Impetus for a dramatic reading on God's glory

This will be an ongoing post that lists the major topic areas for a dramatic reading. The following are possible areas of focus:

• Glory is a word whose use today is mostly applied to sunsets of overwhelming beauty or the victors of sporting events. But it is a seemingly ubiquitous word used through Scripture in a wide range of contexts. It's exact meaning is never clearly defined, yet for all its indeterminancy of meaning, its position suggests its extreme value. It seems that we have lost the capacity to see or recognize a deeper glory.

• the changes/transitions in how YHWH reveals his glory, how YHWH makes his glory known.

• coming to an understanding of how believers are in many senses "guardians of God's glory"

• to fully appreciate God's glory — does that change our relationship with God? Does it change our understanding of the "personal" nature of God? Is a personal God necessarily intimate? How does one reconcile/synthesize/comprehend the other nature of God and the deeply penetrating nature of God?

• the liturgy of worship should lead us to encounter the glory of God.

If the gathered people feel in their inmost selves how much in need they are of the arrival of the Lord among them and in them in order to grow into a real church and for each one to be filled with an ecclesial attitude, then a subjectively responding event will correspond to what occurs objectively. With the awareness of one's own unworthiness, the worthiness of the liturgy grows. [Hans Urs Von Balthasar]

But if it is really God's word and self-communication that we are to hear and understand, then this surely cannot occur on the basis of a neutral foreknowledge about what 'words' mean or what 'truth' is. Such encounter with God can only occur by virtue of a primary sense of being over-awed by the undialogical presupposition of the dialogue that has started — namely the divinity of gory of God. If this shock did not take place then the whole conversation would rest on a foundation of untruth... The first impact of divinity can never be spared the person encountered, a shock that will then penetrate and affect all succeeding speeches and replies. [Hans Von Balthasar]

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Glory and Confession

In reading The Glory of the Lord, volume VI by Hans Urs Von Balthasar, I have been struck by how often the "situation" of confession arises in discussing God's glory.

p.13
The glory of the God who discloses himself always reveals his holiness as well, 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 [Isaiah 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"' [Luke 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 [Daniel 7.9f], and the glorified Son of Man seen by John also has the figure of a judge [Revelations 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 [which includes the contemplator].

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.

When you say "glory", what exactly do you mean?

This is a project that I hope will at least result in a dramatic reading to be performed within a worship service. The initial impulse came from a quiet dawning that the Scriptures are full of the word glory and we hear it several times each Sunday in worship. Yet most of us would be hard-pressed to come up with a definition for glory or account for the pervasive presence of this word.

The idea is that this reading will present and juxtapose in dramatic form, a wide range of uses of glory in Scripture. To the end that we would see the depth and breadth of this word/concept, that it would return to our vocabulary, that we would learn to recognize the glory of God around us.