and is seated at the right hand of the Father

The Text

The clause that names what Christ is doing now. The resurrection happened on the third day; the ascension happened forty days after that; the seating at the right hand is the state in which Christ has remained ever since. Sedet — he sits. The present tense matters. While the church confesses the creed each Sunday morning, while a doctor delivers a diagnosis, while a soldier ships out, while a refugee crosses a border, while a child is born and an old man dies, Christ is seated at the right hand of the Father. The clause is not a piece of biographical past tense. It is a piece of present geography. The risen Jesus, in his glorified flesh, occupies the place of authority beside the throne of God.

Translation Notes

Sedet / kathezomenon. Both Latin and Greek use the present tense (the Latin a finite verb, the Greek a participle), and the present is doctrinally load-bearing. The previous clauses of the creed are all past tense: conceptus est, natus est, passus est, crucifixus, mortuus, sepultus, descendit, resurrexit, ascendit. The seated state is the first thing the creed says about Christ in the present. He sat down, and he has not gotten back up. The whole posture of the Christian life — looking to a living Lord who is at this moment in the presence of the Father — depends on this small grammatical point.

Ad dexteram / en dexia. “At the right hand.” The phrase is biblical idiom, not a literal claim about spatial geography. In the world of the Hebrew Bible, the king’s right hand was the place from which authority was delegated and judgment was exercised; the queen mother sat at the right hand of the king (1 Kgs. 2:19), and the chief counselor stood there. To be at the right hand of someone was to share their authority without competing with it. When the creed places Christ at the right hand of the Father, it is naming a participation in the Father’s authority, not a second location somewhere off to one side.

Patris [omnipotentis]. The phrase echoes the first clause of the creed — Patrem omnipotentem. The Son is now seated beside the Father whose almightiness the creed confessed at the beginning. The two ends of the trinitarian arc meet here: the Father from whom all things come, and the Son through whom all things come, are united in glory; in the next clause the Spirit will be confessed as the one who proceeds from them both. Some early forms of the creed drop omnipotentis; the substance is the same.

The key biblical text behind the whole clause is Psalm 110:1: “The Lord said to my Lord, ‘Sit at my right hand, until I make your enemies your footstool.’” This is the single Old Testament verse most frequently cited in the New Testament — quoted or alluded to more than two dozen times — and it is the Old Testament foundation of every creedal statement about Christ’s session. Jesus himself invoked it in the controversy with the Pharisees (Mark 12:35–37; Matt. 22:41–46); Peter cited it in the Pentecost sermon (Acts 2:34–35); Hebrews returns to it again and again as the architecture of the entire epistle. When the creed says sedet ad dexteram, it is repeating, in liturgical short form, the Christian church’s earliest reading of Psalm 110.

Historical Context

The session at the right hand is among the earliest Christian confessions. Already in the speeches of the apostles in Acts, before any Gospel had been written, Peter’s Pentecost sermon (Acts 2:32–36) names the bodily resurrection of Jesus and his exaltation to the right hand of God as the foundation of the gospel. Stephen, dying, sees the heavens opened and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God (Acts 7:55–56) — the only place in the New Testament where Christ is described as standing rather than sitting at the right hand; the patristic tradition reads this as Christ rising to receive the first martyr. The Letter to the Hebrews makes the session at the right hand the structural center of its entire argument: “After making purification for sins, he sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high” (Heb. 1:3). That single seated posture marks the difference between the Levitical priests, who stood daily offering sacrifices that could never take away sins, and Christ, who offered a single sacrifice for sins and sat down (Heb. 10:11–14). The sitting is the sign that the sacrificial work is finished.

The early creedal forms — the Old Roman Creed (c. 200), the various Eastern baptismal interrogations, the Nicene Creed of 325, the Apostles’ Creed in its developed Latin form by the late 4th century — all preserve the clause. The session is not a contested element of the early Christian confession. What the patristic and medieval theologians spent their energy on was the meaning of the session — what it means for the eternal Son of God, who is everywhere by divine nature, to be seated bodily at the right hand of the Father; what it means for the believer that the human Jesus is now in the place of cosmic authority; what relationship the session bears to the priestly intercession that Hebrews ascribes to Christ.

