The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics

By Hans Urs von Balthasar

In this final volume of his great work, von Balthasar reflects on the New Testament vision of God's revelation of his glory in Christ. This divine 'appearing' is grounded in the self-emptying of the eternal logos in the incarnation, cross and descent into hell. Christ is the man who represents God and is also God; he is a symbol of the worls and is also the world. he dies, but in dying rises into the eternal life of God. It is in Christ's incarnatin and resurrection that the Christian vision is truly expressed and the joining of God and the world in the new and eternal convenant is realised.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ignatius Press
• Release date: Mar 28, 2013
• ISBN: 9781681492049

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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PREFACE

The previous volume did not seek to offer an approximately complete theology of the Old Testament, but rather to shed light on the essence of this covenant from the viewpoint of ‘glory’; in the same way, and a fortiori, this volume cannot be rounded theology of the new covenant. Like the previous volume, it opens up only an approach-road to such a theology, passing through the gateway of ‘glory’; and because of the disposition of the material here, this volume must accept the necessity of opening up an approach-road to the approach-road in a lengthy first part, for otherwise ‘glory’ might be understood only to cover what is explicitly so termed in the texts of the New Testament. Nothing complete can be offered on the level of the individual theologies of the biblical authors, nor on the level of a synthesis of biblical theology, nor on any level of what in the post-biblical period is called ecclesiastical or dogmatic theology. One may also fear that the present volume will appear methodologically imprecise to the reader who is a professional theologian—indeed, that it will strike him as hopelessly amateurish, for many dividing-lines that have become customary are not observed (they are frequently a hindrance, when one wishes to have an overview of the whole phenomenon which is being treated), and yet no final synthesis can be constructed. We clear the path for ourselves through the undergrowth, as well as we can; for us, it is more important to get at all costs a point from which we can see the essential matter, than to lay down orderly roads that lead to that point. For this reason, even less of the scholarly literature that abounds on all sides will be quoted in this volume than in the preceding volumes: we shall restrict ourselves to indicating a few useful works, as these present themselves to our notice.

It is considerably harder to clear a path in the new covenant to the prospect we seek, than in the old covenant; the latter unfolds in a history that can be followed clearly through centuries, but the new covenant bunches everything together into the shortest space of time, in the midpoint of which stands the breakdown-point which can be delimited in external chronology as the ‘Triduum Mortis’, but which internally means that time has come to an end and that there is a new beginning such that all temporal categories of ‘end’, ‘midpoint’, and ‘beginning’ are shattered; and this means that not only the main subject (the theological content of the fate of Jesus), but also the position of the existentially involved observer (the Christian who seeks to understand his faith, in order to live it), slip away at the very point where they ought to be made secure. But it is not our concern to get a secure place to stand, but rather to get sight of what cannot be securely grasped, and this must remain the event of Jesus Christ; woe to the Christian who would not stand daily speechless before this event! If this event truly is what the church believes, then it can be mastered through no methodology; the manner in which this book speaks can be excused only by this axiom.

We shall not ‘analyse’ a ‘concept’—the concept of glory—but rather we shall integrate a cipher for the whole into this totality. Our concern is to make a synthesis; therefore the last theology of the New Testament, the Johannine theology, will always be the vanishing-point, the point towards which we are travelling—though all the theologies of the New Testament remain open both forwards (into the meditation of the church, which can never be brought to its end) and’ upwards (to God). The future and the final opening-out are important for us, and not the categories which are to be integrated in the phase of development (for in this phase these were as yet only source, material, and presupposition for what comes at the end). There is one single thing that aims through all to express itself: we pursue it, without fancying to ourselves that we have grasped it wholly (Phil 3.12f.).

INTRODUCTION

1. We make ready with nervousness to scale the final slope, the ascent which was the goal of all the earlier advances forward. For now everything which could be considered and expressed in isolation hitherto, collapses into a single whole with such decisiveness that in the presence of this unity, all are robbed of breath and speech. As long as God ‘spoke in fragmentary and varied fashion’ (Heb 1.1), and the ‘form’ of his revelation stretched out ‘in temporal fashion’¹ through the extension of our history, and thus led us forward in a pedagogy by stages (Gal 3.24; 4.2), it was possible to believe that one could follow this; but at the end, all distinctions, aspects, concepts, signs, images, words, and periods subside into one another in a transcending ‘fullness’, in the One ‘in whom the whole fullness of the deity dwells bodily’ (Col 1.19), who receives ‘the entire inheritance’ (Heb 1.2), and in whom accordingly the previous’ distinction between the archetype of divine glory and its reflection on the human image, and finally the reciprocity between archetype and image in the glory of the covenant of grace,² is bypassed and dissolved, so that the One of whom we must now speak becomes in an unheard-of manner the joint founder of all periods, and indeed the ‘effulgence of the glory’ and ‘imprint of the substance’ of God himself (Heb 1.3). Nevertheless, God does not destroy the work which he has begun, like a Shiva who destroys the world in his dance: rather, he perfects in the identity of the ‘person’ of the One the ‘distinction without mingling of natures’. It is far more difficult to hold on to this in thought, than to maintain a final commingling of everything or even only a Hegelian progressive ‘resolution’ of the differences into the synthesis. But the man, who represents God and is God, just as he represents the world and is the world, has his time and then dies; but he rises too, with his history, his time, his death, and his world, into the eternal life of God—everything depends on this, otherwise ‘your faith is in vain’ (1 Cor 15.14)—and thus what is not identical coincides, and yet is thereby preserved in its particularity. We recognise that in this, the basic laws of that which we have presented as ‘transcendental aesthetics’ in its history and its substance, fulfil and transcend themselves:³ we recognise that a ‘form’ is the more valuable in the degree that it becomes more transparent for the light of absolute being.⁴ But this general ‘metaphysical’ law is so superabundantly fulfilled through the unique event, the initiative of which lies in God’s absolute freedom, that it is totally subjected to criticism: the One, whose name is Jesus Christ, must go down into the absolute contradiction of the glory of the Lord, into the night of abandonment by God and the formless chaos of Hell, so that, beyond everything that man can see as form, he may be and establish the imperishable and indivisible form which joins God and the world in the new and eternal covenant.

