Abstract
This article offers a theological interpretation of the resurrection and ascension accounts in Luke-Acts through a composite lens consisting of (1) second-century interests in the physicality of Jesus’s resurrection and ascension and (2) present concerns about ongoing White supremacy, issues that intersect at the site of embodied humanity. The focus is on Jesus’s contextually specific enactment of true humanity in Jewish flesh as Israel’s representative liberating king. As such, he rejects a beastly form of humanity contextually embodied in the first century by the emperor and contextually embodied today as “the imperial God-Man” (J. Kameron Carter’s term) cloaked in Whiteness. It is this form of humanity embodied by Jesus—in all its physicality and biographical specificity—that is raised by God from the dead and that ascends into heaven, while remaining the touchstone of true humanity. This gives the lie to implicit and explicit claims of White humanity collectively representing itself as the highest form of humanity.
