God is still incarnate

"He is very God and has ascended into the heavens and taken his seat at the Father’s right hand in glory, not by discarding his body but by uniting it to spirit in the perfection of one Godhead, just as our own bodies, though 'sown as natural bodies' for now, 'will be raised spiritual; though sown in corruption for now, will be raised in incorruption; though sown in mortality for now will be raised in immortality.'
    "Now if such is the case with our [own] bodies, how much more with that holy, inexpressible, incomparable pure body united with God [(ἐκεῖνο τὸ ἅγιον καὶ ἀνεκδιὴγητον καὶ ἀσύγκριτον καὶ ἀκραιφνὲς τῷ θεῷ συνηνωμένον)], the one body in its final uniqueness?  The apostle testifies to this and says, 'Even if we knew Christ after the flesh, now know we him no more.'  It is not that he separated his flesh from his Godhead; as it was and united with his Godhead, no longer fleshly but spiritual, as the scripture says, 'according to the Spirit of holiness after the resurrection from the dead of your Lord Jesus Christ.'  At the same time [he displayed] this flesh divine, impassible and yet having suffered—and having been buried, having risen, having ascended in glory, coming to judge the quick and the dead [(τοῦτον ὁμοῦ θεὸν ἔχουσα, ἀπαθῆ καὶ παθόντα, καὶ ταφέντα καὶ ἀναστάντα, καὶ ἀνελθόντα ἐν δόξῃ, ἐρχόμενον κρῖναι ζῶντας καὶ νεκροὺς)]. . . ."

     St. Epiphanius of Salamis, De fide 17.7-11 (at the close of the Panarion), trans. Frank Williams (The Panarion of Epiphanius of Salamis, Books II and III, De fide, 2nd rev. ed. (Leiden, Brill, 2012), 675-676).  For an accessible modern (if not the standard critical) edition of the Greek see Opera 3, ed. Dindorf (Leipzig:  Weigel, 1861), p. 578 l. 17-p. 579 l. 16.

"In the groves of their academy, at the end of every visto, you see nothing but the gallows."

     Edmund Burke, Reflections on the revolution in France (1790), 2^nd ed. (London:  J. Dodsley, 1790), 126-127.  According to the OED, visto was, through the end of the 18th century, an acceptable way of spelling vista.

"do not imagine, that those who make the noise are the only inhabitants of the field"

"Because half a dozen grashoppers [sic] under a fern make the field ring with their importunate chink, whilst thousands of great cattle, reposed beneath the shadow of the British oak, chew the cud and are silent, pray do not imagine, that those who make the noise are the only inhabitants of the field; that of course, they are many in number; or that, after all, they are other than the little shrivelled, meagre, hopping, though loud and troublesome insects of the hour."

     Edmund Burke, Reflections on the revolution in France (1790), 2^nd ed. (London:  J. Dodsley, 1790), 126-127.

God is still incarnate

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     "The essential teaching of Scripture, that which [above all others] must continue to elicit faith on our part [(celui que doit retenir notre foi)], is that by the triumph of his Resurrection and Ascension, Christ left this present world, corrupted by sin and destined for destruction, in order to enter into the new world in which God reigns within [(en)] matter, in which the Spirit permeates matter by means of a sovereign and transformative power [(et où l’Esprit pénètre souverainement la matière transformée)].  [A] world real with (like the very body of Christ) a physical reality, but [a] world which, however, exists [for now] in promise—or better in first fruits—only, in the body of the risen Christ alone, a world which will be definitively constituted and revealed only at the end of time, when the 'new heavens' and the 'new earth' will appear.
     "While awaiting this day, the glorified [physical] body of Christ exists somewhere, real, much more real than our ruined [(caduc)] world, because it alone possesses the true Life.  But it is vain to seek 'where,' just as it is wrong to imagine it 'far away.'  This new world, in which Christ reigns and awaits us, is not far from us, it is not outside of our world, it transcends it.  It is of another order than it, is distinguished from it by quality more than by quantity, and we have access to it by faith and the sacraments, in a contact mysterious but more real and more intimate than any contact with this [(notre)] present world can be.
     "When, therefore, we say and believe with the Church that the glorious Christ has ascended to heaven, where he resides at the side of [(près de)] his Father, we understand thereby that he has entered forever into the spiritual, new, definitive world of which he is the first cell, [a] world inaccessible to our senses and to our imagination, but sovereignly real, much more real than this [(notre)] present one.  And we think spontaneously, with the bulk of the earliest of Christian witnesses, that he inaugurated this new world from the day of his Resurrection, when he was snatched from the tomb by the Spirit in order to be exalted at the side of [(près de)] the Father."

     Pierre Benoit, O.P., "L'ascension," Revue biblique 56, no. 2 (avril 1949):  202-203 (161-203).

Late-modern American antinomianism

"as Luther wields the language, 'the law' is not coterminous with ethics or 'the gospel' with doctrine as something other than ethics; these supposed equivalencies were invented very recently, to accommodate late-modern America's antinomianism impulse by making it appear that ethical decisions cannot impact doctrinal faithfulness."

     Robert W. Jenson, letter to the Rt. Rev. _____ (an ELCA bishop), 20 September 2004, as reproduced here.  I have not yet been able to confirm (though I do not doubt) the authenticity or the accuracy of this reproduction.