Here we must describe the ineffable final matter of the definitive meeting which unites God and man (the world), and here least of all can we forgo the concept of ‘form’,⁵ although we are well aware of the fact of its excessive employment. We are confirmed in this by the language of the New Testament.⁶ But here most of all do we need the ‘vision of the form’⁷ with the ‘eyes of faith’ (Augustine), the oculata fides (‘faith that has eyes’, Thomas Aquinas), the ‘enlightened eyes of the heart’ (Eph 1.18), because only a ‘simple eye’ (Mt 6.22 par.) is able to perceive something of the simplicity achieved by all multiplicity in the final form of revelation. It is for this reason that those ‘poor in spirit’ and the ‘pure’, emptied ‘hearts’ are blessed most of all in the new covenant, for only they will see God in this form and possess his kingdom.⁸ Such a simplicity of the eye, allowing the decisive perception, presupposes the unity of the act of seeing and the act of living, which Adolf Schlatter lays down as the fundamental postulate of the act of theological recognition, in that the act of living (the obedience to the revelation which is brought about in man through the revelation) is the basis of the act of seeing.⁹ This seeing, which by God’s grace brings no blinding of the human spirit through an immoderate light, but gives it the capacity to stand firm in the presence of the infinite simplicity, has as its first effect on man a sinking down in adoration before the glory; but at the same time, it is the strongest impulse for the subsequent thinking that converts what is seen into action, for the unity of the form offers a fullness of approaches, doors and possibilities for entry. For the Word has become flesh, and calls men and women to discipleship. The theology of the New Testament develops, without any possibility of being brought to a close, from the final form, and is so determined and held together by this form that it cannot degenerate into what is vague, relative, or contradictory. The subject of theology is not to be ‘mastered’ gradually by the understanding through a series of approximations that circle round the subject: rather, every approach in thought is continually ‘judged’ anew by the absolute superiority of the subject. For this subject is the absolute trinitarian love of God, which discloses itself and offers itself in Jesus Christ, which disarms by its humility and simplicity every ‘stronghold’ of would-be mastering thought that ‘rises up’ (2 Cor 10.5). Jesus opposes the despised child to that which thought attempts to devise as the ‘greatest’ (Mk 9.34), and the way that leads to Jesus and to the God who sends him is the acceptance of this ‘least one’ ‘in my name". Thus the simplicity of God ‘judges’ all human thoughts that strive upward above themselves to attain the utmost, and requires of them something that they can accomplish only in self-denial: ‘to know the love of Christ which surpasses all knowledge’ (Eph 3.19). ‘This knowledge knows something that is finally unknowable, because it is beyond the scope of knowledge in its boundlessness.’¹⁰

2. If this were not so, then the form that offers itself would certainly not be the self-revelation of God, Si comprehendis, non est Deus: ‘If you understand, it is not God. If, in accordance with Anselm’s formula, God is id quo maius cogitari nequit, ‘that than which nothing greater can be thought’, and thus is the horizon of the absolute freedom of love that is a vault rising above every insight into the necessitates of the revelation, then this same formula and structure apply also to his final revelation in Christ. This allows us to employ, in what follows, here and there a certain methodological argumentation a priori, which is not the same as Anselm’s, but analogous to this. This consists in bracketing off provisionally at the start the historical revelation in Christ in its historicity, and taking this as a phenomenological eidos, in order to go on to establish whether and how this surpasses and judges every possible human sketch of thought in philosophy and religion; not that the eidos wins a narrow, fortuitous victory in this, but that it soars up every time in absolute superiority. To give a decisive example: every endeavour of thought to explain the existence of a contingent world ‘alongside’ the (by definition) self-sufficient Absolute fails, unless the cosmos is the product of a fundamental goodness that pours itself out without jealousy (Plato, Plotinus), yet the cosmos cannot depend on a determination of God to choose the best possible model of a world (Leibniz), but can depend only on the unfathomable freedom of his love; but it is never truly clear in the Old Testament how this God can be free love, not needing his worldly partner (Israel)—hence man’s repeated rebellions against this apparent contradiction in his image of God. The final obscurity disappears only when God discloses his inmost heart, his trinitarian love, in Jesus Christ, his love that raises him above all bracketing-together with the world, but gives the world its right to existence by taking it up into the eternally flowing dialogue of love. Just as it is an aprioristic insight that outside of being only nothing can exist, so it is an aprioristic ‘insight’ that it is impossible to think of a deeper justification of being than this, which leaves untouched the essence of God and that of the world (the analogia entis), and possesses no capacity to make deductions, but permits everything to open out into the unfathomable freedom of love. The arguments of New Testament theology all have this structure: they point to an unsurpassable tightness, without giving reasons for the articulations of the form of revelation in accordance with the style of human logic through ‘necessities’, for the whole form has its being, fresh in every single one of its articulations, in the element of free love.

