Bridal glory

The fullness of the earth is God’s glory: God clothes Himself with creation.

Mike Bull writes to remind me that this also fits into Isaiah 6. The woman is the glory of man: Therefore, creation as God’s glory is also God’s bride.

The triune God has freely determined that He will not be God except as Husband of His Bride, that He will not be God without His Brid=al Glory. (Plug in everything you’ve learned from Barth and Jenson here.)

But this also throws light back on the triple seraphic declaration of the Lord’s holiness.

“Holy” is often taken as an attribute of separation and transcendence. God is “high and lifted up,” and far from identical with His creation. The cry of the seraphim suggests, however, that His holiness consists less in His separation than in His dwelling-in.

Adonai is holy insofar as He as Creator puts on the robe of His creation, insofar as He as Husband joins to His Bride. This manifests the holiness of His triune life: He is eternally and in Himself holy because the Father is in the Son through the Spirit and the Son in the Father by the Spirit of Holiness.

And Happy Advent again, since the incarnation, far from being a strange contradiction of God’s holiness, is the demonstration and fulfillment of it.