Chapter 4, ‘The Efficacy of Empirical Vision’, argues that physical sight can and should lead to belief in John. Scholars often cite John 2:23; 4:48; and 20:29 as evidence for John’s own critique of physical seeing as a means of coming to belief. The chapter argues that close reading of John 2:23 and 4:48 reveals human hearts to be the true cause of unbelief and shows that physical sight is the catalyst for all unbelief and all belief. Neither does John 20:29 condemn sight as a means of acquiring belief. Rather, it suggests that mediated seeing – via the text of the Gospel – can be as efficacious for belief as an actual encounter with Jesus. The chapter concludes that sight is complex, but that no critique of the positive relationship between sight and belief exists in John.

Having established that God is the goal of belief, that God is physically visible in Jesus, and that physical sight can lead to belief, Chapter 6, ‘Seeing Jesus and Seeing God’, draws these three points together by asking whether John portrays visual encounters with Jesus as visual encounters with God. The chapter argues that the physical act of seeing Jesus is a necessary condition for seeing God in him despite the challenge that God emerges as most visible in Jesus’s most acutely human moments. Evidence for this position arises from exegesis of three passages in which Johannine characters see Jesus (John 6:19; 19:6; 20:14–29) as well as John’s account of the crucifixion as glorification (12:1–50; 19:28–37). The chapter closes by turning to the crucifixion and examining the profound irony of Jesus’s death as the high point of divine visibility in the Gospel.

Chapter 1, ‘My Lord and My God’ in John 20:30–31’, asserts that the cause, content, and consequences of belief all suggest that Jesus is God. In John 20:27–29, Thomas sees Jesus and calls him ‘my Lord and my God’. After Jesus blesses those who believe without seeing him, John claims that he has written down signs in this book so that his readers can come to believe that ‘Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God’ and ‘receive life in his name’ (John 20:30–31). The proximity of both statements is not coincidental but reveals that 20:30–31 describes the same fullness of belief as Thomas’s exclamation. What emerges is that John’s portrayals of the ‘signs’, the titles ‘Christ’ and ‘Son of God’, and the resulting ‘life in his name’ are fundamentally theological. True belief will always make Thomas’s declaration.

The debate about Christ’s incarnation, and the intention behind the incarnation, is wide-ranging and far-reaching. It concerns God’s purpose and the exercise of God’s will; the identity of Christ; the reason for creation; the nature of salvation; and the destiny of humankind. The thirteenth-century Franciscans had a particular perspective on these questions, characterised by their twin emphasis on creation and incarnation. Rupert of Deutz pointed out that if the incarnation was subject to the fall, God must have intended the fall. He countered that God had always intended the Word to have an earthly role in the divine plan for the chosen people. Figures such as Bonaventure, Grosseteste and Duns Scotus amplify and qualify these issues, and Scotus concludes that Christ would have come in the maximal glory of creation – even if there had been no fall.

The eight dimensions of being with, outlined in detail in my A Nazareth Manifesto and elsewhere in their missiological, ethical and public policy implications, are here explored in their full scriptural dimensions. Presence, attention, mystery, delight, participation, partnership, enjoyment and glory each have profound resonances in Old and New Testaments, and each provides a continuous thread through incarnation, the reason for creation, the nature of Jesus’ ministry and death, the work of the Holy Spirit, the church and heavenly destiny – in relation to God, to one another and to the whole creation. They affirm how the incarnation is not a means to an end (such as saving us from our sins) but an end in itself, and they expand the notion of being with into a multidimensional concept with rich resonances.

Recognizing God in Jesus may be the goal of belief, but one must ask whether God himself is available for recognition. Chapter 2, ‘Divine Visibility’, argues that John’s Christology affirms the visibility of God by reconciling the notion of an ‘unseen’ God to the visibility of the Father that Jesus presents. It proposes that John 1:18a is best read as ‘no one has ever [fully] seen God [yet]’. Three pieces of evidence support this claim, chief among them a survey of Early Jewish, biblical, and Rabbinic literature revealing that one may not assume that all – or, perhaps, even many – Hellenized Jews embraced Platonist notions of invisibility. If one reads John’s God as ‘unseen’, rather than as ‘invisible’, the visibility of God in Jesus becomes possible and the tension between the seeing and not seeing God passages can be resolved.