The philosophical analogy of the difference between being and what is, between the transcendental and the categorical, can for this reason not be applied to the relationship between the God who reveals himself and the form of his revelation, for it is in the unique form, and only in it, that the mystery of the ‘super-form’ within the Godhead, of the Trinity as absolute love and thereby as the ‘essence’ of God, is made known. Although God does not need the form of Jesus Christ in order to be the perfect triune God in himself, and thus does not achieve his own full reality through the world, there is nothing accidental attached to his act of making himself known in Jesus Christ: what seems to us to be ‘the accidental truth of history’ is the revelation of his absolute freedom, as this is in God himself, the freedom of eternal self-giving out of unfathomable love. This absolute love is not determined in advance by any ‘nature’ in the eternal Father which would ‘make it necessary’ for him to beget the eternal Son; and in both there is no natural compulsion to make their love known to one another in the procession of the Spirit. This absolute freedom of the love within the Godhead is poured out over the entire form of revelation, gives it its being and structure, and is present in it. From this point, we may sense anew—indeed, in reality we may sense for the first time, after all our preliminary labours, what ultimately the divine glory is, what ‘the light of knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ’ is (2 Cor 4.6). From this, it becomes clear in advance that theological methodology—always presupposing the ‘eyes of faith’, in which this act of enlightenment takes place—can never be genuinely deductive (for otherwise it subjects the freedom of the form to the laws of human thought), but inductive, in the sense intended by Newman: it shows the ‘convergence’ of the lines and paths of discernment (what we termed above ‘rightnesses’) on the single focal point of surpassing brightness, where the glory flares out. This is the methodology which folds inwards in simplicity towards the divine simplicity. It may be that one chiefly sees the unutterable simplicity of the divine glory poured out over the whole form, as Greek theology above all can see this, remaining therefore predominantly, a ‘symbolic’ theology that looks on every detail in its transparency to the glowing centre-point of the epiphany of God; or it may be that one continually strikes out by the diligence of reasoning along the paths that lead from the separate articulations to the midpoint, as Western theology loves to do, that it itself may understand better and open up more paths of insight to others. The methodologies can and must complement each other. Without the look that carries one off to the midpoint, and away from the midpoint again, nothing on the peripheries will be comprehensible.

Illustre quiddam cernimus,

Quod nesciat finem pati,

Sublime, celsum, interminum,

Antiquius caelo et chao.¹¹

3. Accordingly, what we have called in this work ‘theological aesthetics’,¹² taken by us both to be the criticism and the surpassing fulfilment of the ‘philosophical’ transcendent aesthetics, must be fulfilled likewise in the final self-disclosure of the glory of God in the New Testament. If for a moment we take the word ‘beauty’ in a naive ambiguity that leaves open all the possibilities of its employment, then we may say that a ray of beauty has been poured out over the whole New Testament, with all its austerity, sobriety and terribleness. One will see this beauty only when the core of everything is recognised to be the free love of God that justifies man. It is the beauty of God, in opposition to corruptible and human beauty (Jas 1.10=1 Pet 1.24), and so any mythologisation of the beauty of Christ or of the children of God is strictly avoided.¹³ But as there is already always an element of joy in ἀγαπᾶν,¹⁴ so a fortiori in the frequent verb ἀγαλλιᾶν, ‘to exult in joy’ in the presence of the hope that lies wide open in the present fulfilment and looks to the ‘imperishable, undefiled and unfading inheritance in heaven’ (1 Pet 1.4), which is promised and of which indeed the ‘first installment’ has already been paid; the phrase of 1 Peter ‘suggère une merveilieuse beauté’.¹⁵ ‘Peter’ ventures therefore to use two expressions of an unheard-of force, when he says that the believers already now ‘rejoice with unutterable and exalted joy’ (1 Pet 1.8)¹⁶ in the presence of their hope, and when he says precisely to those who suffer for the name of Christ that ‘the Spirit of glory, the Spirit of God rests upon’ them (1 Pet 4.14),¹⁷ here again in a proleptic eschatological sense, as 4.13 shows. This presence of what belongs to the future is the true source of beauty in the New Testament; only in a secondary manner, deriving from this, is the contemplation of the harmonious correspondence between ‘promise and fulfilment’, old covenant and new, a source of beauty. If what is new were not new in itself, then what is old would not be capable of being brought into relation with it.¹⁸

Let us leave to one side the innumerable passages from Catholic tradition which praise the beauty of the New Testament revelation; an excessive criticism delights in accusing these statements of aestheticism and of falling away from the inexorable quality of the words and deeds of Jesus.¹⁹ Let us leave to one side likewise Romantic theology,²⁰ which may on occasion fall prey to the judgment of Kierkegaard. There is, however, a path leading back from Kierkegaard, along which even Protestant theology may be able to recognise anew the dimension of beauty in the New Testament. E. W. Gulin²¹ holds that for John, the grace that we receive from Jesus has left behind an impression comparable to ‘the sights in the world of beauty which, once seen, can never again disappear from the soul’. Johannes Weiss²² describes the deeply moved and persuasive form in which the Gospels were able to mirror the figure of Jesus, as something ‘artistic’, which presupposes in those who execute the portrait the same receptivity that belongs ‘only to a selfless and pure heart, whose sight is obscured by no vanity nor greed’ in the presence of the beautiful. And if the church is formed and wholly determined by the free love of God in Christ, then how significant appears the observation of Dietrich Bonhoeffer in his letters from prison: ‘Perhaps—it almost seems so, today—it is only the concept of the church that will be the source of the rediscovery of the free space for the freedom of art, education, friendship, and play—so that one should not banish the ‘aesthetic existence’ (Kierkegaard) from the realm of the church, but precisely give it new foundation in the church?’²³