The clause has been less politically controversial than most others in the creed, but it has carried surprising practical weight. The patristic insistence that the human Jesus is now in the place of divine authority became, in the iconoclast controversy of the 8th century, one of the central arguments for the legitimacy of Christian images: if the assumed human nature is now in glory, it can be imaged. The Reformation debate over the location of Christ’s body in the Eucharist turned, in part, on what it means for Christ to be bodily at the right hand. The clause is small, but the doctrinal weight it carries is considerable.

Lines of Interpretation

Patristic

Tradition: Augustine, Sermons 263 and 265 (on the Ascension), Letter 187 (to Dardanus); John Chrysostom, Homilies on Hebrews; John of Damascus, On the Orthodox Faith IV.2

The patristic reading holds together two truths that initially seem to pull apart. First, the session at the right hand is real. The risen body of Jesus is in a real state of glorification, in a real participation in the Father’s authority. Second, the session is not a spatial localization. The Son of God, who fills all things by his divine nature, is not confined to a chair somewhere above the firmament. Augustine puts the point with characteristic precision: the right hand of God is not a place but a condition — the condition of supreme happiness in the company of justice and peace.

Augustine’s pastoral application of the doctrine is especially important and worth quoting at length. In a sermon preached at Hippo (Sermon 263) he says: “Christ is now exalted above the heavens, but he still suffers on earth all the pain that we, the members of his body, have to bear. He showed this when he cried out from above: ‘Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?’ and when he said: ‘I was hungry and you gave me to eat.’ Why do we on earth not strive to find rest with him in heaven even now, through the faith, hope and love that unites us to him?” The session at the right hand is, for Augustine, the present reality of the head of the body; the members of the body, still on earth, are already participating in it by faith, hope, and love.

John of Damascus, summing up the patristic tradition in the 8th century, distinguishes carefully: by the divine nature, the Son has always been at the right hand of the Father; by the human nature now assumed, the Son sits at the right hand of the Father from the ascension forward. The session is a new state for the human nature, not for the divine nature.

Strengths

• Holds the spatial and the metaphysical together — refuses both crude localization and modern allegorization
• Gives the doctrine an immediate ecclesial application: the head is glorified; the body still suffers; the two are one

Weaknesses

• The carefully balanced patristic distinction (divine omnipresence + human session) requires more theological sophistication than most preaching audiences can sustain, and slipshod summaries of it have produced confusion in every century since

Scholastic

Tradition: Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae III, q. 58 (“On the Sitting of Christ at the Right Hand of the Father”); Anselm, Cur Deus Homo

Aquinas devotes a whole question (III, q. 58, in four articles) to the session. He treats four issues: whether it is fitting that Christ sit at the right hand of the Father; whether this belongs to Christ according to his divine nature; whether it belongs to Christ according to his human nature; and whether it is proper to Christ to sit at the right hand. His answers are characteristically careful. Sitting at the right hand belongs to Christ according to his divine nature insofar as he has equal honor with the Father; it belongs to him according to his human nature insofar as the assumed humanity has been exalted into participation in divine glory; and it is proper to Christ alone in the precise sense that no other creature is so united to God as to participate in the Father’s authority in this way.

Anselm’s Cur Deus Homo, while not formally an exposition of this clause, lays the soteriological groundwork that the scholastic tradition assumed: the session at the right hand is the public sign that the satisfaction made on the cross has been accepted by the Father. The seated posture, which Hebrews makes structurally central, is the sign of completed work.

