The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics

By Hans Urs von Balthasar

 

This volume initiates von Balthasar's study of the biblical vision and understanding of God's glory. Starting with the theophanies of the Patriarchal period, it shows how such glory is most fully expressed in the graciousness of the Covenant relationship between and Israel. But the breaking of that relationship by Israel means that in the later books of the Old Testament, the divine glory is seen in God's willingness to bear with his people in the dark side of their history. There is no final version of God's glory in the Old Testament. In the 500 years before Christ the Covenant relation is mofe idea than reality. The vision of the transcendent glory of God which is developed in the later writings, is only fragmentary. It will find its strange and unexpected fulfillment in the new Covenant.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ignatius Press
• Release date: Nov 26, 2012
• ISBN: 9781681492063

Hans Urs von Balthasar

Hans Urs von Balthasar (1905–1988) was a Swiss theologian widely regarded as one of the greatest theologians and spiritual writers of modern times. Named a cardinal by Pope John Paul II, he died shortly before being formally inducted into the College of Cardinals. He wrote over one hundred books, including Prayer, Heart of the World, Mary for Today, Love Alone Is Credible, Mysterium Paschale and his major multi-volume theological works: The Glory of the Lord, Theo-Drama and Theo-Logic.

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THE GLORY OF THE LORD

Hans Urs von Balthasar

THE GLORY OF THE LORD:

A THEOLOGICAL AESTHETICS

By Hans Urs von Balthasar

VOLUMES OF THE COMPLETE WORK

Edited by Joseph Fessio, S.J., and John Riches

1.    Seeing the Form

2.    Studies in Theological Style: Clerical Styles

3.    Studies in Theological Style: Lay Styles

4.    The Realm of Metaphysics in Antiquity

5.    The Realm of Metaphysics in the Modern Age

6.    Theology: The Old Covenant

7.    Theology: The New Covenant

The publishers gratefully acknowledge the support of the Pro Helvetia Foundation in the preparation of the English translation.

THE GLORY OF THE LORD

A THEOLOGICAL AESTHETICS

BY

HANS URS VON BALTHASAR

VOLUME VI: THEOLOGY:

THE OLD COVENANT

Translated by Brian McNeil C.R.V.

and Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis

Edited by John Riches

IGNATIUS PRESS    SAN FRANCISCO

Copyright © T&T Clark, 1991

First Published 1991

T&T Clark, 59 George Street, Edinburgh EH2 2LQ, Scotland

T&T Clark is an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers

Authorised English Translation of

Herrlichkeit: Eine theologische, Asthetik, Band III, 2:

Theologie, Teil I: Alter Bund

Copyright © Johannes Verlag, Einsiedeln, 1967

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of T&T Clark.

This Edition Published under License from T&T Clark by Ignatius Press, San Francisco

ISBN 978-0-89870-248-4

Library of Congress Control Number 82-23552

Typeset in Bembo type by Beljan, Ltd., Dexter, Michigan

Printed in the United States of America

CONTENTS

VOLUME VI:

THEOLOGY: THE OLD COVENANT

Introduction

I. GOD’S GLORY AND MAN

A.    GLORY

1.    Dialectic of Sensory Manifestation

a.    Appearance, Kabod

b.    Knowing and Not Knowing

c.    Seeing and Not Seeing

d.    Form and Non-form

e.    Dazzling Darkness

f.    Abode and Event

g.    Dialectic of Fire

2.    The Divine ‘I’

a.    Integration

b.    Power

c.    Word

d.    Holiness and Name

e.    Face

3.    Cosmic Liturgy

B.    THE IMAGE

1.    The Image as the Creature’s State of Suspension

a.    The Figure of God’s Hands

b.    Crowned with Glory

c.    The Suspension of the Image

2.    The Image: To be a World Before God

a.    A Sketch Book

b.    The Great Theatre of the World

c.    The Splendour of Power

d.    Wisdom of Life

e.    Eros and Worldly Beauty

f.    The World’s Final Dance

C.    GRACE AND COVENANT

1.    Concrete Glory

2.    God Allows His People Space

a.    Berith: Covenant

b.    Chesed, Chen, Rachamin: Kindness, Favour, Mercy

c.    Sedek, Sedaka: Right Conduct in Faithfulness

d.    Mishpat: Right which Comes into Effect as Salvation

e.    Emeth, Emuna: Proved Excellence

f.    Shalom: Pacified Realm of Salvation

3.    Existence Outside Oneself

a.    A Dwelling-Place in God’s Life

b.    Contemporaneity

c.    Reaching Backwards and Forwards

d.    Integration of Glorification

II. THE STAIRWAY OF OBEDIENCE

A.    THE BROKEN COVENANT

1.    Sin and Malediction

2.    Sheol and God’s Mobility

B.    THE OBEDIENCE OF THE PROPHETS

1.    Abraham, Moses, Saul

2.    Early Prophecy

3.    Amos and Hosea

4.    Isaiah

5.    Jeremiah

6.    Ezekiel

7.    Liturgies of Lament

8.    Job

9.    Deutero-Isaiah

III. THE LONG TWILIGHT

A.    THEOLOGIA GLORIAE

1.    Glory Ahead

a.    The Glorious Image of Jerusalem

b.    Messianic Hope

c.    Poor Before God

2.    Glory Above

a.    Daniel

b.    At the Throne of glory

c.    Emphasis on Man

d.    The Barrier of Judgment

3.    Glory Anticipated

a.    Success and Danger of the Wisdom Literature.