Such initial steps find their full form in Karl Barth’s isolated treatise on God’s glory and (therein) his beauty, as the appropriate conclusion to the doctrine of God’s freedom and love.²⁴ Speaking generally, God’s glory is, first, ‘the dignity and justification proper to God, not only to assert that he is who he is, but to demonstrate this and to make it known. . . , in a certain measure, to make it obvious and not to be overlooked’; second, to ‘obtain acknowledgment’ for himself; and this, third, with divine power. Glory is therefore ‘God himself in the truth, in the capacity, in the act in which he makes himself known as God’, and he does this by loving. This commences indeed in the various manners of the Old Testament kabod, but comes to fulfilment first in Christ, who represents the ‘glory of God’ because on the one hand he is the perfect image of the glory of the Father (therefore, trinitarian glory), and on the other hand represents ‘the archetype of all creaturely participation in the glory of God’: ‘The kabod has received this midpoint, this concrete form, this name.’ This is ‘what is new in the New Testament’, and it stands obviously in the context of the doctrine of the love of God. If one goes on to ask what the essence of God’s glory is, then a first correct answer (in the old dogmatic theologians) can run: ‘It is the embodiment, become visible, of all divine perfection’: ‘Gloria Dei est essentialis eius maiestas’ (‘The glory of God is the majesty that belongs to his essence’, Polanus). It is possible, however, to define this majesty more closely? Should one describe the brilliance of the δόξα indirectly, starting from its reflection, the δοξάζειν that responds to it, the exultant praise of the creatures, as the angels perpetually offer this, and as we too ought to offer it? Barth attempts a more direct reply, by posing the question of the ‘form and figure’ of the revelation.²⁵ Thereby, he comes up against the concept of beauty, which he situates theologically against aestheticism, after carefully marking the boundary lines: ‘We speak of the beauty of God only to help in the explanation of his glory’, which ‘in any case also includes, and brings to expression, that which we term beauty’. Taking his starting point from the Augustinian and scholastic concept of the fruitio Dei, which is drawn from scripture,²⁶ he establishes, with Augustine: ‘Things are not beautiful because they give delight; they give delight, because they are beautiful’ (Ver. Rel. 32, 59). Transposed to speak of God, this implies: ‘God is not God because he is beautiful; he is beautiful because he is God’. A biblical-theological aesthetics, therefore, cannot orient itself upon any general (‘metaphysical’) concept of beauty, but must obtain its idea of beauty from God’s unique self-disclosure in Christ, whereby this unique event which ‘breaks through every system’, simultaneously transcends, criticises, and brings to fulfilment general aesthetic concepts.²⁷ Instead of offering an aesthetics that runs through the entire Dogmatics, Barth offers three central examples, which receive their evidential power from the third. First, God’s essence is beautiful and perfect in its ‘form’, because in him, in a unique and superabundant manner, ‘the wonderful unity—now puzzling, now clear in itself—of identity and not-identity, of simplicity and multiplicity, of inner and outer, of God himself and the fullness of that which he is as God’, of ‘movement and peace’, makes itself known; because, unlike any worldly essence, he is identical in his whole being with this form of his. Second, this becomes more visible at a deeper level, in the Trinity of God, the ‘making concrete’ of his freedom and love, and thereby also of his ‘unity of identity and not-identity’. In God, there are ‘sequence and order’, there is ‘relationship’ and ‘therefore form’, but this form is once again one with his freedom, love and beatitude: ‘to this extent, the Trinity of God is the mystery of his beauty’. Third, however, the Trinity first comes into view for us with the Incarnation as the ‘centre and goal, and thus also the hidden beginning of all God’s ways’; and this is Incarnation in the man who bears the sins, who has ‘neither form nor beauty’, in whom God seemingly enters what is the opposite of himself, and yet: ‘precisely thus does he set in action and confirm his unity with himself. Along this path he reveals his glory. So deeply does God distinguish himself from himself.’ He is ‘one, and not imprisoned and bound to be only one; identical with himself, and yet free to be another. . . , not in tension, dialectic, paradox and contradiction’, but in ‘this beautiful form that awakens joy’. ‘The beauty of God’ in the ‘beauty of Jesus Christ’ appears therefore precisely in the crucified, but the crucified, precisely as such, is the one risen: ‘in this self-disclosure, God’s beauty embraces death as well as life, fear as well as joy, that which we would call ugly, as well as that which we would call beautiful’. And precisely in this highest self-disclosure is seen the truth of the first description of glory: to be the self-demonstration of his love in truth and power in all the works of God, which is then able, in the gift of the Holy Spirit, to bring about the response of glorificatio from the creation, in ‘looking away from oneself and looking to Christ, in whom glory and glorification become absolutely one. The place in which such glorification is permitted to give its thanks is ‘the form of the church, of the proclamation, the faith, the confession, the theology, the prayer’, a genuine and therefore beautiful form, the fullness of which remains in this age as yet hidden from the Church itself: ‘That is the limit of this form’. We have sketched here the outline of Karl Barth in our introduction, not only because it agrees with our own overall plan, especially as regards the relationship between glory and beauty, but also because it offers at the beginning an overview that we ourselves can approach only slowly. We must take the path of those rudes and incipientes who ‘at the start are not able to see the light of beauty’, as Origen says, and rise up to become ‘lovers of his beauty’ only when they are ‘perfect’.²⁸ This path can be described by means of a mysteriously obscure utterance of Jesus in the Gospel of Thomas: ‘The images are revealed to man, but the light that is in them is concealed in the image of the light of the Father. This light will reveal itself, and then will his image be concealed in his light’.²⁹ The final turn of phrase may be gnostic; the general trend of the logion remains correct. It confirms once again that there is no seeing without being caught up: as Christ (the ‘image’) is ‘caught up’ to the Father (in the Resurrection, and proleptically in the Transfiguration), in order to reveal fully the radiance of God through the form of the image, so we must look away from ourselves, in order to be able to ‘reflect with unveiled face the glory of the Lord, being changed into his likeness’ (2 Cor 3.18).

