In this short and approachable book, Ashley Cocksworth and David Ford walk the reader through a wide ranging theological reflection on ‘glory’, applying it to the life of the Church and the Christian. The argument is centred upon two poles – Irenaeus’ famous dictum that the glory of God is the human fully alive, and the Trinitarian relations of overflowing giving and receiving. Glory, in this framework, follows a logic of ever-increasing abundance, as all things are attracted into the ‘even more’ dynamics of God’s own glory. Applied to the church and the life of faith, this is cashed out in a vision of Christian and ecclesial vocation that centres upon glorifying God in and through the mundane, the difficult, and the ecstatic, as the route through which humans and all creation become most fully alive.
The four chapters of the book, interspersed by the doxological ‘ludes’ (biblical texts inserted to interrupt the reader and invite them into the doxological practises the book encourages), investigate glory from four angles: systematic, biblical, ecclesiological, and practical. Whilst Ford and Cocksworth suggest some readers skip the dense theological argument of the first chapter, this would be a shame, since to do so would be to miss some of the most significant contributions of the book.
In order to locate their understanding of glory (they explicitly resist a definition of the term), the first chapter offers a careful reading of the Nicene Creed. Here the Creed is presented as fundamentally pedagogical and formational, intended to shape Christian and communal imaginations through dynamic confession. This account offers a different complexion to most understandings of ‘orthodoxy’, reading the term more expansively as ‘right glorification’, rather than simply ‘right belief’.
At the heart of the chapter’s argument is a fascinating insight: concentrating on glory in the Creed offers a more helpful way into Trinitarian difference than the more traditional focus on origins. In dialogue with Tonstad, Ford and Cocksworth argue that references to ‘glory’ in the Creed emphasise ‘with’, as opposed to the focus on ‘from’ in the discussions of procession. This ‘syn’ focus generates an understanding of the Trinitarian relations that is far more open, more egalitarian and less subject to competitive and hierarchical logic than much Trinitarian reflection.
Glory, then, is about synergistic, non-competitive relation; it is inextricably bound to God’s love, both for Himself within the Trinity, and for that which He creates. The discussion moves to Barth (a key interlocutor throughout the book) and introduces the core idea of ‘abundance’ – that within the economy of glory there is always a superfluity and a perfecting of perfection. This ‘effulgent abundance of glory’ follows a triple movement: the ‘glory that flows eternally within God and makes God fully God overflows into the world and makes all things fully alive’; glory which is then reflected back to God in the praises of creation.
Glory is thus found, given, and received. Finding glory necessitates the recognition that the world is already saturated with God’s glory, and, therefore, that glory is discoverable in even the most mundane places. Here Luther makes a helpful appearance, reminding us that, if the picture of glory seems rather flatly triumphalist, the theology of the cross insists that glory must also be found in suffering. Giving glory likewise follows the over-abundance logic of doxology. All things are drawn into the praise of God, but such glory does not fill a lack in God: instead, it ‘completes completion’. Irenaeus’ dictum is thus expanded to reflect this cosmic vision of glorification: ‘the glory of God is the cosmos fully alive’. In receiving glory, all human life is caught up into the Divine dynamics of glory, as glorification becomes diffused through the whole of Christian life, rather than simply being the proper end of the ordo salutis.
The chapter ends with the core methodological contribution of the book: the practice of doxological reading. Put simply, doxological reading is reading for the sake of glory, rather than for the sake of amassing intellectual capital. In practise, this means slow reading, with a focus on reception rather than criticism, on communality rather than individual reading, and with a significant stress on intertextuality. If this sounds contrary to the norms of academic practise, this is deliberate – with the ‘ludes’ inserted precisely to interrupt the cycle of academic reading.
The second chapter presents an example of such doxological reading through three core biblical texts (John 17, Ephesians 3.14–21, and Psalm 145). Here the benefits of the dialogic writing method described in the introduction can be seen, as the texts are opened up through a breathtakingly wide-ranging unpacking of their connections and allusions. The chapter takes the form less of an argument than a piling up of images and ideas, reflecting its genre as doxology. The work clearly relies heavily on Ford’s magisterial work on the Gospel of John. John’s Gospel is presented as the paradigmatic ‘biblical glory text’, and profoundly shapes the reading of the other two passages.
In the third chapter, the book turns to more practical questions, asking how doxology can and should shape the life of the church. Here Irenaeus’ dictum is further reimagined, such that the glory of God becomes the church fully alive. Unity is the key note, as the controlling creedal mark of the church. Glorification thus involves the church working for unity, at both local levels and in ‘Receptive Ecumenism’, defined as the expectation that points of difference between churches are precisely where they have most to learn from each other. Such unity is grounded in the unity of God and thus should be accepted as a gift. The chapter culminates in a discussion of the Pentecostal practice of tarrying as a further example of the abundance of glory, since it foregrounds the open-ended character of life under God.
The final chapter turns to a discussion of Christian life, grounding the preceding account in the concrete, affective experience of human beings. Joy is the central concept as the ‘most doxological emotion’, and again the discussion includes an important recognition of the reality of pain and suffering, leading to the helpful idea of ‘respairing’ (an obsolete Middle English word meaning ‘re-hope’) as resistance against despair. The embodiment of glory is given more granularity through a discussion of smiling, which builds on Cocksworth’s engagement with psychological science. Finally, glory is enacted through Sabbath rest, which resists competition in favour of blessing and hallowing.
The book clearly has much to offer in its wide-ranging yet deep exploration of glory. The logic of abundance and the vivifying characteristics of glory coalesce into an appealing vision of Christian life and of the church. Moreover, the style of the writing is itself doxological, and even if not all readers will embrace the patterns of doxological reading it demands (academic theologians may struggle to slow down sufficiently!), the richly reiterative text pulls the reader into the dynamics of glory it evokes.
There are, of course, areas of potential critique. For one, the refusal to define glory does give the term an expansive range of meaning. This is partly a positive, since glory can encompass all of life and indeed creation, but it does mean that, at points, the analytical clarity and specificity of the term are lost. In particular, glory comes to be synonymous with various other concepts – love, unity, joy – to the point where it is sometimes unclear how glory adds anything to the discussion that would not already be understood within those categories.
Secondly, the chapter on ecclesiology paints a rather idealistic vision of church life and ecumenism. Whilst this is in part reflective of the ‘already there in the unity of God’ nature of glory, it does mean the discussion sometimes feels removed from the very painful realities of church life, even if lip-service is given to these realities. we would have liked to have seen a deeper engagement with how this vision might engage specifically with the negative aspects of ecumenism and ecclesiastical existence.
Those minor caveats aside, this is an excellent book with much to offer both church and academy.