Strengths

• The precise distinction between what belongs to Christ by divine nature and what by human nature keeps the doctrine intelligible
• Anchors the session firmly in the completed work of the cross

Weaknesses

• The Anselmian satisfaction framework, when isolated from the wider christological-trinitarian context, can make the session sound like a courtroom verdict more than a kingly enthronement
• The scholastic method’s exhaustiveness can make the doctrine feel more like a problem to be analyzed than a glory to be confessed

Lutheran

Tradition: Luther, Confession Concerning Christ’s Supper (1528); Formula of Concord, Articles VII–VIII

Lutheran theology made the session at the right hand a central doctrinal weapon in the 16th-century Eucharistic controversy. The Reformed (and especially Zwingli) argued that the bodily presence of Christ at the right hand precluded his bodily presence in the Eucharistic elements: if his body is there, it cannot be here. Luther’s response was the doctrine of the communicatio idiomatum — the communication of attributes between the two natures of Christ — and especially the doctrine of the ubiquity of Christ’s risen humanity. Because the human nature is hypostatically united to the divine nature, and because the divine nature is omnipresent, the human nature of the exalted Christ shares in a kind of omnipresence; the body of Christ can be present at the right hand of the Father and on the altar at the same time. The Formula of Concord later codified this position.

Strengths

• Refuses to flatten the session into a spatial localization; takes seriously the strangeness of a glorified body
• Provides a robust account of how the exalted Christ remains accessible to the church here and now

Weaknesses

• The doctrine of ubiquity has always struck Reformed and Catholic theologians as an overreach — preserving Eucharistic realism at the cost of christological clarity
• The carefully balanced patristic distinction (divine nature omnipresent, human nature now exalted but not omnipresent) is harder to maintain on this account

Reformed

Tradition: Calvin, Institutes II.16.14–15; IV.17.26–28; Heidelberg Catechism Q. 49–52

Calvin’s treatment of the session is direct. The session at the right hand means that Christ has been given dominion over all things, that he reigns from heaven, that the church on earth is governed by his Spirit, and that the believer’s life is hidden with Christ in God (Col. 3:1–4). Calvin is at pains to deny that the session involves spatial localization in a crude sense (he is not arguing against the patristic distinction; he is arguing against medieval popular piety that imagined heaven as a chamber above the clouds), and he is equally at pains to deny the Lutheran doctrine of ubiquity. The body of Christ, for Calvin, remains a true human body, in heaven, until the day of his return; the believer is united to that exalted body by the Spirit, not by a quasi-physical extension of Christ’s body into the elements.

The Heidelberg Catechism puts the pastoral application beautifully. Q. 49: “How does Christ’s ascension to heaven benefit us?” A. “First, he is our advocate in heaven before his Father. Second, we have our flesh in heaven as a sure pledge that he, as the head, will also take us, his members, up to himself. Third, he sends us his Spirit as a counter-pledge, by whose power we seek what is above, where Christ sits at the right hand of God, and not the things on earth.”

Strengths

• Holds spatial restraint and doxological warmth together — Christ is bodily there, but accessible here by the Spirit
• The Heidelberg’s account of the three benefits is one of the great catechetical summaries in the Reformation tradition

Weaknesses

• The strong stress on the heavenly localization of the body has sometimes left Reformed piety undernourished in its account of how the absent Christ is present to his people in the Supper
• The polemical context (anti-Lutheran, anti-Catholic) sometimes shapes the doctrine more than the New Testament’s own emphases

Eastern Orthodox

Tradition: John of Damascus, On the Orthodox Faith IV.2; Byzantine iconographic tradition of Christ Pantokrator

In the Eastern tradition, the session at the right hand is liturgically and iconographically central in a way the West has not always matched. The dome of every traditional Orthodox church bears the image of Christ Pantokrator — the Ruler of All — seated in glory. The worshipper enters the building and stands beneath the seated Lord; the whole liturgy is offered upward, toward the one who sits in the heavens. The doctrinal point is the same as in the West, but the register is different: the session is not a doctrine to be analyzed but a presence to be entered.

