The Theology of God’s Glory (Doxa) as Re-Interpreted by the Evangelist John.

John A. McGuckin.

    The theme or concept of the Glory of God (the Kabod: כָּבוֹד) is a major element of Old Testament theology: a primary way that the ancient theologians tried to conceive, and express the action of, the divine majesty in the world, and in particular that glory as a reserved revelation for the chosen covenant people. This paper will very briefly consider the main outlines of that theology of the glory, its refurbishment as it passed into the Greek of the Septuagint (as the Doxa Theou: δόξα θεοῦ), and its magnificent  re-application in the profound theology of St. John the Evangelist. 

        In classical Greek, deriving from δόκειν, the word δόξα denoted ‘what seems to be’ or an ‘appearance’. From this, the idea of δόξα expanded to mean generally person’s (good) reputation, or alternatively what one thought about something: thus a concept to do with renown or opinion. The wider Greek world, obsessed as it was with the concept of one’s honourable standing in the eyes of others, used the term to argue that a person’s reputation, or δόξα, was his core personal worth or essential value. Because of the root semantics the term would remain wedded  to this external and reputational definition of personhood until almost a millennium later when the Christian world more or less redefined the entire concept of individual identity in the aftermath of the Christological disputes of the fifth century turning as these did around notions of substantial personhood, or hypostasis, flowing out of the Trinitarian and Christological  controversies of the high patristic era. 

    In the classical period, δόξα was, though rarely, sometimes applied to the idea of the glorious repute of the local deity, as appears in an ancient inscription dedicated to Bacchus, in a plaque offered: ’For his κόσμος and δόξα᾽: which we would here translate as ‘For the god’s adornment and  renown’. This is one of the few instances in classical Greek where we might say the idea of divine glory appears, though notably it is never divorced from the  root notion of ‘estimation’ or ‘opinion among society’. There is no sense among the non-biblical Greek writers of the glory of the divinity as a proper attribute, or as a divine character having an essence peculiarly its own. The only two non-Christian writers in Greek who show a (very brief) aspect of the sense that the δόξα of God is something inherent to Him, are Philo and Josephus, both of whom, of course, being Jewish, bear the impact of the Old Testament theology of the Kabod. It is this biblical theology of the glory which will deeply impact the Christian Greek writers and to such an extent that a massive development of the theology of divine δόξα is something that represents one of the most distinctive developments of early Christian thought. Let us first look briefly at the burden of the  earlier Hebraic theology of the Kabod.

    The term is clearly a significant one in the Hebrew Bible. It occurs 199 times in all, and semantically carries meanings similar to the Greek pre-Christian usage: namely a  person’s wealth, or prestige, or magnificence in the eyes of society. So, for example, Abraham and Jacob have much Kabod in their gold and silver and cattle. And the brothers of Joseph describe his high status as an Egyptian official as his Kabod.  Gerhard von Rad demonstrated that a clear theological development took place in Hebraic thought, when it began to assign the  term Kabod as a distinct characteristic  of the God of Israel. This seems to have been a trend that the Hebraic Priestly tradition presided over: so much so that even the chronologically later uses of God’s Kabod, or glory, remain marked by linguistic archaisms and traditional tropes that show the concept had, long before, achieved a fixed condition of ritual acclamation. 

    In this context, the prophet Ezekiel added his own distinctive elements to this theology, extending the visionary aspects of the notion. In the Priestly tradition, the divine Kabod was associated especially with the  looming magnificence of the thunderstorm. The oppressive ‘weight’ of atmospheric tension exactly met the  word’s original significance of ‘heaviness’; but the desert storm opened up in layer upon layer of impressive magnificence culminating in the  fearful lightning flash. All of this was taken poetically (as in Psalm 97.1f) to be a  suitable descriptor of the awe-inspiring glory of the Godhead. 