4. We have already said that no complete theology of the new covenant will be presented here. Everything is ordered around the guiding concept of glory, and has been selected with a view to this; it is only here, as Karl Barth showed, that this concept attains its fullness. No concept ready to hand, whether drawn from metaphysics or from the Old Testament, is, therefore, capable of determining the path of the enquiry. At most, themes broached in the old covenant can point in a certain direction, but in each case a total transposition into the tonality of the new covenant will be required. In the Bible, fulfilment is never attainable through a plurality of promises: it is new creation. This is doubly relevant for our theme, when one recalls the inner gradient that the concept must travel in the old covenant: starting from the experience of the momentum of a presence forcing itself upon the attention both of the spirit and of the senses, the experience of an immense subject making itself known in an immediately physical and elemental manner, with a freedom and vitality in its address and in the claim it makes that obtain for itself a right hearing from the very beginning—then through the many images that branch out to portray such a presence of God, in original prophetic experiences, but also in the adoption of mythological forms of expression in the composition of the poetry of the Psalms, going as far as a certain cultic formalism which, in the historical narratives of the priestly writers, takes what may not be tidily controlled and domesticates it to the very boundary of controllability, until finally, after the exile, the accumulated use of the concept reveals a loss of experience of the reality, but at the same time an increased longing and a need for it. At this point, there is almost an anticipation of Paul’s insight: ‘All have sinned, and must do without the glory of God’ (Rom 3.23). This was the intermediate period between the departure of God’s glory from the temple (Ezek 9.3; 10.18; 11.22f.) and its return, awaited for the messianic period (Ezek 43.2ff.; Ps 85.10: ‘Surely our salvation is at hand . . . and God’s glory will dwell in our land’; cf. Is 40.3-5). And thus, those who must do without the glory do indeed grope in all directions like blind men, seeking to have a share once again in the glory that has vanished—they look to the temporal future, which always means, for the Jew, the imminent expectation of the End, but the promises of the Second and Third Isaiah, for all their urgency, are not fulfilled; they look to the heights of Heaven, torn open by apocalyptic, first in the vision of the Son of Man in Dan 7 and then in an obscure pious literature which promises mystical insights into the glory of Heaven and of the world to come, and thereby underlines yet again the deprivation in the present world. Finally, they look to the breadth of the cosmos, where the teachers of wisdom see God’s word and wisdom ‘gloriously’ at work; but it is characteristic enough that Jesus Sirach modulates from his praise of the glory of God in the Creation into a melancholy look backwards from a period without history to the epoch of the great heroes of God’s dealings with Israel, and the final note is sounded in the lost splendour of the high priest Simon, the distinctively Old Testament splendour of figurative sacredness.

Thus the kabod of the Old Testament, its doxa, displays a downward slope accompanied by a decrease in power, the force and evidentness of its presence decline with the frequency with which it is named and the urgency with which it is demanded. It is true that the broadening of horizons which occurs in the post-exilic period—messianically, into the future; apocalyptically, into Heaven; sapientially, into the entire cosmos and thereby into the history of the peoples of the world—became a foundation, indispensable in the history of salvation, for the fulfilment in the New Testament;³⁰ but so far are they from leading over without a break in continuity into the fulfilment, that they themselves tear open the gulf between old and new covenants through their inner exhaustion which brought them to their end. Thus Paul sees more deeply than the usual philological history of concepts, when he puts an adversative πολλῷ μᾶλλον ‘how much the more’, a qualitative advance upwards ὑπερβάλλουσα δόξα as a dividing-line between the glory of the ‘dispensation of death, carved in letters on stone’ that is indeed a ‘dispensation of condemnation’, and the glory of the ‘dispensation of the Spirit’ and ‘dispensation of justification’ (2 Cor 3.7-11). This radical caesura between the sphere of the promise and the sphere of the fulfilment makes it questionable whether we should simply follow the guiding-line of philology; is it not rather our task first of all to consider the matter itself, which may then subsequently draw the old expression to itself, though filled now with new content? Even in the old covenant, there is no doubt that the matter existed before the word was coined. This was a matter that could not be sufficiently contained in any word—for who can ever say what the kabod of God is?—but was continually devalued, the more the word became a coin in daily use. On the level of fulfilment, then, we must indeed expect that God’s act, in which his aim is to present himself definitively and establish his definitive covenant, will not join on to the end of the old covenant, but will have a new beginning from the origins, and will thereby reveal what he truly intended in his first initiative, while everything else remains as if bracketed off (‘the law came in addition’, Rom 5.20), and must remain in brackets for the sake of true comprehension. This is the theological rationale which makes Paul leap over Moses to unite faith in Christ with the faith of Abraham. More importantly for us, this is the reason why the Synoptic Gospels begin by portraying the event of Jesus without using the concept of ‘glory’ (in a present sense), by setting the beginning wholly afresh at the point where God’s act of making himself present had begun: with the momentum of the presence, of the subject that forces its way forward and makes its own impression and expression; they begin with his force and authority, which especially in Mark calls forth anew the elementary terror before God at the foot of Sinai (ἐκπλήσσειν, a stupefied being beside oneself through terror: Mk 1.22; 6.2; 11.18; intensified through περισσῶϛ, at 10.26, through ὑπερπερισσῶϛ at 7.37). Only after the pause that the Synoptists have thus inserted, can John consider the transposition as fully achieved, and lay claim once more to the word doxa wholly for the New Testament glory (Jn 1.14): so much so, that he explains the vision of Isaiah in the Temple (and thus the doxa of the old covenant) as a proleptic seeing of the glory of Christ (12.41). Analogously, Luke too has the two great seers of the divine glory in the Old Testament themselves appear ‘in glory’ on Tabor (Lk 9.31), but then he has them wrapped together with Christ in the cloud of the kabod, which identifies him as the Son. With this return to the beginning, however, we are not taken back to Sinai, to the dialectic of fire and smoke, lightning and cloud, light and darkness, but to an origin that lies much further back (ἀρχή, Jn 1.1), to that which was the true purpose of God’s disclosure in all the previous revelation of glory: his trinitarian love. The dialectic of the Old Testament signs, accessible to the senses, was not simply a ‘concession’ by God to man’s sensible nature, when considered in this light, but rather a path that led to the Incarnation, where the eternal love will press forward in yet another way, quite differently—by bringing all the fear of God, indeed all the rejecting judgment of God into accomplishment, in order to demonstrate his truest glory in ‘having mercy on all’ (Rom 11.32).

The structure of this volume is determined by this insight, that a pause for contemplation is inserted in order to mark out the distance between the glory of the Old Testament and the glory of the New, a pause that requires the return to the original signification. First we must speak of the matter itself, which bears the name not of ‘glory’, but of Jesus Christ; then we must follow on to speak of the application of the affirmation of glory to him and to all that concerns him; and third, we must speak of the response of the world, as this is changed in the New Testament—the glorification of the glory. In the first part, therefore, where the explicit assertion remains bracketed off, we are nevertheless also centrally in the presence of the theme (philologically speaking, of the original significance of kabod as imposing momentum), of the body, so to speak, which will then be clothed in the garments of light (Mk 9.3).

