Daniel 7:13–14 records a vision of one like a son of man coming with the clouds of heaven, presented before the Ancient of Days and given dominion, glory, and a kingdom, that all peoples, nations, and languages should serve him. His dominion is an everlasting dominion, which shall not pass away, and his kingdom one that shall not be destroyed. Formula of Concord, Solid Declaration, Article VIII, treats this as a prophetic description of exactly the exalted humanity the Formula's Christology defends: a genuinely human figure, son of man, receiving a dominion and an eternity that only God can rightly possess, presented directly before the Ancient of Days as one distinct from Him yet given what belongs to Him.
Psalm 110 supplies the companion text FC VIII cites constantly throughout Article VIII: the Lord says to my Lord, sit at my right hand, until I make your enemies your footstool. Christ himself, in the Gospels, uses this psalm to press the Pharisees on how David's son can also be David's Lord, a question that only the personal union of two natures in one person can answer. The Lord seated at the right hand of the Lord is the same figure Daniel sees receiving an everlasting dominion, and FC VIII binds these texts together as the scriptural foundation for the doctrine that the man Jesus, in and according to his human nature, has been exalted to that seat of universal authority.
| Term | What It Means |
|---|---|
| Session at the right hand | FC VIII's term for Christ's exaltation, understood not as a location but as the assumption, according to his human nature, of the full use of divine majesty, power, glory, and dominion, which he possessed from conception by virtue of the personal union but veiled during his humiliation. |
| The state of humiliation and the state of exaltation | FC VIII's distinction between the veiled use of divine majesty during Christ's earthly life, when he genuinely hungered, suffered, and died, and its full, public exercise following the resurrection and ascension. Both states belong to the one person who never ceased possessing both natures. |
| Ubiquity | The teaching, defended in Article VIII, that the human nature of Christ, by virtue of the personal union and the communication of attributes, is capable of a mode of presence that transcends ordinary bodily limitation, which is part of the Formula's ground for affirming the real presence of Christ's body and blood in the Sacrament. |
| Son of Man, Son of God | Daniel 7's title for the exalted figure given everlasting dominion, and the title Christ most frequently applies to himself in the Gospels. FC VIII treats the coexistence of this title with full divine dominion as further confirmation of the personal union it defends. |
Daniel's vision in chapter 7 is deliberately structured as a contrast to the four beasts that precede it, each representing a violent, predatory earthly kingdom. Against that backdrop, one like a son of man arrives, not clawing its way up from the sea like the beasts, but coming with the clouds of heaven, presented before the Ancient of Days. The contrast is the point: every human kingdom Daniel has just described rises through violence and eventually falls; this figure receives dominion, glory, and a kingdom as a gift, presented directly to him, and that dominion is explicitly described as one that shall not pass away and shall not be destroyed.
FC VIII reads this vision as prophetic confirmation of the very Christology the Formula spends Article VIII defending against two errors. The figure is unmistakably a son of man, a human figure, and yet he receives what no mere human figure has ever received or could ever rightly hold: an everlasting dominion over all peoples, nations, and languages, granted by the Ancient of Days himself. The vision will not resolve into either a merely exalted human being who happens to receive great honors, nor into a divine figure whose humanity is incidental. It insists on both at once, exactly as the Formula insists on both at once.
Psalm 110 opens with a formula that would have been immediately strange to its original hearers: the Lord says to my Lord. David, the reigning king, refers to another figure as his own Lord, using the same divine name twice in a single verse for two distinct addressees. Christ presses exactly this strangeness in the Gospels, asking the Pharisees how the Christ can be both David's son, meaning a human descendant in David's royal line, and David's Lord, meaning someone David himself worships and obeys. The Pharisees have no answer, because the only coherent answer requires the doctrine FC VIII will later articulate: one person possessing two natures, fully David's human descendant and fully the Lord David worships.
FC VIII cites Psalm 110's session at the right hand repeatedly throughout Article VIII as the scriptural anchor for Christ's exaltation. The right hand of God is not, for the Formula, a location in space but a way of describing the full, unrestricted exercise of divine majesty, power, and dominion. What makes this session remarkable is precisely that it is a human being, the man Jesus, who is described as sitting there, according to his human nature now openly exercising what the personal union had given him from the moment of his conception, though it remained largely veiled during his life among us.
FC VIII's distinction between the state of humiliation and the state of exaltation is not a claim that Christ's human nature gained something new at the resurrection that it previously lacked entirely. The Formula insists the personal union, and with it the communication of divine attributes to the human nature, existed from the moment of Christ's conception. What changed at the exaltation was not possession but exercise: during his earthly life Christ genuinely hungered, genuinely wept at Lazarus's tomb, genuinely suffered and died, voluntarily not making full and constant use of the divine majesty that was nonetheless truly his according to the personal union. The state of exaltation is the public, unrestricted exercise of what had been veiled.
This distinction matters because it protects both halves of the Gospel's testimony without collapsing either into the other. If Christ's divine majesty were fully and constantly exercised during his earthly life, the genuine reality of his hunger, weariness, temptation, and suffering would be a performance rather than a truth, and the comfort of Hebrews, that we have a high priest who has been tempted in every way as we are, would collapse. If, on the other hand, the human nature of Christ never comes to share in the full exercise of divine majesty, then Daniel 7's everlasting dominion and Psalm 110's session at the right hand describe someone other than the man who hungered and wept, and the promise that our own humanity has been exalted in Christ evaporates.
The son of man Daniel saw receiving an everlasting dominion before the Ancient of Days is the same man of whom Psalm 110 says, the Lord says to my Lord, sit at my right hand, and the same man who genuinely hungered in the wilderness, genuinely wept at a friend's grave, and genuinely bled and died on a Roman cross, all without ever ceasing to be, according to the personal union, true God from true God. The dominion that shall not pass away belongs to a king who knows exactly what it costs to be human, because he was fully human while purchasing that dominion, and he now exercises it, openly and forever, for the sake of the very people whose nature he shared.