    This dyad of gloomy oppressive cloud and startling light of electricity leads the Exodus writer to describe the divine glory as a devouring fire within the cloud upon the mountain of Sinai. It is this electric presence of glory, the presence of the deity itself, that the priestly writers speak of as transferred, after the visions of Moses, into the accompanying presence of the deity within the Tabernacle, into which God pours his glory. The cloud, or the tabernacle itself (later the holy of holies sheltering the ark as God’s throne) are the  baffle, or protective medium, that shelters mortal creatures from the overwhelming force of the divine glory. This important concept gave rise in later Jewish theology to specifying the twin  notions of the Shekinah and the Kabod; the  former being the veil or medium of the divine glory itself; the chariot of fire, the tent, the cloud: ultimately the manner in which the ineffable, invisible and un-survivable glory of the Godhead could be communicated as a revelation to mortal beings on the earth. The idea is anticipated when Ezekiel himself adds the idea of the angelic Cherubim as a chariot offering protective baffles of the  divine glory when manifested. In Isaiah, the Seraphim perform this function. This mediating shekinah (imaged by the fire, or the cloud or the chariot) is thus primarily communicable. Even in the Sinai account the concept of the communicability of the incommunicable is present: as when after Moses sees the hindmost parts of God, he  comes down the mountain with his own face radiating light.

    They key aspects of the theology of glory in the Hebrew scriptures are  thus shown in the theophany narratives and in the  theme of the divine glory in the temple: both of which are closely related themes, in so far as the  glory first witnessed on Sinai is then transferred to the Tabernacle where the  priestly rites celebrate it, and thence to the Temple itself , whose motif the evangelist John is to lift and creatively refashion as we shall see.  In the psalms and in parts of Isaiah this liturgical theme of the divine glory manifested in the  Temple is extended  in the prophetic vision that from the Temple, the glory of God will shine out over the entire world.  

    When the Septuagintal translation (LXX) began to render the Hebraic scripture into Greek for use of the Alexandrian Jews, between the 3rd and 1st centuries BC , a major shift can be observed in the use of the term δόξα. It is the Septuagint which serves as the medium to deliver the biblical notion of divine glory to the Evangelists. Here, the  word now wholly departs from the classical  Greek tradition. It no longer has anything to do with honour or opinion, for which the translators use the semantic of βουλέ (opinion or repute). In the LXX the term δόξα is used more heavily than in the Hebrew text but closely follows the root Hebraic theology of the Shekinah and Kabod to describe a specific theology of divine revelation. Glory now becomes wholly and entirely a character of the divine presence itself, as revealed in the cosmos as the presence of the covenanting (that is the saving) God. 

    So, before passing on to our consideration of John the Theologian, let us briefly sum up what this ancient biblical heritage of the theology of glory amounted to: a revelation of a character of God’s overwhelming majesty and creative power, often using the Sinai archetypes of lightning-bright radiance or fire, or brooding darkness of the cloud; a sense of overwhelmingly commanding presence as symbolized in the holiness of the indwelling of God in the Temple, and bursting out from there to hold sway over the entire cosmos; and above all a particular revelation that is given to the elect people as the heart of the making of the covenant between God and the world. If we are to make a technical distinction in the ‘phases’ of this theology we might also note that the idea of the radiant or fiery shekinah is used to connote the ‘givenness’ of this revelation - that is, its communicability; while the concept of the Kabod is specially used to deliver the idea of the awesomeness of the  unapproachable and utterly majestic divine presence.

    While the theme of  the glory is used in the Synoptic Gospels  chiefly to describe how the Son of Man will be glorified at the Second Coming (‘When he comes in glory’), John sets out to correct this form of eschatological future-projection by demonstrating that the Son of Man has come already in his glory, the very glory of the Father. The Evangelist John knows all the aspects of the biblical theme of the divine Kabod intimately, and uses it like a master musician applying his skill to make variations upon a classical motif throughout his Gospel. We begin on the very first page, quite literally, the preludium of the Gospel, where the Evangelist, like many another ancient author, sets out his basic leitmotifs of theology which his subsequent work will elaborate. I refer of course to the  Prologue to the Fourth Gospel: a highly creative re-working of the Hymn to Wisdom taken from Sirach 24. The original text spoke of how Wisdom, divine Sophia, looked down on earth to see where she might take up her residence, and chose the people of Israel. Her indwelling among them constituted  the covenant for it was by this gift of the indwelling Sophia that the people of God possessed their knowledge of the Lord, and thereby became his covenant children. John will break the  direct parallelism of the Sirach re-write by his opening paragraph “Berishith” (En Arche: In the beginning) which is clearly a cosmic-scaled rewrite of the dramatic Genesis narrative to show that what we are talking about here is the descent of the Divine Logos, the Word that  constituted all things. And he also breaks the parallelism of Sirach 24, by a triad of insertions about John the Fore-Runner: three times insisting that John is not the one of whom he is writing about; not the promised one; not the Wisdom incarnate. In a precise fashion thereafter, whenever John the Baptizer is mentioned again, this theme of the true identity of the indwelling Sophia is reprised. 

