection.”⁷ Our bodied selves are assumed at Bethlehem so to die at Golgotha, rise outside Jerusalem, and ascend to the right hand of the one Christ calls ‘Father.’ God embodies so to kill, and kills so to make alive.

This in itself does not suggest that the incarnation ceases to be a useful way in which to theologize about anthropology and embodied existence. It does, however, complicate it. It forces Christians to follow the narrative arc of salvation to discern where our bodies ‘end up’ after having been assumed by Christ at Christmas. To be assumed by Christ in this way is thus to affirm that our embodied selves have been reconciled in his fleshly body through his death – made holy and blameless (Col 1:22). Those same bodied selves which die with Christ through baptism are indeed raised with Christ to “seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God” (Col 3:1). We – embodied, situated, contextual creatures – have died and are now hidden with Christ in God (Col 3:4). Theological speech about embodiment, then, requires speech about Christ’s resurrection and ascension.

Karl Barth writes that “the resurrection and ascension of Jesus Christ are two distinct but inseparable moments in one and the same event. The resurrection is to be understood as its terminus a quo, its beginning, and the ascension as its terminus ad quem, its end.”⁸ For Barth, the ascension is the culmination of the work heralded by the resurrection, completed on the cross, and undertaken in the incarnation: it places “man [sic] at the side of God, in direct fellowship with Him, in full participation of His glory.”⁹ By virtue of our union with Christ through Word and Sacrament, our whole selves are brought to participate – now in faith, then in fullness – in the divine life. As such, our present embodied selves exist in eschatological witness. So Calvin:

“[Christ] therefore sits on high, transfusing us with his power, that he may quicken us to spiritual life, sanctify us by his Spirit, adorn his church with diverse gifts of his grace, keep it safe from all harm by his protection, restrain the raging enemies of his cross and of our salvation by the strength of his hand, and finally hold all power in heaven and on earth.”¹⁰

The critique which much extant incarnational embodiment theology levels – that other theologies act as though our whole selves in their physical, relational, and situated circumstances are untouched by God’s assumption of creaturely existence – is therefore the critique, mutatis mutandis, that must be leveled back at these theologies: incarnational theologies tend to act as though our whole selves are untouched by the redemption effected by God’s assumption of creaturely existence.¹¹ Correctively, Kathryn Tanner can say that “the ascension and glorification of the humanity of Christ, the Word, with that humanity which is its very own, retakes, so to speak, its rightful seat in the life of the trinity, regains, that is, the clear exhibition of its divine mode of life distorted through sin and refracted by death.”¹²

In some ways, I end this all-too-brief essay inconclusively. I do not seek to offer here a full-bodied account of a theology of embodiment by way of the Ascension. Indeed, at this juncture, I have little sense of what that may look like substantively. Rather, I seek here to redirect theological sensibilities back toward the narratival logic of redemption for future accounts of embodiment such that they may discover not only the ways that God affirms bodily existence, but also the ways in which it dies so to be made truly alive.