In conclusion, something else will become clear. In the ‘teaching on seeing’ of the first volume (‘seeing the form’), the term ‘aesthetics’ was taken in the Kantian sense as teaching about perception; whereas we must understand it now, at the conclusion of the ‘teaching on rapture’, as the self-disclosure of the glory of God (his theological beauty). In this way we see definitively what the first volume stressed in many ways in the teaching on subjective and objective evidence, that the form established by God bears its evidential force in itself and is able of itself to show this to the eyes of faith: but it is precisely this power to assert oneself, to demonstrate oneself, and to achieve acceptance for oneself, that belongs to the most original meaning of the biblical glory of God (as Karl Barth has shown above). Thus, ‘seeing’ and ‘being caught up out of oneself’ are not wholly separate, but are most closely involved in each other;³¹ fundamentally theology and dogmatics are not separable. If we have truly seen Christ, then we have also, in whatever manner, seen ‘his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father’ (Jn 1.14).³²

But ‘being caught up’ must be understood in the sense of the New Testament, as man’s being given a home through God’s glory—through his love—so that he is no more a looker-on, but a cooperator of glory. Man is brought back from the alienation of sin, and comes in this rapture at once to God and to himself: at once into his own depths (which he alone could never reach) and into the true fellowship of men (which can be endured only in Christ). The third part of this volume, which deals with the existential glorification, will therefore also demonstrate that theology and anthropology are involved in one another. Where man is so ‘dispossessed’ through God’s transcendent love that he himself is empowered to genuine transcendence, he wins access to his own true being, which was intended for him always.

I. VERBUM CARO FACTUM

1. PRELUDE

a. The fragments of the old covenant

Theologically, and therefore also epistemologically, it is and remains the case that it is the old covenant that prepares the way for the understanding of the new. However much the Apostle of the Gentiles may exempt his hearers from the old observances, he nevertheless cannot spare them a panorama of the whole event of salvation. How much Old Testament material Paul imposes on his readers in Rome, who were mostly Gentiles, when he must fight at one and the same time on a Jewish front and on an antinomian front!¹ This great rift, right through the centre of Scripture reflects its single and indivisible content: salvation through judgment. At its endpoint, the old covenant is one single cry for its fulfilment—and yet it is unable in the slightest to outline the form of this fulfilment which it postulates through its entire arrangement. Looking backwards from the fulfilment in Christ, it is possible to show that it was precisely this form alone that corresponded to the postulates, but likewise, that this form could never have been rounded out to fullness from the fragments which were available to the old covenant. The fullness was not present in the fragments in the way that the fullness of a jigsaw is present in the pieces, too hard for a child who needs the help of an adult to fit them together; the fullness here came about only through a synthesis possible for God alone, yet absolutely undiscoverable for man. In spite of which the fullness was present in the parts in such a way that man could recognise it subsequently, though in this act of recognition he had to acknowledge it as the sole work of God in history.

At the end of the preceding volume (III/2, 1, pp. 371-382), we offered a new formulation of the argumentum ex prophetia: the numerous images of the Old Testament surround and converge upon a midpoint which remains open and not constructible; through the existence of Christ, this midpoint is occupied, without visible struggling to attain the synthesis; as Christians reflect on this after Easter, it is seen that all fragmentary images order themselves as if automatically towards this midpoint, and contribute a clarification to the unity. Since this argument has far-reaching consequences for the theological understanding of the New Testament event, it will be presented here once again in a high degree of formalisation, and with direct reference to our subject. Put in this way, we can say that the arch of the covenant set up by God rests upon two pillars: first on the dabar of God, his active Word of Wisdom that carries out what he wills, that seeks to establish his righteousness upon earth in the chosen people and to ‘take root’ (Sir 24.12) on earth, because though man merely as a creature does possess a certain reflected brilliance of God’s glory, he yet remains incapable, by his own strength, of contributing a righteousness other than his own—and in the presence of God’s requirements, this righteousness is insufficient, indeed in its depths a righteousness that fails. Accordingly, the other pillar supporting the covenant is not simply man, nor even the chosen people as such, but that form which stands security for the covenant, never fully realised but broken again and again; and it does this in such a way that it mediates between God and the people, bearing the people’s guilt and God’s punishment. We have seen how this form became clearer and more visible from Hosea, through the Moses of Deuteronomy and the major prophets, up to the ‘Servant of Yahweh’, In this purest expression, the form integrates three functions, that of the personal go-between (a function to which Moses, in Ex 3, and many judges, kings and prophets are appointed), that of the priest (which in fact is first separated from the function of Moses through his refusal, in Ex 4.13ff.) who is charged with the cultic sacrifices that bring reconciliation, and the function of the sacrificed animal, whose blood flows in atonement and which is consumed in the whole burnt offering to the glory of God. The way is paved in the Servant Songs for the integration of the three functions, which becomes a reality only in the new covenant and becomes the dominant theme worked out in the Letter to the Hebrews; only in the new covenant is this possible, because beforehand the impossibility of combining the necessity of dying (as ‘beast of sacrifice’) and the necessity of living (as reconciling priest, prophet and go-between) stood in the way. The midpoint of the event of the go-between is to be found in his death (in Is 53, his true role is recognised only afterwards by the ‘many peoples’), but it was absolutely impossible, from the standpoint of the old covenant, to recognise that the one who died could fulfil his role as an individual rising from death. Further, the covenant which was repeatedly violated by the people was one day accounted by the active Word of God to have been definitively broken off, dissolved, as unable to be restored; sin was too great for the atonement that was possible through men (this is seen in God’s dismissal of Jeremiah’s intercession); the great harlot Jerusalem was set ablaze and destroyed by fire from the glory of God. Certainly, God had to remain true to himself, and therefore he must reach out over all disasters and promise a new and eternal covenant; but the event of the judgment through the wounded love of God, affected in his inmost heart by sin, was not something that could be made good again. In the presence of this dilemma there emerges (in a directly aprioristic manner, from the standpoint of the old covenant) the postulate of such a mediator (first sketched as a concept, then described by the Letter to the Hebrews), who vicariously endures the destroying fire of God’s glory—dying, but on account of his proving true under trial (by this, we must understand his obedience), surviving the death he experiences. In order that this may be conceivable, there is a third requirement, the thing that genuinely could not have been thought of: the coming-together of God’s dabar with the human form of the atoning mediator. (Thereby we have also the coming-together of the two events which we have isolated as the events that close the old covenant, the ‘speech event’ and the ‘blood event’, which were hindered hitherto from coming together by the two reserved areas indicated by the command against images and the command against eating blood.) It was impossible for man alone in his intercession and his suffering for others to establish God’s own and entire righteousness upon earth: but it was likewise impossible for God’s dabar alone to take this upon itself, for he cannot bypass or overtrump the God-given freedom of man (the freedom which ennobles him to the image of God): but this could be achieved by a form which was the absolute identity of God’s Word and a man who in free obedience took on himself the sin, now not merely of the people, but of the world. In his atoning death, judgment and mercy came together, so that the final judgment that should bring doom became a function of the final mercy that wished to establish God’s new and eternal covenant with the world. From the standpoint of the old covenant, this identification of the two pillars remains unthinkable, for it appears to take away the fundamental principle on which everything is built, namely the infinite qualitative difference between God and creature. Even when this identification has taken place, it remains a mystery that is never to be fully laid bare, yet that by the force of its existence casts a wholly new light on God himself and on his relationship to the world: on God, because the mystery of the God-man necessarily discloses the mystery of the Trinity within the Godhead. The light falls on God’s relationship to the world, for now, without encroachment upon the difference between God and creature, the world can find in the life of the Trinity its own allotted space.²