    But the obvious text we look at as the climacteric verse of the prologue, reveals to us the very place where the evangelist most heavily underlines what he wants his readers to mark. It comes, of course, in Jn. 1.14: “And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us; and we beheld his glory, glory as of the only begotten from the Father, full of grace and truth.” To read it in the Greek obviously gives us the literary effect the evangelist was after. We see the  culminating stress lies in:  ὁὁ λόγος σὰρξ ἐἐγένετο καὶ ἐἐσκήνωσεν ἐἐν ἡἡμῖῖν: where the word often rendered ‘dwelt’ is actually ‘pitched the tent’ (eshkenosen) - exactly as in Sirach - and has been evidently chosen as a Greek homophone for the Hebrew Shekinah. 

    We also note how the theologian here repeats the word glory (δόξα) twice for emphasis: connecting it with the several references to light and vision that have immediately gone before, and with the qualification of the reference to δόξα that follows immediately after: πλήρης χάριτος καὶ ἀἀληθείας· full of grace and truth (that is, the covenant characteristics). Some commentators connect that latter phrase as a descriptor of the earlier subject μονογενοῦῦς but this, I think is mistaken. Here it is a precise qualifier to the key term immediately preceding it: namely, δόξα. We note immediately, therefore, the  full panoply of what John intends to do with the concept of glory he has inherited. He joins it to the  tradition of Sophia-Wisdom, that constitutes the  gift of the covenant knowledge of God as given to his elect nation. He makes it redolent of the classical themes that this divine Wisdom is pre-existent, creative, cosmic in scale, specifically gifted to a chosen race who in accepting it thus become sons of God, and thereby enter into its divine light, its grace and its truth. To mark, most simply, what the evangelist has done, already in this ‘first act’ in the Prologue, as it were: He has taken the theme of the divine glory and made it into a synonym for the very person of the Word, the Incarnate Christ: who in his own presence (Shekinah) thus demonstrates himself to be the saving glory of God. In short the Evangelist has hypostatized the concept of Kabod. This is an extraordinary tour de force. The only element missing here from the classical imagery of Kabod he has inherited is the  theme of the glory in the context of the temple. But soon John will also turn his attention to that.

    Having thus implied the opening theme of the  personal identity of the Incarnate Logos with the Shekinah of God (his tangible presence upon the earth) in the Prologue, the next statement about the theology of the Kabod is given by John in the  narrative of the first of the ‘seven signs’ that structure his Gospel: the miracle of Cana. The key interpretive text here is the evangelist’s own interpretation of the sign of the abundance of wine given at Jn. 2.11: ‘This was the beginning of the signs which did Jesus in Cana of Galilee, and allowed his  glory to be shown; and his disciples believed on him.’ The phrase closely echoes the synopsis of the Sinai narrative as given in LXX Deuteronomy 5.24: ἰδοὺ ἔδειξεν ἡμῖν κύριος ὁ θεὸς ἡμῶν τὴν δόξαν αὐτοῦ  ‘Behold, the Lord our God has shown to us his glory.’ Deuteronomy goes on to say that on this day the people of God heard the divine voice from the fire and saw from experience that they could hear God speak to them and, even so, still live. 

    It is clear that the evangelist sees Jesus as so possessed of the divine Kabod that he chooses to allow some of that divine power and grace to be revealed in signs and baffles (the famous Johannine aporiai) so that his hearers may understand the awesome revelation and thus come to life by it, or else fail to understand it and, at least, be protected (as mere mortals) by their incomprehension of what is occurring. This theme of not understanding that in the presence of Jesus, one stands in the radiance of the divine Shekinah, is finally made patently evident by John in the final discourses of Jesus at Jn. 14.9, where Philip is told explicitly that to have seen Jesus is to have seen the face of the Father (not just hear divine words) which has never been possible before.

