F. F. Bruce, "At the right hand of God"
Paul does not often use the expression about the right hand of God; when he does so, it is probably because it had already become familiar to Christians when they confessed their faith in the Christ "who died, . . . who was raised from the dead, who is at the right hand of God,. . . " —as Paul puts it in Romans viii. 34, apparently quoting such a confession of faith. . . . Like his fellow-Jews, he knew "the right hand of God" to be a metaphor denoting supreme authority, but he may have preferred to use it sparingly lest some of his Gentile hearers or readers should imagine that it had physical or local significance. It is, of course, difficult to think or speak of exaltation or supremacy without the use of spatial imagery. Christian astrophysicists who recite the historic creeds are not charged with inconsistency for employing the terminology of the three-decker universe; this terminology provides serviceable metaphors for the expression of transcendence, or of communication in both directions between God and man. Even in the first century such terminology was recognized by many thinking people as metaphorical, and among those thinking people Paul is entitled to be included.