This chapter develops a rudimentary theory of glory. Glory is a particularly elevated form of honor, a kind of “super recognition.” It is more exclusive and longer lasting than honor, and it is typically connected with promises of immortality and an “upgrade” of one’s reputation. We distinguish between political (or Periclean) and personal (or Achillean) glory. Personal glory is competitive by definition, political glory is not. We also discuss the scope of the term and suggested that determining the proper objects of glory (military, political, cultural, or even everyday pursuits) turns on the social role the concept is supposed to play. The status and role of glory change during different stages of a conflict. Early on (typically before a war starts) glory helps motivate people to fight for a cause. During the conflict, the preoccupation with glory usually fades among those who actually do the fighting, and after the conflict, the question of bestowing glory becomes subject to bureaucratic and social decisions. Furthermore, we argue that often those who actually do the fighting are not the ones who get glorified. We note the tension between positing that someone has a duty to fight and the practice of glorifying them for fulfilling that duty, and we also argue that glory is subject to both internal and external explanations. We conclude by tracing the relationship between glory and death, and examining the normativity of both Periclean and Achillean glory.

In ancient Greek culture of all periods, the notion of kleos is linked in a fundamental way to the poet’s voice, and no adequate discussion of that voice could ignore this topic. Itranslate kleos by ’fame’, ’glory’ or ’renown’, but some further glossing of this complex term is immediately necessary. Kleos is etymologically and semantically related to the verb kluo (’I hear’) – kleos is ’that which is heard’, ’a report’, even ’rumour’. So Telemachus, when he returns to Ithaca, asks Eumaeus for the kleos from town. Kleos is applied to what people talk (of), and an object like Nestor’s shield has a ’kleos which reaches heaven’, and heroes’ armour is often described as kluta (’with kleos’, ’talked of’). ’Things, places and persons acquire kleos as they acquire an identity in the human world, as stories are told about them.’

Acknowledging Messiaen’s occasional but consistently appreciative references to theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar, especially with respect to the theological aesthetics as presented in The Glory of the Lord (Herrlichkeit), this chapter provides a theological and Trinitarian description of Balthasar’s notion of doxa, or “glory,” which may well have influenced Messiaen’s compositions. For Balthasar, “glory” as a theological concept is neither merely aesthetic nor religiously triumphalist, but remains tangled together with transcendental beauty in Western metaphysics, theophany, kenoticism ( “ self-emptying”), a cruciform Christology, eschatology, and apocalyptic thought.

This chapter asks whether Robert Dodaro and John Milbank are correct in their claim that Augustine thought that the earthly city was necessarily a place of political vice. To this end, this chapter examines Augustine’s idea of the love of material possessions, the love of glory, and the love of domination, and finds that while he looked on these loves as always sinful, he held that they did not necessarily lead people to commit politically vicious actions, but could in fact act as a restraint on people’s actions, ensuring that people conformed their lives to the highest political and social standards.

This chapter argues that Paul’s gospel was based on the conviction that God’s promises through the prophets—specifically the promise of a renewed covenant with Israel—were being fulfilled through Jesus’ death, resurrection, and the gift of the spirit. Working primarily from 2 Corinthians 3 and the central chapters of Romans, this chapter puts Paul in conversation with Jubilees, a variety of texts from the Dead Sea Scrolls (1QS, CD, 1QPHa, etc.), Philo of Alexandria, and more. The chapter demonstrates that all of these texts bear witness to a view of Israel as having fallen under the Torah’s curses for covenantal disobedience and awaiting a restoration that includes an ethical transformation through divine intervention.

Machiavelli cannot accomplish conversion of the world by himself. He has to convince future philosophers to follow or obey him. This is his succession problem.

Using several examples, I discuss the features of Byzantine icons as a form of representational art. In addition to tensions which can occur within the image itself, I point out tensions between the expression of a glory which surpasses the limitations of the aesthetics alone (through the use of gold, perspective, and the mandorla) as well as an impoverishment which falls well beneath what images are capable of (the submission of the painting to prescribed word, in content, style, and name). This paradoxical inclusion of highs and lows, straining against the limits of representation on both sides, hints that the icon is aiming to express a meaning greater than the image alone.