    This theme of the glory that reveals and, in so doing, judges here and now (as used by John to correct the so-called ‘futurist eschatology’ of the synoptics so as to make it clear that the eighth day of the eschaton has already dawned) is also referenced in several texts which contrast the glory of men (the false δόξα of human repute) with the mysterious glory of God which challenges it, by demanding from mortals faith in the unseen reality that they sense themselves to be present before. In Jn. 12. 37-43 this theme comes to a climacteric in the evangelist explicitly citing Isaiah’s prophecy about seeing but not seeing, hearing but not believing, (also used in the synoptics to explain why Jesus’ parabolic teachings were not accepted). In a stark divergence from the synoptics however, John explains this biblical proof by underlining what he sees as the core element of the prophecy that the others have not mentioned: namely that: ‘ Isaiah said these things because he saw his glory (εἶἶδεν τὴν δόξαν αὐὐτοῦῦ) and was speaking about him.’  He is making the strong implication that those who hear the Logos and come to faith have likewise ‘seen the glory’ in and through Jesus; while those who reject the message and the person of the Word are they who ‘have loved the glory of men more than the glory of God (τὴν δόξαν τοῦῦ θεοῦῦ).’

    It is clear, then, that the Johannine theology is subtle, deep and allusive, and that this theme of the revelation of divine glory runs throughout the entire Gospel like a golden thread. It is closely allied to the  equally prevalent Johannine theme that Jesus is the New Temple, the eschatological place of the  new covenant sacrifice which takes place in his body. As we have noticed, Ezekiel (developing the earlier priestly narratives of the Pentateuch) had already made the transfer of the  concept of the Kabod revealed, from the context of the Sinai theophany to the locus of the Temple: the holy place which contains the power of the divine Kabod. John reworks this theme several times. As with Ezekiel seeing the life-giving water flow from under the altar of the Temple, so John points to this fulfilment in the water flowing from the side of Jesus.  

    The idea has been prepared  twice already at Jn. 4.14 and 7.38 to demonstrate the water as a symbol of the Spirit bringing the life of faith. Underpinning it, evidently, is the Johannine insistence that Jesus himself is the holy of holies, the New Temple of the Eighth Day. The idea is openly launched early in the Gospel narrative when Jesus purifies the Jerusalem Temple and speaks of the rebuilding of the New Temple, which is how his body symbolizes the glory manifested in the Resurrection after its sacrificial immolation (Jn.2. 18-22). Several times John underlines how it is inside the Temple that the glory of initiation is given by Jesus. He is implying, by this device, that the Shekinah of the Kabod, which dwells there, is the Lord himself who presents his teaching (His Word) bodily.

    But this mystical theme of Jesus as the hypostasis of the indwelling glory of the Temple, the presence of God in the midst of his covenanted people, is given  also in an extraordinarily deep aporia also in the story of Nathanael’s coming to faith in Jn.1.45-51. The Nathanael story is clearly a major episode in the Johannine narrative that is deliberately left ‘unexplained’ and yet which, because of its very dynamic and mystical nature demands the reader’s attention and scrutiny. In this the story serves as an aporia: a teaching device that requires the reader to puzzle out the clues. It is clear, for example, that Nathanael has been asking some question of himself, and God, before he encounters Jesus. We are not told what it is. And it is equally clear that Jesus knows what the question was and gives its answer so as to provide Nathanael with a certain ‘proof’ of his identity. But what is it that this secret communication is about? 