b.    Ben Sirach

c.    The Book of Wisdom

B.    THE PRESENT DAY WITHOUT GLORY

1.    The Empty Time

2.    The Speech Event

3.    The Blood Event

C.    ARGUMENTUM EX PROPHETIA

CONCLUSION

INTRODUCTION

1. TRANSITION TO THE CONCLUDING THEME

With this concluding volume, in three parts, we arrive at the place towards which the whole work has been tending: to the theology of the glory of the living God, who ‘in many and various ways spoke of old to our fathers by the prophets’ and ‘in these last days speaks to us by the Son, . . . the splendour of his glory and the very stamp of his nature’ (Heb 1.1ff.). The present volume, therefore, looks back directly to the first volume which, by way of introduction, outlined a theological aesthetics as an aisthēsis—a ‘beholding’ of the glory that reveals itself. From the outset we insisted on the preliminary character of that first volume, because the theological act is shaped by its content, to which it attains only in an act of transcendence. This transcending occurs not only in the general philosophical sense that applies to every form of knowing, but in the specifically theological sense according to which every act of ‘beholding’ the living God presupposes a ‘transport’ of the creature beyond itself and its natural cognitive faculties. For the creature such transport bears the name of ‘grace’, which enables the creature to withstand the splendour of the Lord’s glory as he reveals himself to it.

If, in place of ‘the Lord’s glory’ we were to say ‘God’s divinity’, then it would be evident that nothing can be the formal object of the believer’s perception of revelation except God, in so far as he is God and not, for instance, in so far as he is the horizon of the world’s origin and goal, since in this respect God is the object of philosophy or ‘natural theology’.¹ It becomes evident, therefore, that in spite of the fact that even though God uses creaturely guises to speak and act throughout Holy Scripture, what is essentially at stake is solely man’s encounter with the divinity or glory of God. In this respect we can agree with Oetinger when he says: ‘God’s glory constitutes not only the chief content, but also the formal foundational character of Scripture.’² This glory (Herrlichkeit) of God’s—his sublimeness (Hehrsein) and lordliness (Herrsein), which are sovereignly active both in himself and in his self-disclosure—is (on the basis of all the analogies of being that doubtless exist between God and his creatures, and also on the basis of the many ways in which grace trains the creature to be capable of confronting this glory at all) precisely what constitutes the distinctive property of God, that which for all eternity distinguishes him from all that is not God; this is his ‘wholly-other-ness’, which he can communicate only in such a way that, even as it is communicated, it remains his and only his: ἀμεθέϰτως μετέχεται.³ In a biblical sense this means that, the deeper a creature is allowed to encounter God’s glory, the more this creature will long to extol this glory as being exalted over itself and over all creation. Such is Mary in her Magnificat. The deeper a creature is allowed to penetrate into God’s opened realm, the more it will understand grace to be grace. And the more deeply it attains to a real, cognizant understanding of God’s divineness, the more clearly does it realise that God’s love transcends all comprehension: γνῶναι τὴν ὑπεϱβάλλουσαν τῆς γνώσεως ἀγάπην—‘to know the love which surpasses knowledge’ (Eph 3.19). Succumbat ergo humana infirmitas gloriae Dei et in explicandis operibus misericordiae ejus imparem se semper inveniat.⁴

There is no dodging this paradox, which begins with the self-communication of the Wholly Other and ends with the thanksgiving of the creature that has been overtaken. If, under pretext that God’s paradox is too steep for him and also too unfruitful because insoluble, a Christian were to turn away from it and seek his alleged salvation by turning exclusively to his fellow creatures (Christ’s mission has, after all, directed him towards creatures!), such a Christian would, for himself, have already stepped outside the proper sphere of revelation. A Christian encounters his neighbour in a Christian sense only when he has experienced in the ‘fear of God’ something of the wholly-other measure of the love of the Lord God and then attempts to love his neighbour with all humility according to this unattainable measure. Relations among men are as such already established upon the ‘dialogical’ level, since men commune with each other in virtue of their common nature.

