From Glory to Glory: Divine Perfection Shared

Abstract

This article explains ‘the glory of God’ in the context of two Biblical claims seemingly at odds with each other: God does not share divine glory with humans, and God does share divine glory with them. The article offers a resolution of the apparent conflict on the basis of a Biblical conception of divine glory as inexhaustible perfect goodness that could, in principle, be shared in two ways: with human controlling ownership over its nature and value, and without such ownership. It finds widely neglected importance of divine glory in relation to voluntary human cooperation with God in sharing in it, without controlling ownership. As a result, divine perfect (defect-free) goodness inhabits a context of imperfection in human moral defects. The article explains that this context does not preclude divine glory but can advance its value and salience. It also finds the Apostle Paul and the author of John’s Gospel to agree on a voluntary human role in sharing in divine glory and on a central role of this sharing in God’s salvific ‘gospel of glory’.

Be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect [teleios].—Matthew 5:48, NRSV

Divine Glory in the Hebrew Bible

Talk of divine glory (kabōd) emerges early in the Pentateuch, and it recurs in the historical writings, the prophetic writings, and the Psalms. The book of Exodus is seminal here. Its talk of divine glory points to something that can be seen by God’s people. Moses and Aaron promise the Israelites: ‘In the morning you shall see the glory of the Lord, because he has heard your complaining against the Lord’ (Exod 16:7, NRSV, updated version, here and in subsequent Biblical translations unless otherwise noted). The elaboration is: ‘As Aaron spoke to the whole congregation of the Israelites, they looked towards the wilderness, and the glory of the Lord appeared in the cloud’ (Exod 16:9). We should ask how, or in virtue of what, it appeared in the cloud. ¹ What, in other words, does the glory of the Lord ‘look’ like?

The book of Exodus clarifies what indicates the glory of God: ‘The glory of the Lord settled on Mount Sinai, and the cloud covered it for six days; on the seventh day he called to Moses out of the cloud. Now the appearance of the glory of the Lord was like a devouring fire on the top of the mountain in the sight of the Israelites’ (Exod 24:16–17). If this was an initial indicator of the glory of the Lord, we should ask how it differed from other mountaintop fires. We may assume that ‘the glory of the Lord’ has unique features for a unique God that distinguish it from most fires.

A key indicator of the unique features arises from a request of Moses to see God’s glory.

Moses said [to the Lord], ‘Please show me your glory [kabōd]’. And he said, ‘I will make all my goodness [tub] pass before you and will proclaim before you the name, ‘The Lord’, and I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious and will show mercy on whom I will show mercy’. ‘But’, he said, ‘you cannot see my face, for no one shall see me and live’. And the Lord continued, ‘See, there is a place by me where you shall stand on the rock, and while my glory passes by I will put you in a cleft of the rock, and I will cover you with my hand until I have passed by; then I will take away my hand, and you shall see my back, but my face shall not be seen’. (Exod 33:18–23)

The writer of Exodus conveys an important insight: God identifies ‘all my goodness passes before you’ with ‘my glory passes by [you]’. God thus leaves Moses with an understanding of glory as divine perfect goodness, as the splendor, grandeur, excellence, and majesty of God’s goodness.

The approach of Exodus dissents from an understanding of divine glory as just the spectacular activity of a storm god or a powerful amoral god. ² Divine glory harbors moral robustness without defect, according to the God of Moses. Terence E. Fretheim thus remarks: ‘[God’s talk of goodness here] carries the matter beyond any simple tangible manifestation to a statement about what kind of God this is. What will serve as a more genuine sign to Moses is not some direct view of God but a specific indication of the ‘good’ character of this one who has given the divine name ‘Yahweh’ to Israel’. ³ Moses experiences the glory of God’s perfectly good character, but he does not see God’s face. The latter omission indicates that God is not fully comprehended by Moses. Even so, he does experience divine glory as the unique goodness self-presented by God.