In chapter 2, we explore the grounds for the Lamb’s selection as God’s chosen king. Common in Greek and Roman ideologies was the notion that kings acquired power by accumulating military victories. Dubbed a “theology of victory”, this ideology dovetailed with the ideology of divine election of the king insofar as the military victories that precipitated royal investiture were imagined to be the result of divinely-aided assistance on the battlefield. Thus, military victories were imagined to be proof of the divine election—and thus legitimacy—of the king. Revelation adopts some of the parameters of the theology of victory, including the notion that a “victory” was required in order to legitimate the Lamb’s investiture as king. At the same time, Revelation radically refashioned this ideology by claiming that the Lamb’s victory consisted not of a military conquest but rather Jesus’ own bloody death. This subversion of the ideology of victory functioned as a counter-narrative to imperial claims of the divine election of the emperor.

In chapter 2, we explore the grounds for the Lamb’s selection as God’s chosen king. Common in Greek and Roman ideologies was the notion that kings acquired power by accumulating military victories. Dubbed a “theology of victory”, this ideology dovetailed with the ideology of divine election of the king insofar as the military victories that precipitated royal investiture were imagined to be the result of divinely-aided assistance on the battlefield. Thus, military victories were imagined to be proof of the divine election—and thus legitimacy—of the king. Revelation adopts some of the parameters of the theology of victory, including the notion that a “victory” was required in order to legitimate the Lamb’s investiture as king. At the same time, Revelation radically refashioned this ideology by claiming that the Lamb’s victory consisted not of a military conquest but rather Jesus’ own bloody death. This subversion of the ideology of victory functioned as a counter-narrative to imperial claims of the divine election of the emperor.

Given the apparent importance of exempla to Cicero’s project in De Officiis, any account of Cicero’s philosophical method in this work is forced to grapple with the question of how these historical insets function within the text. Yet understanding how, exactly, they contribute to the reader’s moral progress is an interpretative challenge: Cicero’s treatment warns us against taking them simply as models for imitation. Instead, I argue, Cicero focuses on three different, but related, functions for his exempla within De Officiis. First, looking at the behaviour of others can help us to develop the analytical skills necessary to correctly deliberate about our own actions. Secondly, exempla work to verify the theoretical claims of the text. Finally, they show the beneficial outcomes of following the teachings of the text, in terms of the glory and praise that accrues to those who engage in correct action – though, as we shall see, this strategy is only effective because of Cicero’s radical redefinition of the concepts of glory and praise.

Book 2 of De Officiis is devoted to an exploration of the utile, what is beneficial or advantageous for humans in pursuing desirable objectives, and the resources needed to achieve them. As Section 1 discusses, it focuses on the human resource that someone intent on a successful political career will best harness, and on outlining the methods for attaining it. That outline then provides Cicero with a basis for the main body of the book, which has two main parts, the first expounding the methods he endorses for achieving glory, with an accent on the need for justice in pursuing it, the second examining liberality, and good and bad ways of exercising it. Section 2 turns to the detail of his analysis of the complexities of liberality and its vocabulary. Section 3 asks whether glory is the main pay-off he sees as the fruit of liberality, and argues that gratitude is of no less importance. A brief conclusion notes that the cohesion of the res publica emerges as the primary object of appropriate human concern, and comments on Cicero’s view that in its safeguarding lies simultaneously our main advantage and the ultimate focus of the social virtues of justice and beneficence.

The De re publica contains a sophisticated strain of reflection on the place of the honor motive in a good life, and in particular in the good life of public service. Cicero finds a way for a conscientious public servant to be interested in receiving honor while still directing his actions at the public good and that only. Further, he finds a use for merited honor and merited shame in the moral education of citizens and political leaders. The chapter argues that Cicero’s account of how honor motivates a person, both ordinarily and in the normative case, is fundamentally more similar to the views on honor put forward by the Hellenistic Stoics than it is to the tripartite model of psyche used by Plato in his Republic. As so often in De re publica, what we have is Platonism filtered through and modified by subsequent Stoic thought. But Cicero’s own experience in politics has also given stimulus to his reflections; and conversely, the philosophical position on honor that he develops in his writing becomes part of his self-representation as a public figure.