God’s relationship to the world, however, can presuppose no such prior communion, for even the created world, in its non-necessariness, points back to an abyss of free and sovereign lordliness. Any philosophy which would not, or would no longer, press on to this experience would rightly fall victim to the criticism of Karl Barth. If God speaks his word to created men, surely it is because he has given them an understanding which, with God’s grace, can achieve the act of hearing and comprehending. But if it is really God’s word and self-communication that they are to hear and understand, then this can surely not occur on the basis of a neutral foreknowledge about what ‘words’ mean or what ‘truth’ is. Such encounter with God cannot take place on a dialogical plane which has been opened in advance; it can occur only by virtue of a primary sense of being overawed by the undialogical presupposition of the dialogue that has started, namely, the divinity or glory of God. If this shock did not take place then the whole conversation would rest on a foundation of untruth. In so far as God sends forth his word in omnipotence, this word has the power to take to itself and keep the person whom it has struck: his creatureliness quakes to its foundation and, so threatened, he would like to flee from the spot with closed eyes. But the word has the power to bring him to give the answer required by obedience. However, the first impact of divinity can never be spared him, a shock which will then penetrate and affect all succeeding speeches and replies. One may become God’s familiar, but one can never get used to him. ‘The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom’, but also: ‘to fear the Lord is wisdom’s full measure’ and its ‘crown’ (Sir 1.14, 16, 18). This is why it will not do to delimit the object of theology with the concept of ‘mysteries’, as if formally it consisted of ‘truths’ that lie beyond the ken of the human mind and must therefore be believed, in order then to be understood in some measure as ‘a magnificent order, a higher heavenly world . . . , a masterpiece of God’s many-splendoured wisdom.’⁵ What is at stake here is not primarily truths, but the living God in his glory; he himself is all truth, and he suffices.

It is significant that at decisive places in Scripture God’s ‘glory’ (kabod) manifests itself before God’s word is heard. This is the case with the great epiphany on Sinai, the vision in the burning bush, the visions through which Isaiah and Ezekiel received their vocations, the visions on Tabor and at Damascus, and finally the apparition of the Son of Man at the beginning of the Apocalypse. The fact that God’s glory at first appears without any words makes clear whence it is that it comes and the consequent paths that God’s word will have to take. Such glory without words is, in effect, the apparition of him who, in his utter differentness, must be perceived in his reality and truth before his address can be heard. Concerning the word, man always thinks he has a certain foreknowledge of it deriving from the dialogical sphere. But, when confronted by the appearance of God’s glory, ‘Moses falls to his knees and bows his face toward the earth’ (Ex 34.8), Elijah veils his face (1 Kg 19.13), Isaiah considers himself lost (Is 6.5), Ezekiel falls with his face to the ground (Ez 1.28), Daniel is oppressed in spirit (7.15) and sinks in a swoon with his face to the earth (10.9), the Apostles on Tabor are ‘beside themselves’ (Mk 9.6), ‘drowsy’ (Lk 9.32), in great fear (Mt 17.6) at the sight of it; Paul is thrown to the ground and blinded (Acts 9.4, 9), and John falls as if dead at the feet of the appearing Lord (Rev 1.17). The creature experiences its limit and in its finitude undergoes a death; hence the saying that traverses Scripture: a man cannot see God and remain alive (Ex 19.21; 33.20; Lev 16.2; Num 4.20; Jg 6.22; Is 6.5). But when it does occur, the event is greeted with almost unbelieving amazement (Gen 32.31; Dt 5.24) as a unique grace (Ex 24.10f; Num 12.7f.; Dt 34.10). From his death man is put back on his feet by the spirit of God himself (Ez 2.2); man encounters God’s word not in his own power but through the power of God’s grace. The biblical scenes we have enumerated show only by way of example what applies to every hearer of God’s word: he perceives God by being transported outside of himself; he hears and grasps God in God and through God. Whatever happens in the sphere of the revelation of the living God takes place in an arena which has been opened by God and has been made accessible to man beyond any claims of his mere ‘nature.’ Only where God wills to take up his habitation with the chosen people—only in a place that belongs to God, therefore—does a covenant relationship become possible, an existence according to God’s instructions (torah), a holiness within the space of God’s own holiness. And, in the great exemplary lives, the investiture with a mission follows in each case immediately on the vision of God’s glory: Moses, Elijah, the biblical Prophets and Paul are men that have been expropriated as a result of their visions; they are men who have been conscripted for total obedience, instruments of God’s word and action. In a secondary sense, as we shall see, even the whole liturgical and sacral institutions of the priestly writings can be traced back to the epiphany of the glory on Horeb; but, precisely by virtue of this institution, which perennially represents the reality of the Covenant, Israel can live as the people that has been chosen by God from among all other peoples and been led beyond itself and introduced into the sphere of God.

