[Eric Johnson is our guest blogger for December. Eric is the Director of the Society for Christian Psychology and professor at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. This is his third post].

Thanks to wonderful teaching I received early on in my Christian life (at Toronto Baptist Seminary, Calvin College, and Bethlehem Baptist Church with John Piper), I have been drawn to think often about how God’s glory is related to psychology and counseling. In an early article, “Self-Esteem in the Presence of God” (1989), I argued that God alone is of infinite worth and that whatever value humans possess has to be vastly secondary and completely derived from God’s worth, since he is the source of whatever worth there is in his creatures. Christian thinking on the psychology of self-esteem needed to factor such a perspective into its theories and counseling. Needless to say, I hadn’t come up with this on my own. I had simply read Jonathan Edward’s classic essay, “The End for Which God Created the World,” which may the best concise discussion of God’s glory ever written (though it is not easy!)[i].

Sometime during the past decade I came across the massive 7-volume work of Hans Urs von Balthasar (1982-1989) on God’s glory (Balthasar is arguably one of the greatest Catholic theologians since Aquinas), called “The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics.” Though daunting in size and erudition, I have learned more about glory in this work. Balthasar there makes makes an important distinction (which he learned from Aquinas) that glory is composed of two dimensions: form and splendor. I would like to spend the rest of this blog explaining this distinction, and next week apply it to psychology and counseling.

Balthasar equates glory with beauty, and he wrote that the form of something is a certain arrangement of its elements, which altogether have a certain complexity, harmony, and proportionality, which constitutes its beauty (consider the form of a strong, healthy horse or Michelangelo’s David) (Edwards, 1989, defined beauty similarly in “The Nature of True Virtue”). The form of the triune God is the most beautiful of all forms, because God is infinitely the greatest being there is, particularly since God consists of the most awesome and amazing arrangement of characteristics and moral virtues that can be. The form of a creature can be no more than a miniscule replica (or image or representation or sign) of the beauty of its infinite Creator, and the ultimate standard of comparison for the replica must always be the original form upon which it is based.

However, an object’s splendor, according to Balthasar, is the depth dimension of its form and refers to the form’s inner radiance and luminescence, we might say, the form’s genuine value that lies, as it were, within it and that shines forth from it. It is what we might call the density of its full beauty. And again, the triune God possesses the greatest degree of splendor imaginable, because God has infinite depth and density of glory, and all creaturely splendor must be measured most truly by the degree of its depth resemblance to the beauty of God.

Form, we might say then, is the beauty evident on the surface of something, whereas splendor is the beauty that lies within. Therefore only the omniscient God fully knows the splendor of something. Splendor is always something of a mystery to humans; we can recognize it generally, but not fathom its depths. Also, while intelligence understands form, it takes wisdom to perceive splendor. Grasping something’s form seems to be mostly a mental or cognitive enterprise, while grasping something’s splendor is more a heart activity, which engages our emotions and entails an appraisal of its worth (in the case of God, love and worship!). But both form and splendor are involved and interrelated in an object’s full beauty.

To illustrate the difference between form and splendor, think of a statue of a living human being. It may be a statue that has great form, identical to the person it represents, but the internal glory or beauty of the human being far exceeds the statue. The human has obvious depth that the statue lacks: the former is alive and has far greater value! For another illustration, consider two siblings who are taking care of their dying mother, one, in order to guarantee a large inheritance, and the other, out of loving devotion. Their actions may have the same form, but their moral splendor is considerably different. Balthasar said that form and splendor are inseparable, and a thing’s splendor is dependent on its form.

I’m sure readers are already sensing the potential here for Christian psychology and counseling. Please respond with your insights this week, and next week I’ll offer a few of my own.[ii]

 

References

 

Balthasar, H. U. (1982-1989). The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics. San Francisco: Ignatius.

Edwards, J. (1989). Ethical Writings (Vol. 8). (P. Ramsey, Ed.) New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Johnson, E. L. (2007). Foundations for Soul Care: A Christian Psychology Proposal. Downers Grove, IL:       InterVarsity.

Johnson, E. L. (1989). Self-Esteem in the Presence of God. Journal of Psychology and Theology , 226- 235.

Piper, J. (1998). God’s Passion for His Glory. Wheaton, IL: Crossway.

 

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[i] John Piper (1998) republished Edward’s essay with a great introduction and some helpful footnotes. It is also available in volume 8 of the Yale edition of Edward’s works (1989)

[ii] Most of this discussion is derived from Foundations for Soul Care: A Christian Psychology Proposal (Johnson, 2007, pp. 312-313)