Acts 1:9-11 and the Hyper-Preterism Debate by Keith A. Mathison

ascension in Acts 1 is all about. Christ our true High Priest ascended into the
heavenly Holy of Holies to present His sacrificial blood on the Heavenly Mercy
Seat to make final atonement for us. Then He (like the earthly High Priest) would
come back out of the Holy of Holies (cf. Heb. 9–10, esp. 9:26–28, and 10:37) to
announce to His anxiously waiting saints that atonement had been fully and
finally accomplished. Notice in the Heb. 10:37 text when this “descent” back out
of the Temple was supposed to occur (“in a VERY little while”). 38 He left in
clouds of glory, and He returned in the same manner in clouds of glory (cf. Acts
1:11). 39
Stevens explains this view further.
Acts 1:11 fits into the Preterist schema very neatly and consistently. It explains
the Yom Kippur typology and quilts together many heretofore disjointed remnants
of soteriology and eschatology into one seamless garment. Christ returned in AD
70 “in the same manner” in which He left. He ascended as High Priest into the
glory cloud of the Father’s Presence, and He descended back out of that glory
cloud as High Priest to announce to His waiting saints (in the outer courts of the
temple) that His blood had been accepted and that reconciliation was complete
and the Holy of Holies was open for them to dwell in. Christ’s descent (the
Parousia) is the exact point at which soteriology and eschatology and Christology
all coincide and mutually reinforce each other. Eschatology is the final events of
soteriology which reveal and unveil Who Christ is and what He has done. The
Parousia at AD 70 puts the focus on Christ, whom the Jews had rejected, and
reassures Christians that He has redeemed us from Sheol. Acts 1:11 does not talk
about some unrelated “ascension” of Christ into heaven. And the return it
predicts cannot be some other Parousia than the one the apostles had been taught
to expect within their lifetime. Acts 1:11 fits the Yom Kippur typology like a
hand-tailored glove. No futurist interpretation of Acts 1:11 does justice to this
glory-cloud Theophany and Yom Kippur “ascend/descend” typology that is
prominently featured in this passage. 40
38 It is ironic that Stevens quotes Hebrews 10:37 here in an attempt to prove that the Second Advent of
Christ was to occur very soon after the writing of Hebrews. Hebrews 10:37 is a quotation of Haggai 2:7,
which was written around 520 years before Christ. If Haggai 2:7 is a prophecy fulfilled in Christ’s first
advent, his “little while” was at least 520 years. The author of Hebrews quotes the prophecy to refer to
something still in the future at the time Hebrews was written, so Haggai’s “little while” appears to be an
even longer period of time than that. If Haggai’s prophecy had an initial fulfillment in his own time as well
as a later fulfillment in the time of Christ, then the fact that he used such language (“little while”) supports
the possibility of multiple fulfillments of prophecies.
39 Edward E. Stevens, Questions About the Afterlife (Bradford, PA: International Preterist Association,
1999), 44. As an aside, it should also be noted that Stevens’ outline of his view seems to rely to some
extent on Alfred Edersheim’s nineteenth century work entitled The Temple: It’s Ministry and Services
(Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 1994). Edersheim’s book must be used with care, however, for
much of it is his own reconstruction based not upon the text of Scripture alone, but also upon various
uninspired Jewish traditions such as the Mishnah and the work of Maimonides (cf. The Temple, pp. ix–x).
However, even Edersheim does not emphasize “ascension” in his treatment of the Day of Atonement ritual
(cf. The Temple, pp. 240–63).
40 Ibid., 45–46.
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