Even before man is addressed, however, or before any grace, promise or demand is granted him, the appearance of the absolute Subject is never abstract or without a relationship to the human party or parties involved. The glory of the God who disclosed himself always reveals his holiness as well (however we may wish to define it), and thus it also discloses the full unholiness of the person beholding the glory: ‘Woe is me! For I am lost; for I am a man of unclean lips’ (Is 6.5). ‘When Simon Peter saw that, he fell down at Jesus’ knees, saying, Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord ’ (Lk 5.8). For Paul the voice comes out immediately from the blinding light: ‘Why do you persecute me? It hurts you to kick against the goads’ (Acts 26.14). Ezekiel sees the glory already in the colours of judgment, and Daniel likewise (Dan 7.9f.), and the glorified Son of Man seen by John also has the figure of a judge (Rev 1.13-16). It is not possible to enjoy a reposeful aesthetic contemplation of the divine glory, a contemplation that would consider God ‘in himself’ and thus could dispense with the opposition between God’s holiness and the unholiness of the world, of which the contemplator is the mathematical exponent, as it were. Glory is the intruding lordliness of him who comes to confront the world, both judging it and gracing it. It is this that distinguishes the biblical reality from the epiphanies of gods outside the Bible.

2. THE THEMES OF BIBLICAL AESTHETICS

If our thinking is to be obedient to biblical revelation we will in no way attempt to detach the theme of glory from the context of revelation for the sake of which we are studying the theme in the first place; and, in any event, this is a context which, in all its phases and aspects, is coloured by the emerging glory of the Lord. Other themes that suggest themselves simultaneously with and subsequently to the theme of glory (and we will have to discuss these also) can in no way be isolated from this glory, to be dealt with elsewhere. This applies even to themes that occupy a relatively autonomous sphere. No theme of revelation can be isolated from the field of theological aesthetics. And if other Old Testament themes at first appear to enjoy a certain independence alongside the theme of glory (for instance, the theme of creation, life in the world, man, and, further, the theme of the erecting of a valid order between God and creature, starting on God’s initiative), even then these sets of themes can never, for the biblical thinker, become distanced from the realm of God’s lordship (Herrschaft) or, thus, from God’s glory (Herrlichkeit). Indeed, the historical development of revelation shows all these themes to be more and more tightly intertwined, to the point of becoming inextricable.

A second theme of theological aesthetics would, therefore, be the theme of God’s creaturely partner, who from the first pages of Scripture is referred to as his ‘image and likeness’. Now, the theme of ‘image’ is obviously something new, different from the theme of ‘glory’; nevertheless, the relationship between them is from the outset unmistakable. In the first place, it belongs to God’s lordliness for him to be able to set an image of himself over against himself. In the second place, if this image is indeed to resemble its archetype, certain traits of glory must intrinsically be proper to it (Ps 8). And finally, the whole movement of revelation has it as its goal to make image and glory coincide in Jesus Christ.

Thus, to the primal tension between ‘splendour’ and ‘form’⁶ proper to an inner-worldly aesthetics there corresponds at the highest biblical level a tension between the ‘formless’ (Dt 4.12) glory and its well-formed image. This latter image in the end so greatly becomes the vessel of divinity that it can have ‘the whole fullness’ of the God who is above all forms dwell ‘corporeally’ in itself, all the while expressing it (Col 2.9). The fundamental question of aesthetics—that concerning measure and measureless—will have to be clarified here in an archetypal manner.

A third group of themes concerns the work that God has willed to set up between himself and his image: this is the whole realm delimited by concepts such as grace, covenant and justification. From the glory on Sinai there immediately issue the ‘Ten Words’ (Dt 4.13; 5.22) that as such are a most exalted grace. For these words are the proclamation of the charter that makes it possible for the people to dwell in God’s realm and for God to dwell in the people’s realm. They are an instruction of how human life must be shaped to be considered ‘righteous’ and ‘godly’ in God’s sense and to be found acceptable and permissible by God—and this beyond the abyss that divides divine standards and claims from inner-worldly and even sinful ones. But there is a final mystery of biblical revelation which will also have to be the final question of a theological aesthetics: this is the question of how it is possible that the transitory and constantly failing order of mortal existence is able to perdure in the face of the absolute and unmovable order, the question of what course things must take so that God’s apparently necessary and extreme indulgence and condescension—whereby what is crooked in man is actually considered straight and a righteousness valid before God is imputed to the unrighteous man—will coincide with real ontological righteousness. Only the New Covenant will be able to shed full light on precisely this group of questions, since it is in the New Testament that God’s Image becomes one with God’s Word and that, therefore, God’s Image itself becomes the subsisting Covenant (Heb 9.14f.) and thus also subsisting grace (2 Cor 8.9) and divine justice (1 Cor 1.30). But the question emerges in God’s design from the outset, and receives a profound development already in the history of the Old Covenant.

These three themes and their elaboration, however, still do not bring the decisive factor into full view. To stop here would perhaps mean to have not finally gone beyond the realm of mythical analogies to the glory of God in the Bible. When together with God’s glory there appears his holiness and sinful man falls to the ground, only then does the contradiction between light and darkness, holiness and sin, come into full view, and the drama is begun which—beyond all mythical parallels of deities wrestling with the forces of the abyss—is to lead to the reconciliation and redemption of the world. The outward defeat of God’s enemies, which for a very long time ancient Israel also counted on, was seen to accomplish nothing where the most interior spiritual oppositions are concerned. No glory of the gods has as its opposite what is called ‘sin’ in the biblical sense; and only the glory of the living God, which lacks all analogies, can, by its ‘wildly strange and astounding works’ (Is 28.21), put an end to that darkness which at first appeared to set a limit to the extent of the lordship of God’s glory. And it is above all in the time of classical prophecy and in the melting pot of the Exile, that Israel will, through its experience of suffering, become aware of this interior and hidden drama, so deeply aware of it, in fact, that it already reaches the threshold of the New Covenant with regard to the content of its faith.