Planning to leave Mount Sinai, Moses set up the tabernacle of the Lord, and the cloud of divine glory occupied it: ‘The cloud covered the tent of meeting, and the glory of the Lord filled the tabernacle. Moses was not able to enter the tent of meeting because the cloud settled upon it, and the glory of the Lord filled the tabernacle’ (Exod 40:34–35). A lesson here is that divine glory is not limited to Mount Sinai or any geographic location. Instead, it is with God and the people of God, wherever their journey takes them. The divine glory is nomadic: ‘For the cloud of the Lord was on the tabernacle by day, and fire was in the cloud by night, before the eyes of all the house of Israel at each stage of their journey’ (Exod 40:38). A change of location, then, is compatible with the presence of divine glory.

The book of Isaiah endorses the relation between divine glory and the goodness of and from God.

In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord sitting on a throne, high and lofty, and the hem of his robe filled the temple. Seraphs were in attendance above him; each had six wings: with two they covered their faces, and with two they covered their feet, and with two they flew. And one called to another and said,

‘Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts;

the whole earth is full of his glory’.

The pivots on the thresholds shook at the voices of those who called, and the house filled with smoke. And I said, ‘Woe is me! I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips, yet my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!’ (Isa: 6:1–5)

A contrast here is between divine glory and ‘people of unclean lips’, that is, between the ‘holy’ righteousness of God and the unrighteousness of the people of God. This is not a contrast merely of divine power with human weakness. It rests on a striking moral difference between God and humans, between moral superiority and moral inferiority.

The book of Isaiah relates divine glory directly to a concern for righteousness, beginning with some rhetorical questions from God:

Is not this the fast that I choose:

 to loose the bonds of wickedness,

 to undo the thongs of the yoke,

to let the oppressed go free,

 and to break every yoke?

Is it not to share your bread with the hungry,

 and bring the homeless poor into your house;

when you see the naked, to cover him,

 and not to hide yourself from your own flesh?

Then shall your light break forth like the dawn,

 and your healing shall spring up speedily;

your righteousness shall go before you,

 the glory of the Lord shall be your rear guard. (Isa 58:6–8, RSV) ⁴

The glory of the Lord, according to the book of Isaiah, seeks to yield divine righteousness among humans, despite their habitual resistance. Divine glory and its righteousness are thus seen in their joint conflict with wayward humans.

The divine righteousness inherent to divine glory contravenes static morality. It includes the active divine effort to save wayward people, to bring them into a righteous relationship with God. According to the book of Isaiah, God stirs up trouble for humans in order to promote righteousness and salvation towards divine-human reconciliation among them:

I am the Lord, and there is no other.

I form light and create darkness,

I make weal and create woe,

I am the Lord, who do all these things.

Shower, O heavens, from above,

 and let the skies rain down righteousness;

let the earth open, that salvation may sprout forth,

 and let it cause righteousness to spring up also;

 I the Lord have created it. (Isa 45:6–8, RSV)

Creating woe here is not doing evil, but it is agitating among humans for their benefit towards righteousness and salvation in divine-human reconciliation. This is part of the glory of the Lord, according to the book of Isaiah.

The divine effort towards righteousness in salvation is not limited to Israel, according to the book of Isaiah; it aims to attract all people:

The foreigners who join themselves to the Lord,

 to minister to him, to love the name of the Lord,

 and to be his servants,

every one who keeps the sabbath, and does not profane it,

 and holds fast my covenant—

these I will bring to my holy mountain,

 and make them joyful in my house of prayer;

their burnt offerings and their sacrifices

 will be accepted on my altar;

for my house shall be called a house of prayer

 for all peoples.

Thus says the Lord God,

 who gathers the outcasts of Israel,

I will gather yet others to him

 besides those already gathered’. (Isa 56:6–8, RSV)

The promise to ‘all peoples’ is striking, recalling the divine promise to Abram (Abraham) to have all families of the earth blessed through him (Gen 12:3). So, divine righteousness and its salvation are explicitly transnational (see Isa 66:18–19). The book of Ezekiel concurs with the idea of intended divine glory for all peoples: ‘I will set my glory among the nations; and all the nations shall see my judgment which I have executed, and my hand which I have laid on them. The house of Israel shall know that I am the Lord their God, from that day forward’ (Ezek 39:21–22).

Psalm 85 relates divine glory to righteousness and salvation in divine love and faithfulness, thus integrating some key features:

Surely his salvation is at hand for those who fear him,

 that glory may dwell in our land.

