Dear Dr. Craig, I enjoyed your recent dialogue with Philip Goff on Goff's apparently heretical view of God on the Justin Breyerleys'

Unbelievable podcast.

During the dialogue, Gough brought about a quote from Dale Allison's recent book on

the resurrection of Jesus, in which Allison claims that Jesus' resurrection was identical

with Jesus' ascension, a view apparently also shared by Wolfheart Pannonberg and other

theologians,

hence lending some plausibility and support to Goff's own unorthodox view.

You replied that Goff misrepresented the views of these authors,

but I feel you couldn't expand sufficiently on this,

and this very important issue was left unclarified in the dialogue.

Can you please expand your reply to Goff on this?

Thanks. Augustine from the United States. Sure. Goff's view is that Jesus' resurrection and

ascension into heaven are the same event, what he calls the identity theory. This was, in fact, the view of certain

liberal scholars like Rudolf Boydmann in the mid-20th century, who were skeptical of physical

resurrection appearances of Jesus. On their view, Jesus, rather than being raised from the

dead in the spacetime universe, was extracted from the world and assumed directly into heaven.

As I mentioned in the podcast, it is the burden of N.T. Wright's massive book,

The Resurrection of the Son of God, to show that such an interpretation misrepresents

the view of antiquity. One of the merits of Wright rights exhaustive study of ancient texts concerning the resurrection

of the dead is this demonstration that the notion of resurrection was not a translation to

an otherworldly non-spatioemporal realm, but inherently involved the restoration of life

in the realm of space and time. Although Boltman, unlike Goth, also denied Jesus' empty tomb, writes sharp critique of Boltman's

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