It is only by looking backwards from the new covenant that any of these considerations became possible. The lines from the old covenant do not converge on a single point. And everything that the Jew might have undertaken in order to force something like a convergence, in his longing for fulfilment, showed itself subsequently to be the opposite of convergence: he was an obstacle in the path of God’s plans, merely taking up the place that God wanted empty, in order to fill it himself. So terrible was God’s judgment in the destruction of the holy city and the abandonment of the holy land, so decisively had his fist smitten what remained into fragments, that man, for all the energy that he devoted to sacrifices and observance of the law, to looking out for the return of God’s glory by examining the future, the heaven, and the creation, was not able to mend the broken pieces, but could only make what was dreadful yet more obvious. The ‘kingdom’ was no longer, in any real sense, an option—it was only something that had ‘come on the scene between-times’ and had left behind it a great wasteland when it disappeared: ‘Where now is your king, to save you?. . . those of whom you said, Give me a king and princes? I gave you a king in my anger, and I have taken him away again in my wrath’ (Hos 13.9ff.). A Judaistic kingdom had lost its theological significance. It is for this reason that Jesus, in his speeches of judgment against the Pharisees and legalists, and Paul, showing the tragic dialectic of the law, must begin by opening again the obscured horizon, which permits the view of God’s original intention (the faith of Abraham and the prophets) and of his final great act of judgment in the ruining of Jerusalem. This disclosure does not at all signify the wholesale rejection of Judaism; for Jesus knows how to take hold of what is genuine among the debris (cf. Mk 12.34), indeed what is perfect (cf. Lk 21.1-4), and how to purify it and give new wholeness to the fragments in his person, just as Paul knows of the holiness, righteousness and goodness of the law (Rom 7.12), and, when he deals with the error of his Jewish brothers, speaks with all consideration and caution (Rom 10.2ff.). It is only the human self-righteousness that is rejected, which sets itself in the place of the righteousness that comes through God (in open faith, in the spirit of poverty); it is for this self-righteousness that the judgment passed on Israel half a millennium previously becomes present reality. In the threats uttered against the religious hypocrites (Mt 23.13-33) and the following lamentation over Jerusalem that murders the prophets, and whose time has now come, it is only the situation of Isaiah and Jeremiah that is rendered present—for it is obvious enough, from the fact that Jesus like all the prophets must die in Jerusalem (Lk 13.33), that he looks on ‘Jerusalem’ as the midpoint of God’s work of salvation and as the midpoint of every adulterous rebellion against God; thus, in the prophecy about the destruction of the Temple, which follows immediately in the text, a prophecy containing eschatological traits, we should not so much look forward to the events in the year A. D. 70, as backward to the events of 587 B. C. What then happened in the course of history, and thus as a type, will be repristinated in God’s definitive act and will become truly an event of the end-times.³ But precisely for this reason, it is not to be separated from the inmost content of the period of exile, the suffering of the Servant of Yahweh, which, likewise across a period of five hundred years’ silence, acquires its conclusive truth and efficacy in the eschatological suffering under judgment of Jesus Christ. We may express this in other words: the logia of judgment, expressed still in the language of the Old Testament prophets and partly in the language of apocalyptic, which bring the Synoptic Gospels to a close (however composite these may be, from a literary point of view, in their various aspects), make present the concluding historical act of salvation of God in the old covenant, and make it ready for integration in the synthesis of his eschatological act of salvation in the New Testament in the Cross and Resurrection of Christ. While Jesus exposes more the personal sin and contrariety of legalism, which he will take on himself as the personal bearer of sin, Paul brings to light more the provisional character of the whole order of law, which is the occasion of the temptation to self-righteousness for the sinner, which thereby exposes his concealed lack of redemption, and so can be understood only as an intermediate moment in the history of the covenant-faith (between Abraham and Christ). The theologies of Matthew and James do not contradict this, because even they—in their more positive estimation of the law—see its wholeness only from the New Testament’s viewpoint of radical transcendence of the time and the level of its ruins (Mt 5.19f.; Jas 2.10f.).