To develop all of this with equal thoroughness would mean constructing a complete theology of the Old and New Testaments, something impossible within the limits of this work. The concept of glory will remain to the fore, therefore, and the other two areas will be considered and presented from this perspective. Even in this, however, no critical study concerning the meaning and development of the concept of kabod is intended, but rather a look at the reality to which this word points in the Old Testament, and this reality is not limited to the actual occurrence of the word (and certainly not to its sense in the priestly writings). The same thing is intensely discussed already by J and E, and much later, when the Septuagint translates kabod as δόξα, it will retain the much richer content of its meaning. The New Testament will further multiply the forms of expression for ‘glory’. But already the Old Testament transformations of kabod and δόξα are so rich and problematic that by studying them we will be able to discern the great articulations of the history of revelation.

3. GLORY AS CONSTANT BIBLICAL THEME

The transformation in the idea of divine glory, which runs from the Pentateuch right through to the Johannine writings, is remarkably great, and yet the intermediate steps are so interconnected and they so clearly point to one another that in their very variety these phases constitute a whole, the parts of which support and substantiate one another. If one were to take the epiphany on Sinai only in itself, in the face of the various versions one would be tempted to regard the whole phenomenon as a contradictory composition which it would be best to dissect into heterogeneous images of mythical theophanies; by themselves, however, these images would scarcely allow us to glimpse what really occurred on the Mountain of God—and this is even supposing that something did in the first place occur which can be experienced as a theophany. But then we do have the return of Elijah to Horeb and the mysterious theophany which presents itself to us both as an opposition and a continuance of that first happening and to which we cannot deny an historical core. Both events, in turn, are presupposed as the background of that occurrence which the Apostles report as being Christ’s transfiguration on Tabor, and they report it in a way that we can hardly dismiss as a mere theological arrangement: the luminous splendour and the cloud are seen again (as they will be also at the Ascension), and the voice that resounds from the cloud is also heard. Moses and Elijah are speaking with the Lord about his final mission and about the sealing of the covenant with his Passion. And precisely at the climax of the Passion the sun is darkened and the earth quakes, and we are confronted anew with the divine darkness that had been experienced when the covenant had been entered into on God’s mountain in the desert. The prophets’ visions of glory somehow begin without a previous tradition; this is true of Micah ben Imla and especially of Isaiah. Already in Ezekiel, however, and even more so in Habakkuk, there are unmistakable retrospective references not only to the experience of Isaiah, but also to the theophanies of the Pentateuch and, strange to tell, even to the divine glory which was supposed to have manifested itself at the construction of Solomon’s temple (corresponding precisely to the portrayal of the Exodus in P) and which so many would like to dismiss as being no more than literary ornamentation. New ground is again broken in the seventh chapter of Daniel, which doubtless has an authentic vision as its basis; from here direct paths lead both to the visions of Stephen and of Paul, at Damascus, and to the apparitions in the Apocalypse. Before the Sanhedrin, moreover, Jesus himself refers to the glory seen by Daniel and lays claim to it himself. Another line, which presupposes both the Exodus and the vision of Isaiah, leads, partly already in Ezekiel and more markedly in Deutero-Isaiah and post-exilic prophecy, to the eschatological expectation of God’s glory, and this is likewise taken up by Jesus and understood in the writings of the Apostles as being the hope of the Church. The reposing of God’s glory over the tent, and apparently also over the temple at the feast of its consecration, becomes an occasion for the Psalms to speak of the fact that this glory can be seen starting from Zion and then spreading out over the whole earth (this is also stressed in Isaiah’s vision), and indeed over the entire cosmos (Ps 19.1). The Psalms and the Prophets, moreover, develop a whole hymnic world of theophanic images which stands at the disposal of all prayer glorifying God; this hymnic world enriches the received facts and quite spontaneously considers God to be manifest both to man’s spirit and to his senses. The wisdom literature, to say nothing of the apocryphal apocalypses, affirms this manifestness of God’s glory both in nature and in history, and Paul attests to it both in his letters (Rom 1.18-21) and his discourses (Acts 17). Then, too, Paul refers directly in 2 Cor 3 to the resplendent countenance of Moses, which reflected the splendour of God’s glory (Ex 34.29f.), and he uses this reference to explain the proximity and distance between the two Testaments and the nature of Christian existence. When Stephen, as he lay dying, saw ‘the glory of God and Jesus at God’s right hand’ (Acts 7.55), he did not in his discourse refrain from transposing the appearance of the ‘God of glory’ all the way back to the stories of the Patriarchs, so that even Abraham experienced it (Acts 7.2). In the Apocalypse, finally, nearly all utterances concerning glory in both the Old and the New Testament come together and, in this confluence, they exhibit the interior unity of their variety.

