What is glory?

Well, we have finished the trilogy of Iain Provan’s talks on creation and it provides a nice foundation for all of our thinking in Gospel Conversations. In this next podcast I pick up the Breakfast with Jesus journey through Ezekiel that Anne and I enjoyed so much. You will see a lot of resonances with Iain’s talks.

In this talk I ask a question that might seem obvious but in fact is not – ‘What is glory?’  I confess that I never much asked this question for most of my early Christian life, so I just skated over the word and let it become a cliché.  The question completes our BwJ series on the book of Ezekiel being framed by ‘glory’ – and in my last talk I explored the wider vision of the ‘temple’ that animates Ezekiel, where ‘temple’ becomes a synecdoche for the entire created order. But we need the second half of the concept to complete this transporting vision of creation and that is ‘glory’ filling this creation temple.

In this talk I foreshadow a couple of conversations that we are going to have with Professor David Bradshaw later this year. David is Professor of Philosophy at Kentucky University and his thinking on glory is eye-opening – he explains how the Eastern church fathers explored ‘glory’ in ways that the Western church – to its loss – did not. So you can look forward to that.I also mention Meredith Kline in this talk. You probably have not heard of him, but he was a big influence on two of our friends, Rikk Watts and Mark Strom. The book that I quote from in this talk is “Images of the Spirit” and it is still freely available from online book stores.

Finally I mention a conversation with a friend of mine at the end of this talk – and I have made this letter anonymous and we will post it on the Gospel Conversations website. It is an example of how we might use the creation gospel as the platform for sharing the good news with seekers.