The Orthodox tradition is also especially attentive to the eschatological dimension. Christ is seated until his enemies are made his footstool (Ps. 110:1, Heb. 10:13). The session is not the end; it is the present interval between the ascension and the parousia, the second coming.

Strengths

• Restores the liturgical and doxological register of the doctrine
• Holds the present session and the future return together as parts of a single eschatological arc

Weaknesses

• The iconographic riches do not necessarily make their way into discursive theology; the doctrine can be more deeply held than carefully articulated

Modern Ecumenical

Tradition: Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics IV/2 §64 (on the exaltation of the Son of Man); T. F. Torrance, The Mediation of Christ; Douglas Farrow, Ascension and Ecclesia (1999)

Modern theology has tended to recover the session as a constructive doctrine rather than as a controverted one. Barth’s treatment in Church Dogmatics IV/2 — the second part of his christology, the exaltation of the Son of Man — places the session at the center of what it means for human nature to have been taken up into God. The session is not the end of Christ’s work but the present mode of his work; he is, in his exalted humanity, the one who is for us in the presence of the Father. Douglas Farrow’s Ascension and Ecclesia is the most sustained recent treatment of the session and its ecclesiological implications: what it means to be the church of the absent-but-present Christ, suspended between the ascension and the parousia.

T. F. Torrance, drawing on Athanasius and the Cappadocians, recovers the patristic insight that the exalted human Jesus is, in his very humanity, the one mediator between God and humanity (1 Tim. 2:5). The session is not a doctrine about Christ’s geographical location; it is a doctrine about the human nature that is now in the presence of the Father on our behalf.

Strengths

• Recovers the doctrine as a constructive resource for thinking about the church, the sacraments, and Christian life
• Reorients the doctrine away from the spatial puzzles that dominated medieval and Reformation discussion

Weaknesses

• Some modern reconstructions, in their proper reaction against crude spatializations, can leave underdeveloped the simple New Testament point that the body of Christ, the body that suffered and rose, is there

Liberation

Tradition: Jon Sobrino, Christ the Liberator; James Cone, God of the Oppressed; Latin American base-community readings of Psalm 110

The liberation reading takes seriously the political register of Psalm 110, the psalm beneath the clause. The session is the announcement that this particular crucified man — the one Pilate executed, the one the powers of the world rejected — is now in the place of cosmic authority. The verdict of the powers has been overturned. The seat at the right hand is not the cushioned throne of a tame deity; it is the public scandal that the crucified is the king. The implication for the church is unflinching: every earthly power that wants to claim ultimacy is, by the session, demoted to the level of footstool material. The reign of Christ is not a private spiritual reality; it is a public historical one.

Strengths

• Restores the political and historical force of Psalm 110 to the doctrine
• Refuses to let the session become a piece of inert metaphysical furniture

Weaknesses

• Like all liberation readings, the strongest forms can press the political so hard that the trinitarian and eschatological dimensions thin out
• Must hold carefully that the demotion of the powers is real but not yet complete (the until of Ps. 110:1)

Wesleyan Voice

The Wesleyan tradition has held the session at the right hand simply and unfussily, in close continuity with Anglican formularies. The Articles of Religion (1784), Article III, drawn directly from the Anglican Article IV: “Christ did truly rise again from the dead, and took again his body, with all things appertaining to the perfection of man’s nature, wherewith he ascended into heaven, and there sitteth until he return to judge all men at the last day.” The clause is doctrinally settled Methodism. Wesley did not edit it out in 1784 when he made his other revisions of the Thirty-Nine Articles; it stands in the United Methodist Doctrinal Standards among the Restrictive Rules.