If, out of this confusingly variegated panorama, we were to isolate the one thing at which all else aims, then surely we would turn to the prologue of John’s Gospel. What the Old Testament experienced and described as God’s glory in an endless series of forays and always both in a spiritual and a sensory way—that reality attained its definitive form in the Incarnation of the Word: ‘We have beheld his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth’ (Jn 1.14). John understands this glory as entailing the fulfilled ‘truth’ of the ‘image’ and the fulfilled ‘grace’ of the ‘covenant’, and in the end he is able to behold God’s glory in the unity of the cross and the resurrection. The depth of this vision thus makes John’s theology to be the last word of the Bible, and in John’s vision the tension between the present contemplation of God’s glory and the eschatological hope of it even emerges as the Christian’s penultimate experience.

4. CONCLUSION [III/2, PART 3]*

The biblical themes will constitute the first two parts of the concluding volume. But biblical theology naturally develops into ecclesial theology, which at the present moment in history must be taken and presented in all its ecumenical breadth, comprising the Orthodox Churches, the Roman Catholic Church, and the Evangelical Churches. Many aspects of this ecclesial theology have already been sketched by anticipation in the earlier volumes; the results must now be brought together in the concluding synthesis.

This summary takes shape almost of itself. The first volume especially makes a direct and natural transition to the present volume, particularly since in the section concerning the ‘objective evidence’ that first volume already had to deal with issues which will now be developed. The fact that God’s glory is beheld could not be established without an advance glance at what it is. Volume II then took up the theological and historical demonstration of the full import borne by the aesthetic viewpoint in Christian theology; this it did by examining in the course of history twelve systems of thought which are particularly well-contoured in a theological sense and which have mostly been very decisive in theological history. But that second volume had promised to demonstrate later on how it is that these very different systems may be interpreted and justified from one common centre. Only biblical theology can and must necessarily become the standard by which to judge the whole range of the historical developments in question, and by using this standard we can see that not all these systems have remained in equal proximity to the source, and that not all of them have portrayed the innermost concerns of biblical theology with equal success. We will carefully have to keep, however, from regarding the theology which is contained in revelation as a (super-)system, following which we could construct other (infra-)systems according to rational methods. The glory of God’s love in Jesus Christ remains the omnidimensional reality, and its utter transcendence of everything that can be known or systematised can itself be known only very dimly (Eph 3.18f.). For as Anselm says, rationabiliter comprehendit incomprehensibile esse (Monol 64). It is only the Holy Spirit who can expound, for the consciousness of the Church throughout all ages of history, the breadth and height, length and depth of the glory of God’s love in Jesus Christ. It is quite possible that many forms of the theological interpretation of God’s glory (think here of those of Denys or of Dante) spoke more directly to one age than to another; or it could be that theologies which were long thought to be defunct (such as Ire-naeus’) suddenly come to life again, while others (such as Augustine’s, Anselm’s, and Pascal’s) provide a leaven for all ages.

Volume III/1 attempted to survey the mythical, philosophical and poetic experience and portrayal of ‘glory’ in the West both before and after the time of Christ. Here the connecting points to theology are numerous. This is so because, on the one hand, biblical revelation took root in the concrete historical terrain of human thought, feelings, and imagination, always using all these forms for its own expression. On the other hand, and according to this same revelation, from the outset there has existed a supernatural relationship between God and both the created world and man’s spirit. Divine grace, predestined in Christ to be given to the whole world, is secretly at work in the whole sphere of history, and thus all myths, philosophies, and poetic creations are innately capable of housing within themselves an intimation of divine glory.