"these spiritual contacts of the sacramental dispensation"

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     "If Jesus says to [Mary] Magdalene, '"Do not hold on to me"' (Jn 20:17), this is not simply because she must not hold him back because he must go to the Father.  It is rather because the new state into which he has entered by the Resurrection does not allow for the same familiar relations that had been permitted before his death[, as at, for example, Lk 7:37 ff., and Jn 11:2 and 12:3]. . . . Already there can no longer be any question of rendering him the same [corporeal] offices of devotion, for his Body is in a new state that [however] has not yet been definitively consummated by the Session at the right hand of the Father [(et qui n’a pas encore reçu sa consécration définitive par la session auprès du Père)].  This is what the clause '"because I have not yet ascended to the Father"' signifies, i.e. that he has not yet taken complete possession of his celestial glory.  Is it to say that that one will be able to touch him after his ascent to the right hand of the [(montée auprès du)] Father?  Without a doubt.  In this sense the point is less the scene of Jn 20:27 (in which [such] contact takes on a different signification) than that of Jn 6:62 ff., in which the discourse on the Eucharist is associated with [(se clôture par)] a clear allusion to the Ascension and a significant opposition between the Spirit that gives life and the flesh which is useless.  From the rapprochement of these two texts it follows that, by the Ascension, the Body of Christ has taken full possession of the spiritual state that characterizes it as permeated by the Spirit [(qui le pénètre de l’Esprit)] and makes it possible for him to dispense [the Spirit], and under the form of the Eucharist above all.  Before Jesus was glorified, the Spirit could not be given (Jn 7:39).  This means to say that after his glorification by the Resurrection and return to the right hand of the [(auprés du)] Father, he will possess in his very Body the plenitude of the Spirit, whom he will be able to dispense by means of the sacraments.[1]  One sees this by the appearance that follows [(suit)] his ascent to the right hand of the [(sa montée auprès du)] Father, during which he gives to his disciples the Spirit who pardons sins (Jn 20:22 ff.).  It is doubtless to these spiritual contacts of the sacramental dispensation that John refers when he makes Jesus tell [Mary] Magdalene that she must not touch him for as long as he has not re-ascended to the Father; she will be able to do so anew [however] when he returns to her, as to all the faithful, under the form of his spiritualized Body that gives life.[2]

Pierre Benoit, O.P., "L'ascension," Revue biblique 56, no. 2 (avril 1949):  183-184 (161-203), italics mine.  Re. suit above, "John places the appearances of Jesus to the disciples (20:19 ff., 20:24 f.; 21) after his return to the Father (20:17)" (197).  Benoit then goes on to cite the "in heaven" of Mt 28:18 as well as 1 Cor 15:8, according to which Paul had an indubitably post-Ascension experience of the risen Christ every bit "as real and physical for him as for [the first witnesses]," in support of his contention that "there is no incompatibility between the glorious transfer of the body of Christ into the divine sphere and episodic manifestations of it on earth," since "for him as for them it is the Christ risen and already ascended to his Father who manifested himself by resubmitting to their senses the whole physical reality of his spiritualized body" (197-198).

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[1]"In order to become the dispenser of th[e divine] life [in the intimacy of the Father and the Spirit from which the Word-become-flesh of course never himself ceased to live], he had to pass through death and conquer at the price of his blood the glory that he had always had in God (Jn 17:1-5).  It is only by the cross and the triumph that crowns it that Christ becomes the appointed dispenser of this divine life.  In order to send to his own the assistance of the Paraclete, he first had to go away in order to fetch him from the [(s’en aller pour le quérir auprès du)] Father (Jn 16:7, 14:26).  Then, having entered into his glory, he will be able to send him and even to return with him and the Father by a mysterious habitation in the heart[s] of his faithful (Jn 14:3, 18-23, 28; 16:16).  One will find an analogous exegesis of the Noli me tangere in St. Cyril of Alexandria (PG 74, col. 696)."

[2]"Note in the Eucharistic discourse the frequent expression, “‘the true Bread. . . . which comes down from heaven and gives life to the world’” (Jn 6:32 ff., 50 ff., 58).  It is a question of the spiritual re-descent of Christ after the Ascension rather than of his first descent in the Incarnation (vv. 38, 42, 46)[, as closely compenetrating as those two descents are]."

"the first cell of the new cosmos"

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     "The whole of Pauline teaching is oriented to this corporeal resurrection of Christ as to one of its cardinal points.  In Christ, and in him alone for the moment, has already been effected the cosmic renewal that must characterize the eschatological age.  The risen body of Jesus is the first cell of the new cosmos.  In him the Spirit has already taken possession of matter, as he must do of all creation after the parousia, when Christ 'will recapitulate' definitively all things.  For as long as the present age continues, the bodies of other men do not yet participate in this triumph; they remain submitted to the law of death and corruption.  But his faithful are already united to his [body] by the mystical union of baptism and the eucharist; with him they have died and been raised.  What is for him a state physical and definitive is for them a state mystical and expectant [(mystique et qui attend son achèvement)] but no less real.  It is on these exceptionally concrete footings that the profoundly realistic moral and mystical theologies [(la morale et la mystique si réalistes)] of St. Paul are constructed.  If the bodies of Christians are already now in his eyes the 'temples of the Holy Spirit', if they are sanctified and purified right down to the level of [(jusque dans)] their physical passions, this is because they are united by means of the sacraments with the glorified body of their master.  They are his members and preparing to rejoin him in his celestial existence by a [corporeal] resurrection of their own, which will take place at the time of his parousia."

     Pierre Benoit, O.P., "L'ascension," Revue biblique 56, no. 2 (avril 1949):  181-182 (161-203).