And it’s interesting the radical and revolutionary character of what Calvin said.
Calvin produced a Copernican revolution through his ascension studies. Whereas previously scholars focused on Christ present with His body in the Church — making it impossible, they thought, to be bodily present at God’s throne — Calvin reversed this by stressing the bodily presence of Christ in heaven alone.
Whereas emphasis had been on the person of Christ, Calvin considered the work of Christ, Godward and manward, breaking new ground in his view of the threefold office of the ascended Christ as prophet, king, and priest.
Calvin upheld the bodily ascension of Christ to God’s throne, with no bodily presence in church or sacrament. He supported a localized humanity of the ascended Jesus, in contrast to Luther’s ubiquitous, omnipresence of His humanity.
“The implications of this are very important.”
We cannot legitimately transfer Christ’s authority to church, state, experience, or anything else. Our Lord is very clear on this:
“All power” — and the word can also be rendered, and it has a double meaning, “all authority is given to Me in heaven and on earth.”
We cannot make anything on earth a center of independent authority.
In our time, as in other times in church history also, a human experience has often replaced Christ’s finality and authority, and this is blasphemous. We cannot say that our experience is authoritative because we are always, at our very best, fallible creatures.
One consequence is that little stress is laid — because of this emphasis on church or state or experience or the sacraments or anything else — upon the locale of His presence and His authority.
One consequence is that little stress is now laid upon Christ’s ascension and His session at the right hand of God the Father. And instead of returning to it, we have seen that Charismania has moved us further from the truth.
This doctrine of the ascension and session is one of the great aspects of the Reformed faith, now too often forgotten by supposed Calvinists. – RJ Rushdoony