In three particular places in the Bible we see quite expressly how biblical revelation takes up or assumes pre-existent religious forms. We first of all see how in primitive biblical history (the religion of the Patriarchs) mythical forms of the encounter with God and of cultic worship are integrated into the history of revelation and are slowly penetrated and transformed by the Jewish understanding of revelation. This process continued until the Exile, since Israel’s ever-recurring capitulation to the mythical world of Canaan and of the great surrounding cultures must be counteracted, and it is precisely this struggle with the myths that will permit new and genuine insights to emerge from the heart of revelation. Something analogous occurs, in the second place, with the ‘Solomonic humanism’ of the time of the kings. This humanism, reflected in Proverbs and other biblical books related to or dependent on it, borrows and grafts onto the Bible in scarcely modified form and with astounding nonchalance a ‘wisdom of life’ which had been spreading internationally between Egypt and Mesopotamia. In the third place we finally have the broad Hellenistic current of Greek thought which, already before Christ (in the Septuagint’s late historical and sapiential books), had effected a fusion of Hebraic and Greek thought in various proportions. This fusion will then be everywhere detectible in the New Testament: we have only to think of the Letter to the Hebrews and its literary dependency on Philo⁷ and Platonic forms of thought.⁸ Such an appropriation of historical forms of expression on the part of revelation is quite natural; if it had not taken place then revelation would have to become suspect either of not having become historical at all or, in case it had, of having been but one form of the historical utterance of human experience among others. The characteristic of revelation in all its phases, however, is that the ‘mythical’ (and, analogously, the ‘philosophical’ and ‘religious’) forms of its ever more restrictive and definitive content are utterly denuded, and that it is only after going through such a ‘death’ that these forms become a suitable expressive means for the revelation of the living God. As an example of this we could take the story of Abraham in its great theological articulations. In other cases the Yahweh-religion launches from its midst, by way of a directly challenging counterstroke against myth, a theological principle that not only totally demolishes the myth but which—almost as a byproduct—overtakes it and incorporates it. Such is the case when Hosea outstrips the mythical sexuality of Canaan’s ‘marriages of the gods’ with the revelation of a totally non-sexual and yet wholly incarnate relationship between Yahweh as husband and Israel as bride; such is also the case when Ezekiel uses images from Babylonian myths in his great hymns of indictment concerning Tyre and Egypt. This will in due time open the way for the Christian ‘application’ (χϱῆσις) of the mythical world of the Greeks by the Church Fathers and by later Christian humanism. The provisionality of myth must allow itself to be judged by the finality of the Gospel, so that in this finality the world of myth may attain to its rightful rank and expressive value. Possible cross-connections between Greek epic and tragedy or Vergil with the Old Testament will be judged correspondingly, and in this the Old Testament itself will ever anew receive the final rank that belongs to it. Something similar holds for philosophy which, in its pre-cursoriness to revelation, must allow itself to be irradiated so as to exhibit the degree of its readiness to be penetrated by the ultimate mystery of the epiphany of glory. Thus, the tragedians, Plato, and Plotinus were questioned concerning their transparency. When later on the ‘sphere of metaphysics’ becomes Christian, the problem of the ‘discernment of spirits’ continually emerges—of discernment between the penultimate (‘philosophical’ or ‘poetic’) standard of judgment and the definitive biblical criterion, which comes to the fore only in this concluding volume. To us it seems that the real tragedy of intellectual history, from the Middle Ages to modern times, has lain in the secret struggle over this ultimate criterion (‘Metaphysics of the Saints’, ‘Holy Fools and Glory’, and the two paths of the ‘Ancient Mediation’ and the ‘Metaphysics of the Spirit’). Finally, if it has been demanded of Christians that they should be the ‘guardians of glory’, this becomes possible only by a constantly renewed descent to the very heart of what in the Bible constitutes the glory of the incarnate God, who ever anew bestows the gift of the Holy Spirit.

And this must suffice by way of summary of the earlier volumes.

Biblical theology concludes by opening out into an ecclesial (ecumenical) theology. But as theoretical theology it has a foreground—the liturgy—and also a postlude—(Christian) art.

a. Liturgy grows directly out of the innermost substance of scriptural revelation, in so far as God’s demonstration of his glory is always necessarily answered by the glorification (doxology) of God. Indeed in the Bible it is impossible to distinguish adequately between the two spheres of God’s word and man’s answer. This applies not only to the ‘praise of the lips’ in psalm and hymn but also to the whole area of sacrificial liturgy, which P expressly derives from divine revelation and as such is regarded as the word of God enacted by men. In the liturgy of the New Testament—the Eucharist—God’s gift to man and man’s return of the gift to God become even more inseparable. Around this Eucharist the churches develop an extended liturgy of psalms and hymns, and into it are absorbed the sacrifices of the Old Testament. Glory in the biblical sense is perfected in the reciprocity of God’s giving of himself to man and believing man’s praising acceptance of this gift.

For this reason no Christian church can regard its cultic liturgy in isolation from the liturgy of an existence in faith which, as it actualises what it understands itself to be, knows that it is an existence established, first, upon the mystery of the Father’s hidden will-to-salvation. Second, the Christian’s existence in faith is established upon the ‘dimension of God’s grace and love for everything which is to come about’, a dimension already contained in the mystery of the Father’s will and which is opened up by the presence of his incarnate Son on the Cross. And, third, that believing existence is established upon the Christian’s admission through baptism into this realm of God’s grace, even as he recognises the Christian truth that may now become a living reality in his grace-filled existence. Paul can thus define this existence as order εἰς ἔπαινον δόξης, that is, an existence ‘unto the glorification of his glory’ (Eph 1.14): ‘Admitted into this mystery [of God’s will] by the very definition of what we are, we experience the mystery in the forgiveness of sins even as it becomes luminous to us in gnosis. Thus, it is from what we are and from what we experience that we bear the splendour of God’s mystery in ourselves, and praise God by means of what his benediction has made us to be’ (H. Schlier).⁹ Exemplary sanctity in the Church has always been understood in the light of this definition of a liturgy of life, not in the sense that sanctity has been subjectively understood to be the extended splendour of the kabod-Yahweh in the saints (only Paul once came close to this as he discussed the existence of the Church as such in 2 Cor 3), but in the sense that all of the Christian’s existence now lives away from itself and thinks exclusively in terms of an obedient recognition of God’s glory alone. ‘To do everything with a mind to God means to have eyes only for God, to be always looking at God. The lover beholds the beloved uninterruptedly, thinks only of him and is wholly turned towards him. All his thinking, speaking, and acting occur only in connection with him . . . O my God, I offer Thee all the moments of my life for Thy greater glorification, as a sacrifice to Thine honour, in order to be obedient to Thy will for the redemption of many. . .’ (Charles de Foucauld).¹⁰ Ecclesial liturgy, therefore, always connotes and includes the living liturgy of the individual Christian’s existence: it presupposes it and effects it ever anew because in the innermost mystery of the Church as bride of Christ both spheres coincide and have as their exclusive meaning the ‘glorification of God’s glory’.