    The clue is given in the climacteric verse of the  pericopé: (Jn. 1.51) ’And Jesus said to him: Amen, Amen, I say to you, you shall see the heaven laid open, and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man.’ This latter title (used by the synoptics to associate with the martyrdom of Stephen as a futurist eschatological sign), is radically repurposed by John and  brought back to its original biblical context: namely the vision of Jacob at the Temple in Bethel. In this episode (Gen. 28. 10-17) Jacob innocently decides to sleep within the sacred site of Beth’El  (the ‘House of God’ in Hebrew) and chooses a sacred stone he finds there, upon which to lay his head. The sacredness of the stone opens up for him his vision of the ladder between heaven and earth and the ascent and descent of the angels: a dream-vision that makes him understand this this is indeed the holy place of God and that he is witnessing the promise of a universal covenant. But the stone is not simply a random one. It is a cipher for the tradition continuing to the Jerusalem Temple (and thereby the ‘Temple’ meaning the locus of the divine Kabod) of the  keystone of the Temple being the’ Stone of Foundation’, also known as the ‘Stone of Anointment’: but literally designated as the ‘Stone of Blood’ in Hebrew (Aben Dam: אבן דם). This  is the sacred place upon which the Holy of Holies, the Ark itself, and its mercy seat are all founded: the very place in the Temple where God dwells. The evangelist, however, explains that when Nathanael sees the revelation Jesus will give him he will understand that the angels are ascending and descending upon the head of the Son of Man. But why bring the  two ideas into such proximity precisely here? Precisely in this enigmatic place where Jesus is inviting Nathanael to ‘see the mystery’? It is because the whole thing is a word-play: a metathesis that would have been apparent to anyone who was bi-lingual in Greek and Hebrew (but which escapes most of us moderns today). The stone of Blood (the sacred place of the Temple) is, simply put, the Son of Man (Jesus himself). In the Hebrew, the mystery is given secretly by the metathesis: Ben Adam / Aben Dam. In understanding this Nathanael has been admitted to that same shocking revelation of Jesus’ synonymity with the divine glory that Thomas will also experience in one of the final revelations of the Gospel, after the resurrection (Jn. 20.28). Jesus is himself the Holy of Holies. His body is the Temple (Jn.2.21): his sacrificial betrayal and death will be the manifestation of his glory (Jn. 13.31) and the fulfilment (Jn.19.30) of the universal covenant promised so long ago. Both Nathanael and Thomas make a shocked confession of faith that serves to book-end the mystery of Jesus as slowly appearing to the disciples in all its full glorious revelation.

    This ‘Johannine Secret’ of the mysterious revelation of the glory, is finally laid open, though in the closed context of the  deeper initiation of the disciples in the Upper Room, in what has been called by modern Roman commentators the ‘High Priestly Prayer’ of Jesus. But while they are right to recognise the entire context of this initiation narrative is that of the Temple, Jesus is not functioning here as a mediatory High Priest, rather as the very Shekinah revealing the  otherwise Unapproachable Kabod of the Father’s glory, in the presence of his own self as the living Temple on earth. 

    In Jn. 17.4-5 we see the intimate closeness of the Shekinah glory, with that of the Kabod which it manifests on earth: ‘I glorified thee on the earth, having accomplished the work which thou hast given me to do. And now, Father, glorify Thou me with thine own self with the glory which I had with thee before the world was.’  We learn, then, that the Shekinah and the Kabod have an intimate union which is in fact a mystical synonymity that brings all the covenant community into unity (Jn. 17.22): ’And the glory which thou hast given me I have given unto them; that they may be one, even as we are one.’  It is this revealed mystery of the hypostatized glory  that allows the disciples to ‘partly see’ (though Philip almost misses the point here): ‘And Jesus replied, “Do you not know me, Philip, even after I have been with you all this time? Whoever has seen me has seen the Father. So how can you say, “Show us the Father”’? 

    Post medieval Orthodox theology has spent much time considering the Palamite distinction of the divine essence and energies. Important though this stream of  soteriological and revelational theology is, it pales before the profound import of the Johannine theology of the divine Kabod and its revelation in the  hypostatized Shekinah of the person of Jesus. In making the edits to achieve this synthesis, John has shown himself to be a masterly reader of the Old Testament Priestly traditions via Ezekiel, the prophetic ecstatic traditions via Isaiah, and the Wisdom traditions via Ben Sirach. His own inspired weave, however, by means of the magnificently subtle structuring of his Gospel narratives, bring the entire theology of divine glory to a new Christological pitch, of an unsurpassed majesty: granting to us, even in this late age of history, a glimpse into the secret initiations of Jesus himself to his inner core of disciples, and why the ancient Temple, its priesthood and its conduct of affairs, mattered so much to him and was so pivotal in his momentous Passion week.