What Wesley brought to the session was less novel theological speculation than a thorough soteriological-experiential application. In his Explanatory Notes upon the New Testament on Hebrews 1:3, Wesley glosses the seated posture as the sign of completed sacrificial work and ongoing priestly intercession: Christ sat down, because the work is done, and intercedes, because the application of the work is ongoing. The exalted Christ is, in the Wesleyan account, the present resource of the believer’s life; the same Spirit by whom Christ was raised and exalted is the Spirit by whom the believer is regenerated, justified, sanctified, and made fit for glory. The session is not a doctrine that recedes into eschatological distance; it is the present basis of every act of grace.

The Methodist instinct, distilled across Wesley’s preaching and his brother’s hymns, has been to take the heavenly session as the ground of a heavenly life lived now. Christ is seated in glory; the believer is, in the Spirit, hidden with Christ in God (Col. 3:1–4); the daily life of holiness is the form that hiddenness takes on earth. To confess that Christ is seated at the right hand is therefore not to gesture at a distant location but to confess the resource of the present Christian life.

Hymnody

Charles Wesley’s most concentrated hymn on the session is “Hail the Day That Sees Him Rise” (1739), which moves from the ascent through to the seated reign: “There the glorious triumph waits, / Lift your heads, eternal gates! / Wide unfold the radiant scene, / Take the King of glory in!” The hymn unfolds Psalm 24 alongside Psalm 110, and ends with the seated Christ as the present advocate of his people.

“Rejoice, the Lord is King” (Charles, 1746) is the Methodist tradition’s most enduring hymn on the present reign of the seated Christ: “His kingdom cannot fail, / He rules o’er earth and heaven; / The keys of death and hell / Are to our Jesus given.” The refrain — “Lift up your heart, lift up your voice; / Rejoice, again I say, rejoice” — is sung from below to the one who reigns from above.

“Crown Him with Many Crowns” (Bridges and Thring, 19th c.; not Wesleyan in origin but central to Methodist worship) gathers the patristic and creedal language into a single hymnic confession of the seated Christ: “Crown him the Lord of years, / The Potentate of time.” Methodism has sung this hymn for generations as a confession of the present reign.

“At the Name of Jesus” (Caroline Maria Noel, 1870) puts Philippians 2 into singable form: “Bore it up triumphant, / With its human light, / Through all ranks of creatures, / To the central height, / To the throne of Godhead, / To the Father’s breast; / Filled it with the glory / Of that perfect rest.” The hymn names the session with unusual precision as the resting-place of the perfected human nature.

For the General Doxology — “Praise God, from whom all blessings flow…” — which closes Methodist worship in nearly every congregation, the session at the right hand is the implicit doctrinal premise: blessings flow from a Triune God whose Son, exalted, mediates them to the church.

Pastoral and Liturgical Use

The clause looks impossibly remote — a man seated on a throne above the heavens — and is in fact one of the most immediate of the creed’s confessions. Psalm 110:1, the verse beneath the clause, is sometimes called the great cross-reference of the New Testament because the apostles cited it more than any other Old Testament text. “The Lord said to my Lord, ‘Sit at my right hand.’” When the church repeats sedet ad dexteram, it is making, in three Latin words, the confession the apostles made on Pentecost: that the same Jesus who was crucified has been enthroned, and that this enthronement is the present state of the cosmos.

This is the place to address the geography of the clause. Where is Christ seated? Not on another planet. Not, as the medieval cosmology imagined, in the highest sphere of a layered universe. Not even, as the popular religious imagination still pictures, on a literal cushioned throne with feet on a literal footstool. To confess the right hand of the Father is to confess a condition, not a coordinate. The risen body of Jesus has been taken into the presence of the Father, into a participation in the Father’s authority that the Bible has no other vocabulary for than the language of the king’s right hand. To insist on the bodily realism (he ascended in his body; his body is now somewhere; we will see him bodily return) without collapsing into pre-Copernican spatial maps requires what the patristic tradition has always required: a doctrinal imagination that is neither crudely literal nor airily symbolic.

