A professor of "worship studies" reckons that God's glory is disclosed through humility and suffering

 

The Glory of God Revealed: Living the Resurrection

... many early Christian thinkers offered a striking insight: the glory of God is seen most clearly in His act of rescuing those in need. ... The glory of God, therefore, is not merely something to be observed, but something encountered in His gracious movement toward humanity. It is revealed in His willingness to enter the depths of human brokenness, to meet us in our need, and to act decisively for our salvation. In this light, glory is not diminished by humility or suffering but is disclosed through them. The God who is truly glorious is the God who comes near, who restores, and who redeems. In short, the God who is truly glorious is the God who rescues. ...

I don't mean to pick on this guy. What he writes sounds completely plain vanilla unobjectionable to the average Christian mind, which unfortunately is full of gooey sentimentality and dull humanitarianism. Except for the fact that none of those early Christian thinkers he speaks of, whoever they may be, are in the New Testament. You will be hard pressed to find lines there which endorse a preoccupation with glory disclosed through humility and suffering.

On the contrary, the New Testament evidence is overwhelmingly in favor of the view that God's inestimable glory is robust, and still to be revealed in the future at Jesus' second coming, an acknowledgement that the crucifixion and resurrection most certainly did not constitute a convincing revelation of God's glory. If it had been otherwise, preaching the Gospel would not have been promoted everywhere by the New Testament because it would not have been necessary. The glory of God would have been self evident. The book itself would not have been necessary, because the revelation of the glory of God would have meant the end of the world.

The New Testament remains pregnant with unrealized eschatological expectation, in which the revelation of the glory of God is an explicitly future apocalyptic goal, because obviously the promised glory failed to be revealed the first time around for "all flesh" to see.

The voice of him that crieth in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of the LORD, make straight in the desert a highway for our God. Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low: and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough places plain: And the glory of the LORD shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together: for the mouth of the LORD hath spoken it.

-- Isaiah 40:3ff.

If the New Testament thought that God's glory had been disclosed through the humility and suffering of Jesus and actually had replaced Isaiah's, and John the Baptist's, vision, it ought to have said so. It is only its unworthy heirs who have done so.

The New Testament certainly does insist that God accomplished something through Jesus' suffering, but all flesh seeing the glory of God is not one of them. Only a select few "beheld his glory" (John 1:14). "Read my book" (John 20:31).

The revelation of the glory of God is yet future, and the not-yet is by no means comparable to it.

 For I reckon that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed [ἀποκαλυφθῆναι] in us.

-- Romans 8:18

But rejoice, inasmuch as ye are partakers of Christ's sufferings; that, when his glory shall be revealed [ἀποκαλύψει], ye may be glad also with exceeding joy.

-- I Peter 4:13

The elders which are among you I exhort, who am also an elder, and a witness of the sufferings of Christ, and also a partaker of the glory that shall be revealed [ἀποκαλύπτεσθαι]: 

-- I Peter 5:1

For who hopes for what he sees?

-- Romans 8:24 

Therefore being justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ: By whom also we have access by faith into this grace wherein we stand, and rejoice in hope of the glory of God.

-- Romans 5:1f.   

How do you cleanse the land of the blood of the innocent Jesus when it is God himself who defiled it?

 

So ye shall not pollute the land wherein ye are: for blood it defileth the land: and the land cannot be cleansed of the blood that is shed therein, but by the blood of him that shed it.

-- Numbers 35:33

 

New Testament "theology" is pretty clear that it is the Jewish god who is ultimately responsible for shedding Jesus' blood:

For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son ...

-- John 3:16

He that spared not his own Son, but delivered him up for us all ...

-- Romans 8:32 

God sent his Son to be our sin offering ...

-- I John 4:10

But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

-- Romans 5:8. 

The penalty for Jesus' murder is death according to the Law of Moses, but who could possibly kill God, the murderer, except God himself?

 

The Christian atheist Thomas J. J. Altizer, who died in 2018 at the age of 91, wrote in 1966 that the transcendent God of the Bible had truly died when he immanentized himself and entered human history through the Incarnation and was crucified. As a leading representative of The God Is Dead movement, the highly animated Altizer instantly became a pariah in America, which at the time literally wanted to kill him over it, as his obituary remembered:

 He even went on the “Merv Griffin Show,” a popular television talk program, though the event, held before a live audience in a Broadway theater, was a debacle. He was given two minutes to speak. “The response was a violent one,” he wrote later, “forcing the director to close the curtains and order the band to play forcefully, and after this event a crowd greeted me at the stage door, demanding my death.”

But logically one should really go a step farther than Altizer and say that the Jewish god actually committed suicide according to this God Is Dead "theology" because God did all this on purpose.

After all, Jesus allowed himself to be crucified according to the wide evidence of the gospels and the New Testament, which insists that Jesus went to the slaughter like a sheep and opened not his mouth (Acts 8:32). This is exactly what one should have expected of a truly Divine Man bent on death.

This problem again illustrates the limits of "theology", Aquinas' queen of the sciences.

Her rational talk about God goes only so far, which Tertullian recognized when he said that the resurrection is certain because it is impossible (certum est, quia impossibile).

There are more things than the resurrection which are impossible.

 

 

Paul imagines many brethren, but Jesus only a chosen few

For as by one man's disobedience many were made sinners, so by the obedience of one shall many be made righteous.

-- Romans 5:19

For whom he did foreknow, he also did predestinate to be conformed to the image of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brethren.

-- Romans 8:29

Even as I please all men in all things, not seeking mine own profit, but the [profit] of many, that they may be saved.

-- 1 Corinthians 10:33

And except that the Lord had shortened those days, no flesh should be saved: but for the elect's sake, whom he hath chosen, he hath shortened the days.

-- Mark 13:20

Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it.

-- Matthew 7:14

So the last shall be first, and the first last: for many be called, but few chosen.

-- Matthew 20:16

Paul's Idea Of Sonship Is Not Absolute And Developed Over Time

In Galatians it's a fact meant to distinguish starkly God's elect under the promise:

But when the time had fully come, God sent forth his Son, born of woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons. And because you are sons, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, "Abba! Father!" So through God you are no longer a slave but a son, and if a son then an heir.

-- Galatians 4:4ff.

But by the time of the composition of Romans the fact of it is no longer susceptible of any unqualified absolute "spiritual" interpretation which flies in the face of reality. Instead sonship finally depends upon the resurrection of the body and apart from that still remains tenuous because of human weakness. Adoption as sons in the final analysis remains contingent upon the advent of the general resurrection from the dead at the last judgment:

We know that the whole creation has been groaning in travail together until now; and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies.

-- Romans 8:22f.