Steadfast love and faithfulness will meet;

 righteousness and peace will kiss each other.

Faithfulness will spring up from the ground,

 and righteousness will look down from the sky.

Yea, the Lord will give what is good,

 and our land will yield its increase.

Righteousness will go before him,

 and make his footsteps a way. (Psalm 85:9–13, RSV)

This is a remarkable summary of the rich goodness involved in divine glory. It resists any attempt to reduce such glory to mere power, light, or living presence. The power of divine glory encompasses the power of righteousness and its reliance on the divine goodness of salvation, love, and faithfulness. It thus fits with what we have seen in the books of Exodus and Isaiah.

Given the previous Biblical evidence, I dissent from Abraham Heschel’s purely functional approach to divine glory: ‘The glory is the presence, not the essence of God; an act rather than a quality; a process not a substance. Mainly the glory manifests itself as a power overwhelming the world’. ⁵ We shall see that the divine glory is not an overwhelming or coercive power in the way Heschel suggests. Instead, it can be opposed and frustrated by humans. In addition, it is integral to the moral character of God, and thus is no mere act or function of God. It includes the inherent moral perfection of God and thus figures in God’s worthiness of worship, that is, in God’s being truly God.

Talk of the glory of God, going beyond talk merely of divine morality or goodness, serves an important purpose for various characters and writers of the Hebrew scriptures. It captures the reality of their experience of God’s moral character as inexhaustibly profound, illuminating, challenging, and renewing in relation to cooperative humans. It thus accommodates an important difference between God’s actively righteous moral character and the static rules and norms of familiar morality. God’s moral character is not static or fully comprehensible by humans, and it thus can challenge human moral complacency or presumed moral completeness. Human recognition of divine glory enables us to see that God can always go deeper in moral profundity for humans, even leaving older moral teachings surpassed by deeper divine glory. We shall see how Paul recruits this consideration in relation to the transition from the old to the new covenant.

A key issue concerns how divine glory relates to cooperative humans, with regard to their participation in it. Is it selfish or shared from a divine point of view? The book of Isaiah offers some relevant comments:

I am the Lord; that is my name;

 my glory I give to no other,

 nor my praise to idols. (Isa 42:8)

For my own sake, for my own sake, I do it,

 for why should my name be profaned?

 My glory I will not give to another. (Isa 48:11)

Such comments suggest that God is selfish with divine glory, being unwilling to share it with, or give it to, other persons. The raises the question of whether divine glory is compatible with unselfish love in its presentation and circulation among humans. Is it something to be announced by God but limited to God?

Some Biblical writers, including Paul and the author of John’s Gospel, reject any suggestion that divine glory goes unshared by God. They hold that humans can, and sometimes do, share in divine glory, and that human cooperation with God bears significantly on this sharing. Perhaps, then, they would interpret the aforementioned passages from Isaiah to concern the giving of divine glory to humans in a way that does not give them controlling ownership of it. We shall explore relevant evidence that makes the latter interpretation plausible, at least from the perspectives of Paul and the author of John’s Gospel.

Divine Glory in Paul and John

Paul tells the Corinthian Christians that his ‘ministry of righteousness excels in glory’, even in more glory than that found in the Mosaic covenant (2 Cor 3:9). He adds:

Whenever someone turns to the Lord, the veil [‘over their hearts’] is taken away. Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. But we all, with unveiled faces, looking as in a mirror at the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory, just as from the Lord, the Spirit. (2 Cor 3:16–18, NASB)

Paul’s language of ‘from glory to glory’ indicates divine glory, or splendor, shared with humans.

Victor Paul Furnish correctly observes: ‘Paul’s association here of the Lord with the Spirit shows that he is still thinking of God himself (see especially ‘the Spirit of the living God’, v. 3) as the ultimate source of that splendor [= glory] with which not only the Pauline apostolate but also the life of every believer is being infused’. ⁶ In such ‘infusion’, according to Paul, divine glory is being shared with cooperative humans, that is, those humans who ‘turn to the Lord’. So, the transformation of responsive humans by God’s glory is interpersonal and voluntary, not mechanical and coercive. Divine glory, according to Paul, invites and encourages human turning to God without extinguishing voluntary human agency.