Thus, Judaism’s three forms of reaching out for the missing glory of God can find a home in the unity of the new covenant only by way of their total dismantling. The image of the coming Messiah must be broken through the image of the suffering Servant of Yahweh (which, for the Jews, could not be united to it); apocalyptic must undergo a complete transformation of signification, and be humbled to the role of a function of the dying and rising of the man Jesus; the sapiential teaching can be utilised only when it lets itself be measured against, and brought into alignment with, the scandal of the Cross and of the ‘foolishness of God’ that appears therein—for the ‘lord of glory’ must be crucified (1 Cor 2.8). This threefold failure (and salvation ‘as through fire’, 1 Cor 3.15) is all part of the process of making present again the great failure of Israel and its loss of God’s glory in the past. But, to summarise once again what was said at the beginning, this failure was only the proclamation that God in the covenant foresaw a higher building than was visible in the Old Testament foundations. The Adam created as God’s image (the ‘first’ Adam) could not bear sufficient weight to permit him to be the second pillar that would bear the whole vault of the eternal covenant that God wanted to establish with the world. This was for the simple reason that he was mortal; but the content of the covenant of which he was the partner was divine and therefore immortal. Ruin, death and Hades must be taken up into the act of covenant: this was possible only if God’s Word became flesh, if the eternal life took death (as judgment, ruin, Hell) upon himself as man, and made it past in himself: ‘I was dead, but behold, I am alive for evermore, and I have the keys of death and Hades’ (Rev 1.18). Only then is ‘the righteousness of God’ established on earth as it is in heaven (Mt 6.10); only then does God’s Word, sent forth into the world, return to him with its whole harvest and equal resonance (Is 55.10f.); and in this full resonance, the whole fragmented clatter of the broken covenant and of the enacted judgment must sound forth too, must indeed bring into being the highest harmony (as this reigns eternally between Father and Son), In the absolute suffering of judgment and its overcoming in the rising of man to God, the imperfect Old Testament glory of God must display itself in the New Testament as the perfect glory of his love that overcomes all things. And if in the period of the great prophecy the insufficiency of men appeared as a whole—so much so, that even the strongest intercessory prayer of the individual could no longer balance the sinking scales (Jer 7.16; 11.14; 14.11f.)—if that solidarity in insufficiency, from which a doctrine of ‘original sin’ could develop, became visible, then the atonement of the ‘new Adam’ will be obliged to effect a deeper solidarity in opposition to this, in accordance with the Pauline principle of superabundance in the establishment of God’s universal righteousness (Rom 5.15,17,20). This solidarity, whereby God’s righteousness passes from the one to ‘all’, corresponds on earth to the trinitarian solidarity of love in heaven.

b. Drawing together and handing over: the Baptist

The ‘heir of all things’ (Heb 1.2) ought not to inherit a lordship over ruins; something unheard-of took place, namely that the original meaning and content of the first covenant rose again intact in a form that brought it to a close so that, restored to its original brightness, it might dispossess itself in favour of the new form: midpoint to midpoint, and above all, person to person. We are not dealing with a ‘movement’—the group of John the Baptist’s disciples remains shadowy and irrelevant, like the groups of prophets who surrounded the solitary and unique figure of Elijah, and the frictions between this party and the disciples of Jesus remain irrelevant¹—but rather with an encounter seen in ever new variations of light and shade. Each makes a decision about the other and takes up a position in relation to him with an emphasis, with an amount of detail that is so astonishing when we consider the brevity of the Gospels, that we grasp that the two persons who measure themselves against one another, like all the great persons of salvation history, are not only ‘sent on a mission’, but are personified missions, embodiments, bodily ideas, who as such bear epochs of salvation history in themselves and dismiss epochs from themselves (cf Heb 7.9f.): it is thus that Moses portrays ‘the law’ and Elijah ‘prophecy’ in the scene of transfiguration. Looking ahead from this point, we can recognise immediately that when he is asked who he is, the Baptist, who is to embody in concentrated form the glowing kernel of the first covenant, can identify himself neither with the ‘prophet’ (‘like Moses’, Deut 18.15), nor with Elijah (Mal 3.23), nor with the Messiah, in view of whom he is to ‘clear the path’ (Mal 3.1, following Is 40.3). He, like all those ‘sent’, does not know who he is—all the more is this true, since his mission is the greatest that anyone born of woman has received (Mt 11.11), and therefore the least surveyable. He knows only his commission, to be a voice that calls (in reality a voice that is called)² in the wilderness: ‘Clear the path of the Lord’, and to effect this clearing of hearts with all the might of his existence: through a word which is given him directly from God with an unprecedented immediacy (Jesus testifies of him, ‘Yes, I tell you, he is more than a prophet’, Mt 11.9), and through an act that is inspired in him just as directly, and without connecting to anything already existing³ (Jesus testifies to this too: the baptism of John is ‘from heaven’, Mt 21.25).

The seemingly disparate characteristics of the Baptist in the Gospels come together to form an impressive figure only when they are considered together in the unity of his mission that goes beyond all boundaries. This mission exceeds not only the comprehension of his disciples, but also the self-understanding possible to the one sent himself. Since his mission on the one hand goes back into the kernel of the old covenant, and on the other hand makes the leap of transcendence in anticipation into the kernel of the new covenant, it can be understood as a form only if it is allowed to remain in this unique and unrepeatable suspension.

The event of the Baptist is above all the fact that salvation history, which had in effect (apart from a meagre postlude) come to an end with the destruction of Jerusalem and the exile,⁴ in order to make room for the ‘empty period’ of five hundred years, suddenly jerks into motion again. Passing over all apocalyptic, it goes back to the centre of the great prophecy, which was always intimately related to the imminent expectation of the Day of the Lord;⁵ John’s proclamation of judgment and call to repentance have the same quality as those of Amos or Micah, Jeremiah or Ezekiel. They have likewise the same indissoluble two-sidedness: naming declaration of wrath, and good news (Lk 3.17f.) of forgiveness of sins on the ground of penitent conversion (Mk 1.4), addressed to the present, without looking forward like apocalyptic to the separation of two classes in the coming judgment. By contrast with all contemporary messianic movements, the call of the Baptist is wholly apolitical, purely religious. His ethical requirement—of which Luke seeks to give a sketch⁶—is as simple and to the point as the altruistic requirement of the original law and prophecy: namely, to share with the poor and to practise righteousness in self-denial and the