What Augustine gives the church pastorally is the move from where to what for. “Christ is now exalted above the heavens, but he still suffers on earth all the pain that we, the members of his body, have to bear… Why do we on earth not strive to find rest with him in heaven even now, through the faith, hope and love that unites us to him?” The head is in glory; the body is on earth; the two are not separate. To confess the session is therefore to confess that the church’s suffering is the present suffering of the exalted Christ — the Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me? of the road to Damascus is the abiding logic of the relation between the heavenly head and the earthly members. The hungry person you have not fed is the Christ at the right hand. The session and the works of mercy belong to a single doctrine.

This is also where Wesley’s General Rules — the simplest of all Methodist disciplines — find their full theological footing. First, do no harm. Second, do all the good you can. Third, attend upon all the ordinances of God. The three rules are not a moralism appended to the gospel. They are the form a heavenly life takes while it is still being lived on earth. The Christ who is seated at the right hand has not left his body behind; the body is living, on this side of the parousia, the life of its absent Head. To do no harm is to live the holiness of the seated Christ. To do all the good one can is to extend the works of the seated Christ. To attend upon the ordinances — the Supper, the Word, the prayers, the works of mercy — is to be drawn, week by week, into the company of the one who reigns. The General Rules are what the session looks like on a Tuesday morning.

The clause also gives the church a particular kind of confidence and a particular kind of humility. Confidence: the executive verdict of the universe has already been pronounced; Christ reigns; no contrary power is final. Humility: the reign is not yet visible to the powers that imagine themselves ultimate; the church lives in the interval between the ascension and the parousia; the interval is real; the suffering of the body is real; the absence of crude political vindication is part of what it means to live by faith and not by sight. The session is a doctrine of hope, but it is hope of a peculiar kind — the hope of a body whose head has already entered the future the body still awaits.

For the preacher: the homiletic temptation in this clause is to make Christ’s seatedness sound like passivity. He is not passive. The same Hebrews that names the seated Christ in 1:3 names him as the constantly interceding high priest in 7:25 and as the unfinished pioneer of the church’s pilgrimage in 12:2. The seated Christ is more active in the church’s life now than he was when he walked the roads of Galilee, not less. To preach this clause is to preach the present resource of the church’s life: a living Lord whose work is finished and whose intercession is unceasing.

Christ ascended the heights for us. Let us live a heavenly life of love in response.

Further Reading

• Psalm 110 — the Old Testament foundation of the doctrine of the session
• Acts 2:32–36; Acts 7:55–56 — apostolic preaching of the session
• Hebrews 1:3; 7:23–28; 10:11–14; 12:1–2 — the structural center of the New Testament’s session theology
• Ephesians 1:18–23; Philippians 2:9–11; Colossians 3:1–4 — the cosmic and ecclesial implications
• Augustine, Sermons 263 and 265 (on the Ascension); Letter 187 (to Dardanus, on the presence of God)
• John of Damascus, On the Orthodox Faith IV.2
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae III, q. 58 (“On the Sitting of Christ at the Right Hand of the Father”)
• Martin Luther, Confession Concerning Christ’s Supper (1528)
• Formula of Concord, Articles VII–VIII
• John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion II.16.14–15; IV.17.26–28
• Heidelberg Catechism, Questions 49–52
• The Articles of Religion of the United Methodist Church (1784), Article III
• John Wesley, Explanatory Notes upon the New Testament on Hebrews 1
• The General Rules of the Methodist Church (1743)
• Charles Wesley, “Hail the Day That Sees Him Rise” (1739); “Rejoice, the Lord is King” (1746)
• Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics IV/2 §64 (on the exaltation of the Son of Man)
• T. F. Torrance, The Mediation of Christ (Helmers & Howard, 1992)
• Douglas Farrow, Ascension and Ecclesia (T&T Clark, 1999) — the major recent monograph
• Gerrit Scott Dawson, Jesus Ascended: The Meaning of Christ’s Continuing Incarnation (T&T Clark, 2004)
• Jon Sobrino, Christ the Liberator (Orbis, 2001) — political reading of Psalm 110 and the session