The veil needing removal blocks people from apprehending the glory aright, in the absence of their turning to the Lord in heartfelt, sincere repentance. This consideration recalls the deficit in human attitude towards God from Isaiah 6. God commands Isaiah: ‘Make the mind of this people dull, and stop their ears, and shut their eyes, so that they may not look with their eyes and listen with their ears and comprehend with their minds and turn and be healed’(Isa 6:10). ⁷ Without the suitable moral attitude from the human heart (or, volitional and affective center) towards God, the turning to God would be relatively superficial, in failing to align a human heart with God’s moral will. In particular, suitable love towards God would be lacking. So, God aims to block human turning to God before people are ready to obey God sincerely from their heart. The veil needing removal, then, is not merely intellectual, a matter of thinking. It has volitional and affective features that bear on turning to God aright.

Paul represents the risen Jesus Christ as a focal place for divine glory and for human response to such glory. He is, according to Paul, ‘the Lord of glory’ (1 Cor 2:8; see Eph 1:18 on ‘the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory’). In addition: ‘It is the God who said, ‘Light will shine out of darkness’, who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ’ (2 Cor 4:6). Paul does not mean the physical face of the historical Jesus; instead, he has in mind the Jesus of history who ‘became a life-giving Spirit’ (1 Cor 15:45). This is the Christ of whom the Epistle to the Colossians says: ‘God chose to make known how great among the gentiles are the riches of the glory of this mystery, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory’ (Col 1:27; cf. Gal 4:19). Paul’s talk of ‘the face of Christ’ concerns the direct presence of the Spirit of the risen Christ, whom Paul closely associates with the Spirit of God (Rom 8:9–10). He thinks of the relevant Spirit as characterized by ‘righteousness’ (Rom 8:10). He also thinks of the Spirit of God, as noted, to be the divine source of bringing divine glory to cooperative humans (2 Cor 3:17–18).

Evil, according to Paul, can block people from seeing the glory of God in Christ: ‘If our gospel is veiled, it is veiled to those who are perishing. In their case the god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelievers, to keep them from seeing clearly the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God’ (2 Cor 4:3–4). Paul also recognizes the prospect, and the reality, of humans frustrating the glory of God among them. He recognizes a moral component in divine glory that enables him to say: ‘All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God’ (Rom 3:23). Frustrating divine glory, furthermore, is included in what he opposes with this injunction: ‘Do not quench the Spirit’ (1 Thess 5:19; cf. Eph 4:30).

We have noted that Paul regards the transformation from ‘glory to glory’ to originate from ‘the Spirit, the Lord’ (2 Cor 3:18). So, quenching that Spirit will result in frustrating the glory of God among humans. Paul also holds that humans can ‘nullify the grace of God’ owing to their attitudes towards divine righteousness (Gal 2:21). When they do so, they frustrate the divine glory inherent in righteousness by divine grace (the latter grace being compatible with an expectation of human cooperation). In addition, when they fail to ‘turn to the Lord’ (2 Cor 3:16), they frustrate the divine glory on offer in the transformation, from glory to glory, that arises from such turning (cf. Rom 2:4).

Paul follows the book of Isaiah in representing God to say: ‘I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart’ (1 Cor 1:19; cf. Isa 29:14). He adds: ‘Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through [its] wisdom’ (1 Cor 1:20–21; cf. Isa 55:8–9). This perspective echoes the book of Isaiah:

You felt secure in your wickedness;

 you said, ‘No one sees me’.

Your wisdom and your knowledge

 led you astray,

and you said in your heart,

 ‘I am, and there is no one besides me’. (Isa 47:10)

Divine glory has and exhibits an incomprehensible splendor that cannot be explained by the wisdom of the world. It thus disturbs that wisdom, seeking to destroy it, for the good of ‘the wise’ and ‘the discerning’, who are ‘led astray’. By transcending human understanding, while bringing unique goodness, divine glory challenges by contrast the wisdom of the world. Whether it attracts ‘the wise’ to God, however, depends on their priorities and their willingness to be led by God.

