The Ascension - More Significant Than the Resurrection?

This morning a visiting Anglican bishop from South Asia preached at our parish's World Mission Sunday.  In what seemed to be more than just a passing comment, he wondered aloud -- "with fear and trembling," I believe he said -- whether the Ascension might be more significant than the Resurrection.  I hope I don't misrepresent his views, but I thought he was saying something like the following:

• the significance of the Ascension was that, at the end of Jesus' eartly mission, God embraced and welcomed him home; whereas ...
• the Resurrection was simply a step in the process that culminated in his being (re)united with God.
  

That's an intriguing notion.  The Resurrection holds an exalted place in Christian doctrine.  By taking the Resurrection down a peg, this idea hints at a different kind of soteriology (theory of salvation):  When we say that Jesus saves, maybe the mechanism was not his death per se; and perhaps we of the present day are not saved by a belief that God raised him from the dead.

Maybe instead the mechanism of salvation has more to do with:

1. putting our trust in the message Jesus preached and conducting our lives accordingly -- that is, striving to love God above all; to love our neighbors as ourselves; and to repent, that is, work on changing our lives; and
2. participating in the church that Jesus catalyzed, both (i) to help each other in our efforts to internalize that message, and (ii) to help carry the message to all the world.
   

I did a Google search to see what other writing might be out there on this subject.  The only relevant hit I could find was an article, The Dynamic of Right Action and Right Doctrine in the Shaping of Belief, by the Rev. Peter Philips, an English priest, who quotes Jean Daniélou's Theology of Jewish Christianity:

Contrary to the practice of later theology Jewish Christianity expresses the glorification of Christ from the point of view of the Ascension rather than that of the Resurrection, an approach which fits better into the structure of Jewish Christian theology with its more cosmological than anthropomorphic world-view... The important point, therefore, in the accounts of Christ’s Ascension is the essential meaning, not the cosmological expression. Nevertheless, since the cosmological symbolism serves as a means of presenting doctrine it calls for careful examination...