The Truth About Jesus' Ascension (Most Christians Miss This!) Ask NT Wright
Premier Unbelievable? | 3 Aug. 2026
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V3r6otQslH8
18:02 To answer the question very briefly as to the objections.
1) As Earth is round, up is always outward.
In this case it's outward along the coordinate of the Jerusalem or more precisely Mount of Olives coordinates.
2) Heaven as in God's throne room isn't in the stars, but above them. (Further out on the Mount of Olives coordinates).
Unlike stars and planets, Empyrean Heaven isn't doing a circle around Earth each day-and-night.
19:00 Not within our space-time ...
Stargate cosmology?
19:57 Both the Temple of Solomon and the Second Temple and a Catholic Church before Altar and Tabernacle involve angels, denizens of Heaven being there to adore God, as they do in His throne room.
There is a deeper fusion of the two places in so far as the same body of Christ which in its own dimensions is present in Heaven (above the stars) is also, in the dimensions of bread, present on the Altar or in the Tabernacle.
This doesn't in any way deny that Heaven as such is above the stars.
21:26 God's presence can obviously make a place on Earth a second Heaven.
This doesn't in any way mean that God doesn't have a throne room above the stars.
The "joining of Heaven and Earth in Jesus" sounds great ... but it's vague. It doesn't answer where Jesus is now as Man.
A person going outward from Melbourne would, if he could get above the fix stars, presumably be in Empyrean Heaven ... and then have a half globe to trot before arriving in God's throne room. A half globe above the stars that is.
Apart from the Eucharist, this would have been common ground between the heretic Calvin and the Pope Saint Pius V.
21:50 Two objections to the Geocentric view:
And he added and said: Hear thou therefore the word of the Lord: I saw the Lord sitting on his throne, and all the army of heaven standing by him on the right hand and on the left
[3 Kings (1 Kings) 22:19]
And Eliseus prayed, and said: Lord, open his eyes, that he may see. And the Lord opened the eyes of the servant, and he saw: and behold the mountain was full of horses, and chariots of fire round about Eliseus.
[4 Kings (2 Kings) 6:17]
The second obviously is due to angels being able to displace themselves from Heaven and in a sense (less than God in the flesh) take Heaven with them where they go. As already said about angels adoring the Eucharist.
As to the first, Jesus didn't see Luoyang, the then capital of China, because China was in sight from where Satan had brough him, Jesus saw Luoyang because Satan provided (and good angels presumably authentified) the "television" from Luoyang. Micheas saw God's throne room in literally, as per the etymology of the word, tele-vision, a sight transported from very far away.
22:07 Neither 8th C. (or whatever) BC nor 1st C AD do the upward movements of Elias and Jesus seem to be metaphors taken as such.
On a Geocentric view, as per St. Thomas, St. Pius V or even Calvin and Luther, heretics though they were, there was no need to take it so.
Also, there was no need to be silent about what was actually seen, since Jesus simply disappearing from the midst is a thing that had been seen in the previous forty days and which had been described that way.
22:11 False alternatives.
I'm a Geocentric, I'm not a Flat Earther. For 5 or perhaps even 10 years, I have seen the false alternatives put as modern cosmology (including Heliocentrism on a local level, Sun then moving around the centre of the galaxy and that one being one of several similar things) vs Flat Earth.
Similarily, you are now putting as the two alternatives either "upwards is metaphorical" or "they believed in a three storey universe" ... box shape included and Earth flat in it.
Tertium very clearly datur.
22:16 "other place whatever that may be"
Hell doesn't necessarily have nine circles. But it very probably has Satan in the very centre of Earth, and no, this doesn't necessitate a hollow earth, the dimensions of Hell would be minuscule compared to the solid or molten centre in which Hell is presumably placed.
22:26 Assuming St. John in Apoc. 7:1 describes a flat earth is assuming he was simple. Or very heavily closed off from the Greek world. Plus not inerrantly inspired.
The Four corners seem to need to be places and the Medieval Sawley map treats them like that. That map is in a manuscript of a French, scholastic, manual of geography, and that means the author was into Earth, as a body under / inside Heaven being a globe. This doesn't preclude Land having four corners. Like Alaska, Cape Horn, in the West. NE Siberia and Tasmania in the East. NZ may excuse me if I take their place as a kind of post-Flood Earthsea, outside the original dimensions of Land.
But, assuming that 1st C people were Geocentrics is simply presuming they were believing what people back then are pretty well known to have believed.
And I would not say they were in error to do so.
23:10 Heaven may certainly be 1 whole light day up and some more.
This doesn't mean He hasn't a good view of Earth.
Again, posing false alternatives, loading the view you object to with obviously false implications that naturally it doesn't have.
23:47 Jesus sometimes does send troops, though.
Sisera's army got on the wrong end of those (and he himself got too close to a type of the Blessed Virgin).
The Flood can have involved some troops from Heaven too, especially around the Ark, even if the work of destruction may have been left to demons, who enjoy that kind of stuff.
Apocalypse 19 shows Jesus coming back from up there ... with troops.
24:09 Part of the story of Acts involves Jesus arranging a shipwreck and helping St. Paul to expel a Pythonic spirit.
The "crude force" isn't absent, any more than when He stilled a storm on Kinnereth.
25:16 "absentia" is a Latin word, not a Greek one. No -ía in Latin, only -ia with accent on the previous syllable.