Paul acknowledges the goal-directed leading by God with divine glory: ‘Our slight, momentary affliction is producing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all measure, because we look not at what can be seen but at what cannot be seen, for what can be seen is temporary, but what cannot be seen is eternal’ (2 Cor 4:17–18). Divine glory aims to yield ‘glory beyond all measure’ for humans in the fullness of time, and it does so through ongoing pain and suffering. Such intentional leading brings a measure of divine glory to cooperative humans now, but not in its fullness for them. So, there is a ‘now, but not yet (fully)’ feature to the sharing of divine glory, just as there is with the arrival of the divine kingdom.

The goal-directedness of divine glory seeks the glory of the freedom of God’s people, according to Paul: ‘The creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its enslavement to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God’ (Rom 8:20–21). Here again the ultimate divine goal for glory is eschatological, to be realized in the fullness of time, but also realized in part now. Full human freedom from sin and death, according to Paul, awaits God’s appointed time in the future, but a measure of its glory is available now. In its goal-directedness, or intentionality, towards moral perfection for recipients, divine glory exceeds any static or impersonal moral standard. In settling for static or impersonal morality, we will neglect divine glory and its active, intentional righteousness.

Paul thinks of divine glory as both transcendent and immanent relative to humans. Its transcendence is that of God as creator and sustainer of the creation. Its immanence is found in God’s personality traits self-manifested in human experience and life where humans are cooperative. These traits, according to Paul, are ‘the fruit of the Spirit’ of God: ‘The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control’ (Gal 5:22–23). Such fruit is not static or impersonal; instead, it includes features of the active moral character of God in human life (cf. Rom 5:5, 2 Cor 5:14). It manifests what Paul characterizes as follows: ‘It is God who is at work in you, enabling you both to will and to work for his good pleasure’ (Phil 2:13). This work to manifest the divine fruit in humans is interpersonal, morally challenging, and thus uncoercive towards human wills. As a result, Paul uses injunctions to promote it.

The salvific work of God, according to Paul, aims to have the glory of God realized perfectly with cooperative welcome in human lives. This is an ultimate goal, realized only in part now, for the imperfections of human life in relation to God. So, Paul writes: ‘Since we have these promises [from God], beloved, let us cleanse ourselves from every defilement of flesh and of spirit, making holiness perfect in the fear of God’ (2 Cor 7:1; cf. 2 Cor 12:9). He thus asks the Corinthian Christians: ‘Do you not know that you are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in you?’, adding that this temple is holy. Paul has in mind the kind of righteous holiness, in contrast with human unrighteousness, that we observed in Isaiah 6, in connection with God’s manifested glory. It stems from the divine glory that extends outward to wayward humans, for the sake of their salvation as reconciliation with God. We find a related idea in Matthew’s Jesus: ‘Be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect’ (Matt 5:48).

The author of John’s Gospel shares Paul’s understanding of divine glory as being morally perfect and thus uncoercive of humans in its being shared with them. The key role for voluntary human agency in receiving divine glory in Christ as ‘God’s only son’ emerges at the start of John’s Gospel:

[Jesus] came to his own home, and his own people received him not. But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God. And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth. (John 1:11–14)

God’s glory, according to John’s Gospel, is ‘seen’ in Jesus as God’s ‘only son, full of grace and truth’. The talk of ‘grace and truth’ points to God’s moral character of glory. This glory on offer in Jesus is to be ‘received’ by humans; they do not apprehend it aright without cooperative reception of it.

In a prayer to his ‘righteous Father’, John’s Jesus proclaims: ‘The glory which thou hast given me I have given to them, that they may be one even as we are one, I in them and thou in me, that they may become perfectly [teteleiōmenoi] one, so that the world may know that thou hast sent me and hast loved them even as thou hast loved me’ (John 17:22–23, RSV). The divine glory ‘given’ by God to Jesus aims at humans becoming ‘perfectly one’ in a way that reflects God’s glory and love. The perfection of divine glory and love among humans, according to John’s Gospel, thus sets a goal for human development and salvation in reconciliation with God and humans.

