In an interesting essay titled “He is Outwith the World…that He Might Fill All Things” (in This is My Body, Baker Academic, 2008, 127-139.), Thomas J. Davis suggests that Calvin’s frequent emphasis on the spatial distance between Christ and the world is actually an accommodated way of speaking which metaphorically communicates an indescribable reality in a way we can understand it. The key to this interpretation of Calvin, for Davis, is found in certain passages in his commentaries.

Davis rightly points out that Calvin’s Eucharistic theology is conditioned by the dialectical tension of absence and presence. There are two seemingly antithetical points which Calvin was most concerned to uphold: 1. “[I]t is absolutely essential for the ascension to be understood as the removal of Christ’s body from earth to heaven so that it is corporeally absent from believers. Calvin’s understanding of salvation depended on this.” And 2. “[I]t is absolutely essential that believers have access to the body of Christ in heaven so that it is present corporeally to them. Calvin’s understanding of salvation depended on this.” (130)

We see both points being affirmed throughout Calvin’s writings. The clearest affirmation of the first point may be found in the Consensus Tigurinus (which Davis, following Paul Rorem, rightly sees as a compromise on Calvin’s part which demonstrates the limit to which he would allow himself to be taken in conciliatory efforts with Bullinger and the Reformed in Zurich, rather than a full disclosure of his own position). Calvin viewed spatial location as essential to a human body. And since Christ must ever remain truly human for us and for our salvation, he must remain a locally circumscribed human. (132)

Nevertheless, point 2 is just as important for Calvin. For salvation to be a reality for us, we must have access to Christ himself. Even though Christ has ascended, we must possess him in reality. While Calvin clearly affirmed that Christ is located in heaven, and even states in his comment on Acts 1.11 that this has to do with spatial distance, he also makes some comments which imply that this talk of “spatial distance” is but an accommodated or metaphorical way of speaking (133-134)

While, for Calvin, the account of the ascension condemns any effort to seek for a corporeal presence of Christ in local proximity to ourselves, nevertheless, he often stated that the right hand of God to which Christ ascended is not a particular place but a metaphorical description of the authority given to Christ (as in, for instance, his comment on Ephesians 1.20). There is a most intriguing passage to this effect in Calvin’s comment on Ephesians 4.10, where he suggests that the language of spatial distance is indeed a form of accommodated speach:

When Christ is said to be in heaven, we must not take it that he dwells among the spheres and numbers the stars. Heaven denotes a place higher than all the spheres, which was appointed to the Son of God after his resurrection. Not that it is strictly a place outside of the world, but we cannot speak of the Kingdom of God except in our own way.

Davis comments on this passage:

What I take this passage to mean is that talk of place, in relation to heaven or the kingdom of God, was figurative for Calvin. We speak, Calvin seems to be saying, of heaven up above and separated from us by space, not because that is the way it is, but because that is the only language we have to understand how the world is separated from heaven. (135)

Davis’ conclusion in this regard is worth quoting at length:

How, then, does this finally help with the dilemma of Calvin’s insistence that Christians partake of the true body of Christ for salvation while at the same time maintaining that that body is absent in space? How did the notion of a Christian’s spirit being lifted to heaven to feast on Christ there make sense to Calvin? For, if one is going to insist that humanity, to remain truly human… must retain its limitations, it makes no more sense that a human spirit can ascend to heaven than that a human body can be ubiquitous if–and this is the big if–the notion of space on both ends, the space between heaven and earth, is thought of as a literal space with a straight line being the shortest distance between point A and point B.

But there is at least reason to entertain the hypothesis that Calvin did not mean space literally; he said, as we read above, that the talk of such space is actually an accommodated way of speaking. As such, this accommodated language is the only language Calvin thought could be profitably used; it is a type of language that reflects human ways of speaking and knowing rather than one that corresponds perfectly to divine reality…

Here, then, is my hypothesis regarding Calvin’s language on ascension: Separation from Christ is not a function of distance; rather, distance is a metaphor for separation. In other words, separation from Christ is not a function of physical removal, but it is the language of physical removal that best conveys to the human mind the reality of separation. To put it yet another way, the notion of distance was Calvin’s way of speaking about the radical divide that separates the heavenly from the earthly, the divine from the human. (136)

According to Davis, this way of understanding Calvin’s frequent talk about spatial distance opens a way to see yet more convergence between Luther and Calvin on the question of Eucharistic presence:

If this can be shown to be a viable reading of Calvin’s thought, it means, I think, that Calvin and Luther were somewhat closer on the point of the mechanics of Christ’s presence in the Eucharist than has previously been thought. Though it has been pointed out how, in some ways, their thought might have had points of contact, it has mostly been assumed that Calvin stood closer to Zwingli than to Luther on the issue of the ascended body. My suggestion is that it is possible to see Calvin as crossing hemispheres, and even on this matter being, as he always claimed, much more of a disciple of Luther than has been recognized. (137)

Right or Wrong? I’m not quite sure at this point. At the very least, it’s certainly an attractive hypothesis, and I think it opens some intriguing possibilities.