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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