John’s Gospel identifies an important distinction between divine glory and human glory given by God. God’s glory is inherent to God but not to humans. So, God’s glory must be ‘given’ to humans, as an unmerited gift, if they are to share in it. In addition, God ‘gives’ divine glory to God’s unique son, Jesus, who, in turn, gives that glory to humans who receive him as their Lord. A remarkable claim of John’s Jesus is that God loves people in general (‘the world’) as God loves Jesus, his unique son.

John’s Gospel, unlike the synoptic Gospels, has no isolated transfiguration story regarding Jesus, because Jesus consistently shows divine glory in transfiguration, including through his ‘signs’ of God’s presence (beginning in John 2:11). ⁸ Even so, God’s glory in Christ is no spectacle for mere human observation, according to John’s Gospel. On the contrary, it presents a challenge that seeks voluntary human obedience (in cooperative faith) to divine righteousness.

John’s Jesus links faithful obedience to divine glory:

Jesus answered, ‘My teaching is not mine but his who sent me. Anyone who resolves to do the will of God will know whether the teaching is from God or whether I am speaking on my own. Those who speak on their own seek their own glory, but the one who seeks the glory of him who sent him is true, and there is nothing unjust in him. (John 7:16–18)

Resolving to do God’s will concerns God’s moral will, the will Jesus experienced and faithfully obeyed in Gethsemane, despite his life’s being at stake. Jesus ‘seeks the glory of him who sent him’, and he expects his followers to do the same. ⁹ In doing so, they share in God’s glory as an unmerited gift given to them.

According to John’s Gospel, the self-giving death of Jesus is the focal point of divine glory in him:

Jesus answered them, ‘The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified. Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain, but if it dies it bears much fruit. Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life. Whoever serves me must follow me, and where I am, there will my servant be also. Whoever serves me, the Father will honor. (John 12:23–26)

Jesus thus shares in God’s glory when he obeys his Father in giving his life for God and God’s people. His followers are expected to do the same and thus be honored by sharing in God’s glory. So, Jesus’s promise of his followers’ sharing in God’s glory is realized in their serving God as Jesus did.

Jesus asks Martha, the sister of Lazarus: ‘Did I not tell you that if you believed you would see the glory of God?’ (John 11:40). The author of John’s Gospel would generalize on this question to suggest that humanly apprehended glory of God is shared with those who faithfully obey God. John’s Jesus thus prays to God in a promise to share divine glory with his followers: ‘I have made your name known to those whom you gave me from the world. They were yours, and you gave them to me, and they have kept your word’ (John 17:6). Faith in God, for John as for Paul, is the kind of trusting obedience that keeps God’s word, after the model of Jesus.

We cannot digress to a detailed comparison of Paul, John, and Isaiah on divine glory. We should note, however, their common Jewish background regarding divine glory in the theological life of ancient Israel. Even so, we can note some differences.

For instance, the book of Isaiah did not have the benefit of the realized Christology enjoyed by Paul and John in the wake of the ministry of Jesus. In addition, as Richard Bauckham has noted, John’s Gospel offers an ‘intensification’ of Paul’s understanding of glory and the cross of Christ:

In Philippians [2:6–11] the paradox which transforms the meaning of exaltation [to glory] is that the one who humiliated himself to the utmost is therefore exalted to the utmost. But in John the paradox intensifies: Jesus’s self-humiliation actually is his exaltation [to glory] by God. . .. What it means to be God in God’s sovereignty and glory appears in the self-humiliation of the one who serves. ¹⁰

Such intensification in John 12:23 and 13:31–32 does seem to be an actual Johannine emphasis. Nonetheless, Paul and John share Christology regarding Jesus in a way that yields some common themes about glory. For example, Jesus shared in the richness of his Father’s glory before his earthly life (2 Cor 8:9, John 17:4–5, 24), and Jesus’s disciples, through faithful obedience, share in his glory now by grace, prior to their own resurrection (2 Cor 3:16, 18, John 17:8, 22). We now can recruit the views of John and Paul to elucidate how divine glory is apprehended and shared by humans.

Glory Apprehended and Shared

Humans often neglect divine glory with its active moral perfection, as defect-free goodness, in salvific righteousness. In doing so, they omit something crucial for divine worthiness of worship and for human relating to God as worthy of worship. Divine glory, with its active moral perfection, merits unqualified commitment from humans in their obedience, trust, and love. Such glory, given its independence of any created agent or object, differs in authoritative status from the glory of created agents derived from and dependent on divine glory.