b. Ecclesial theology will always find its centre here again after all other particular considerations. But for this it does not suffice that the principle of Soli Deo Gloria be formally commemorated at the beginning and at the end as in most standard theologies, to be wholly forgotten in the interim. Such theology does indeed conventionally affirm that God could create the world only for his own glorification; but this statement can be understood without scandal only if, in the course of the total theological development of God’s saving action, one is enlightened as to what this glorification actually consists of.¹¹ This same theology likewise promises us an eschatological kingdom of glory, with the ‘contemplation of God’s glory’ in heaven and a participation in it through the ‘transfiguration’ even of the material world at the resurrection of the body. No objection can be made to this either, as long as it becomes clear that this final irruption of God’s glory is but the conclusion of his self-glorification throughout the whole course of salvation-history; and only from the perspective of salvation-history can eschatological glory be understood—but then really understood—as the manifestation of the fact that God’s glory is its own origin and its own reason-for-being. This is already made clear by the whole span of the Old Testament, and even more so by its transcendence in Jesus Christ.

Instead of elaborating a systematic dogmatics with its various propositions under the heading of ‘glory’, it seemed to us more fruitful to show the central position held by the concept of glory by developing an ecumenical dogmatics: this presumes, however, that the dogmatics of the Orthodox, Evangelical, and Catholic churches in each case has its centre in the concept of the Gloria Dei and that, consequently, a fruitful dialogue among these churches can be conducted only starting from this common centre. In this dialogue the total ecumenical understanding of the Gloria Dei will be able both to uncover the one-sided emphases and limitations of a particular dogmatics and to lead to a reciprocally beneficial interpenetration of viewpoints. The fact that Catholic dogmatics exhibits a sort of ‘projection’ over the other two dogmatics will have to be pondered precisely in the light of our theme: this projection can be accounted for by the fact that it conveys to us a decisive and final deepening of faith’s understanding of God’s glory.

c. As a kind of postlude and somewhat by way of an appendix we will finally ask the question concerning the relationship between the theologically beautiful (glory / image / charis) and inner-worldly beauty as a question having particularly to do with Christian art. In so doing it will be wise once again to look back to the Bible, since it is there that the forms and branches of the artistic domain are in various ways made serviceable to revelation. According to P, artists were hired and especially endowed with the charism of the divine Spirit (Ex 35.31) so that they could produce the liturgical buildings and accoutrements; and the theme of the true temple traverses all eras of the Bible down to the Apocalypse. All available forms of poetry are taken up by the Prophets in order to proclaim God’s word effectively, and music and the dance are not disdained. All of this will have to be kept in mind when the question is seriously posed and when we seek to give it a thorough answer—always, of course, maintaining critical distance and caution. One thing is certain, however, and this is that wherever God’s free revelation intervenes in a human context, this context cannot be reduced to theoretical laws or practical rules in the manner of human science or technique.

For this reason, too, our whole attempt to restore to theology the third dimension of glory—alongside the dimensions of the true and the good—must itself remain a fragment, and at best it can serve as a stimulus to do new homage to the incomprehensible mystery of divine love.

I. GOD’S GLORY AND MAN

A. GLORY

1. DIALECTIC OF SENSORY MANIFESTATION

a. Appearance, Kabod

How can revelation take place? How can the abyss and Ocean of all reality make itself knowable and perceivable to the ‘drop in the bucket’ and the ‘speck of dust’ (Is 40.15) that is man? How can the ‘grass that withers’ and the ‘flower that fades’ be touched by the ‘word of our God, that will stand for ever’ (Is 40.8)? To have an inkling of the divine, to adore it from afar, to learn to be silent before it and to allow it to hold sway: this may be granted to creatures at their very limits. Such an intimation appears to creatures to be revelation enough: on the shore of their finitude they discover the Wholly Other, and buffeted all about by the surge of its breakers creatures learn something like piety—a sense of awe before the undecipherable Meaning that pervades and directs even the apparent meaninglessness of their existence. They can also invent gods for