This article is a transcript - with minor editorial changes - of a recording of Dr Lochman's summing up during the final plenary session of the WARC centennial consultation.

...An attempt to summarize the main accents of our consultation in the light of its discussions and presentations is indeed a "mission impossible". What follows now is made still more difficult because of the shortage of time; so I will present now only a summary of my intended summary. And I would like to mention basically three points which seem to me to have emerged out of the reports, particularly out of the section groups. Two of these remarks will deal with the temptations which we tried to avoid, certain dangers which might have been built into the main theme of the consultation. And a third point deals with an attempt to show in what way this consultation approached the content and meaning of our theme and tried to articulate its importance for the personal and social life of everyone of us.

Two temptations, I would say, were possibly built in. The first one was the temptation of triumphalism. "Glory of God" seems like a bit of triumphalism and some of our co-workers in different areas of this world warned us from the very beginning against the danger. I quote one sentence only from one contribution from Northern America: "The glory of God has frequently become strangely and subtly interwoven with the glory of that society which produced the Albert Hall, and the Crystal Palace, and the Eiffel Tower and the Empire State Building". And I would add some more buildings...

I think it is fair to say that our consultation tried hard, and I would claim even succeeded, in facing the danger. From the very beginning it was clearly emphasized that the glory of God is not our glory. It is not our glory in the sense of our possession or of our triumph and it is not the glory of our societies. Here a clear Christocentric orientation of much that had been prepared helped us. And thinking of the presentations during the consultation, allow me only to point to Paul Minear's Bible studies, which I would say by their very form, that is to say, in that very subdued, devotional, utterly untriumphalistic way, made clear what was then also exposed materially: that the glory of God is the glory of Christ and as such particularly the glory of the Cross. I think that, consequently, also the reports of our study groups did justice to this particular approach.

The second danger I have in mind may be called the danger of "escapism". The glory of God might be conceived as a pure transcendentalism or what we call in the ecumenical movement "verticalism". We would speak of the glory of God and we would do it to excuse ourselves from participation in the basic questions facing the church and the society in our days. "Religion (or the glory of God) as opium of the people" - how often have I personally heard that criticism, and that emphasis on the glory of God might well be interpreted - and I would say misinterpreted - in this way. Well, again I think it is fair to say that as far as both the discussions and the "results of those discussions as presented in the papers show, we struggled with that danger. All the groups made attempts in their own way to relate the glory of God to the future of man, to the conditions, to the troubles and to the hopes of our contemporaries and of ourselves.

I think that in this respect the keynote speech by Dr McCord set for us the perspective. It was an attempt to approach, as he said, the theme from below, that means to connect the vision of the glory with the basic perspectives of our times. And again the groups followed. What was presented to us this morning shows that there were many questions of contemporary humanity which were dealt with, in a more or less committed way, eg human rights, all the ecological problems - and I don't need to repeat what was stated here. The workshops presented the varieties of implications of the theme of the glory of God. There was what I might call an open market, a "common market" of implications involved. One may say: Is this a responsible way now to approach the theme of the glory of God? My reply would be, it is responsible if that means that we are well aware that the glory of God has many practical implications.

And so it has. It has political implications, it has personal implications, it has doxological implications, trying to encourage us to develop ways of adoration of the glory of God in song, in liturgy, in prayer. This dimension was not missing here. Neither was that other, the political one. And since then, too, I would say we have tried to overcome that danger; if we succeeded, we cannot say yet, but we tried hard.

And now my third and last point. What clarity did we reach about that central question of our theme? What does it mean positively to speak about the glory of God for our personal and communal life today? After having listened carefully I cannot find any - if you like - general statement which I could produce easily as an answer, as a definition of that particular concern, but this is not necessarily the fault of our consultation; it is much more connected with the basic situation in which we are when dealing with the glory of God. We cannot possess that glory. The glory of God is not something which would be defined in such a way that we would show it to anybody. We know how the biblical studies warned us against such a danger.

Yet the basic direction in an attempt to show what it means for our life was elaborated, in my opinion rather clearly, in some of the reports. And if I were to summarize, I would say the basic emphasis trying to articulate in what way we are involved in the context of the glory of God was the confession that the story of our life, our human story, is part and parcel of that broader and decisive story, the story of the Covenant of God with his people in the Old Testament, and particularly the story of our participation in the life, in the death and in the resurrection of Christ. To speak of the glory of God means to understand one's life in the context of the liberating salvation story. We are not left alone with our lives. We live them in our full responsibility, with our own hopes and frustrations. The glory of God does not make our life transparent or easy. We have to face our personal as well as our communal problems; but we may know that these personal and communal problems do not stand in a void, that they are part and parcel of the story of Christ. The glory of God means to know that I may live my life in all its precarious quality in the perspective of a reality which encompasses me. This is the glory of Christian life.

This was the way in which the first Christians faced the fatalisms of their own days. They knew principalities and powers have power, and yet their power is not the ultimate. I can, I may dare to see my life in the perspective of the coming kingdom of God. This liberates; this gave strength yesterday, and this liberates also today. Facing other principalities and powers, facing the dangers of our world's situation as well as all the claims of today's society to grasp and manipulate human destinies, we may believe we are not utterly and completely in any other hand than in the hand of God where it encompasses us. Our responsibility remains, and yet this responsibility is placed in an open eschatological perspective. We may live a life which, in spite of all its tragic elements, is ultimately "beyond tragedy". This is in my opinion the message of the glory of God in its relation to our future. It will be always broken, yet it is very real. It illuminates the future of our world and encourages us to play our role in that "theatre of God's glory".

Let me now conclude by a quotation from one of our groups which formulated a practical consequence for the Christian way of life of the vision of the glory of God in the following sentence: "Because we are encompassed by this history of the glory of God, we are able to be judged yet not annihilated, to hope without illusion or deception, to be active yet not pretentious, and to speak for God without timidity or arrogance."

To this statement I can only say my personal "Amen" but only under the provision that "Amen" will not remain the last word of the consultation, but rather the first word of our attempts on our further way, as the Alliance of Reformed Churches and as individuals, to try and live out the implications of the great theme "The glory of God and the future of man".

Prof Jan M. Lochman teaches theology at Basle University. He is a member of the synod of the Evangelical Reformed Church in Basle/ Switzerland and during the WARC centennial consultation was re-elected chairman of the WARC department of theology.