Quotes and excerpts from chapter xviii: "The Glory and the Christian Faith" of Arthur Michael Ramsey, The Glory of God and the Transfiguration of
Christ (1949; Eugene: Wipf & Stock reprint):
"The conception of glory illuminates every part of the structure of the Christian faith." (83)
"To glorify God is both to rejoice in His works, and to own their absolute dependence upon the Creator." (83)
"It is...in the revelation of the Son and in the gift of the Spirit that the Father's glory is fully disclosed...The obedience of Jesus to the Father in His life and death and the vindication of Jesus by the Father in the Resurrection are the disclosure within time of a glory of self-giving love which belongs to God from all eternity." (84)
"It was in humiliation that the glory was revealed on earth." (84) - the humiliation of the eternal Word in the incarnation, the humiliation involved in the 'messianic secret', and the humiliation in the completion of His mission in suffering and death.
"This paradox of the Incarnation is apparent in the Johannine language. On the one hand the Son retains on earth the glory which He ever had with the Father: 'the heavenly Word proceeding forth, yet leaving not the Father;'s side' On the other hand the Son prays that the Father will bestow glory upon Him in the Passion and in the exaltation which will follow. There has been no abandonment of glory: yet the Son prays for glory and awaits the day when He will receive it. The right solution...seems to be that it is in His human nature that the Son receives glory from the Father, and He asks that through Passion and the Resurrection the human nature may be exalted into the eternal glory of the Godhead." (85)
"It is by the humiliation of the Son's winning of glory in the toils of history that the eternal glory of the divine self-giving is most signally disclosed." (86)
"Primarily and obviously glory suggests that aspect of the Atonement which is described in the phrase Christus Victor... But the Christus Victor doctrine does not stand alone: it includes, in the Fourth Gospel, the doctrine of a godward offering whereby sin is expiated...the glory of Christ's self-giving breaks the power of men's sinful glory of self-esteem." (86-87)
The meaning of the Church lies in "the mystery of the participation of men and women in the glory which is Christ's." (87)
Two apostolic warnings: "the glory in the church is an invisible glory...hidden from the eyes of the unbelieving world" (88) and it is "but a foretaste of the glory that is to come, and therefore the Church's sense of possession is mingled with the Church's sense of incompleteness." (89)
"The Christian hope is...far more than the salvaging of human souls into a spiritual salvation: it is the re-creation of the world, through the power of the Resurrection of Christ.
Thus the hope of the beatific vision is crossed by the hope of the vindication of the divine design not only in man but in all things." (90)