The unmerited gift of divine glory to cooperative humans relies for its being apprehended and shared in by them on their faithful obedience to God. Such obedience is voluntary in its cooperatively conforming, to some extent, to the divine glory of God’s moral character and will (even if they fail to acknowledge God, as God, at work; cf. Matt 25:31–45). If humans seek to apprehend and share in divine glory, they are to obey God as God’s will presents itself to them, such as in the offered fruit of God’s Spirit, including in moral conscience. Such fruit is an experienced indicator of intentional divine perfection, even if experienced in glimmers at times.

A relevant intentional feature is in the divine nudging of humans towards the goal of deeper righteousness on the basis of the offered fruit. How a person responds to that indicator will figure importantly in whether it comes to fruition in salience in that person’s experience, that is, whether they experience its distinctive moral power in cooperation. For the sake of accountable human personhood, God yields to human persons the power to frustrate or to advance the expansion of divine glory in their experience (2 Cor 4:15).

Faithful obedience to God, according to Paul and John, has its highest reward in human sharing in divine glory. Humans then reflect that glory to some measure in their moral character and are thereby sustained in righteous life with God. To the extent that humans undervalue divine glory, they undervalue the motivating divine power behind faithful obedience to God (at least as a response to that power), with corresponding detrimental results for their lives. One such result bears on the human need to ‘turn to the Lord’ in faithful obedience. This is no merely abstract or theoretical turning, because, as suggested, it is a cooperative response to the manifested fruit of the Spirit as God’s personality traits. Divine love heads the list, according to Paul, and its manifestation is experienced evidence of God’s reality and goodness that can ground hope and faith in God (Rom 5:5; cf. 2 Cor 5:14).

As humans cooperate with the manifested fruit of God’s Spirit, they share in the divine perfect intention to bring divine glory to realization among humans. They thus experience firsthand the movement of that intention, and its reality, towards divine perfect goodness, and thus glory, among humans. God’s power of glory on offer then moves towards fruition among them as they experience it firsthand and conform to it, at least to some extent. The voluntary role of the conforming leaves humans as responsible moral agents before God who lack controlling ownership over divine character traits of glory.

A recurring human impediment to recognizing divine glory is the human tendency to lose awareness and other apprehension of its moral perfection in the midst of life’s abundant imperfections. Humans often allow the moral imperfections in their lives to obscure the presence of more or less subtle indicators of divine perfection. This amounts to losing recognition of God and divine glory in what is not God. It is common.

In the language of John’s Gospel, people sometimes allow the world’s darkness to ‘overtake’ the light of divine glory. The author of John’s Gospel thus remarks: ‘The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overtake it’, adding that this light is the glory of God in the life of Christ (John 1:5). Paul likewise would direct human focus to the impeccable divine goodness on offer: ‘Whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about [logizesthe] these things’ (Phil 4:8; cf. Rom 2:4). This is an injunction to reflect carefully on the good things given to humans by God, in effect, to behold the glory of God (2 Cor 3:18). This is not a recommendation for abstract speculation.

Paul is concerned not with arguments of natural theology, but instead with being moved to turn to the Lord on the basis of divine ‘excellence’ confronted firsthand in human experience. In this turning, a human voluntarily conforms to the divine glory on offer and shares in it. In that case, one becomes a co-valuer with God in and towards divine moral perfection.

Conclusion

Divine glory looms large in many Biblical narratives, given God’s worthiness of worship and inherent moral perfection. The excellence of God’s character calls for language that goes beyond static morality to an active salvific morality personified and empowered by God. The latter is a morality driven by a divine intention to share divine glory with humans, without their controlling ownership, via their being reconciled to God, volitionally, affectively, and intellectually. That glory can co-exist with human moral imperfection, as we ‘have this treasure in cracked earthen vessels’. We honor God’s exalted role in salvific morality by recognizing the central role of shared divine glory, the gift of grace that goes ‘from glory to glory’ in the lives of cooperative humans. ¹¹