Even where men do not know or acknowledge Him, God is at work. This is why the Bible, the heart of which is the story of the covenant celebrated between God and His people, also tells us that this same God created all things and that all things have their destiny in Him. At the centre is the reconciliation of men with God in Jesus Christ, but the doctrine of creation points to the truth that everything comes from God, belongs to Him and lives by his grace, while eschatology, the doctrine of final redemption, announces the truth that everything moves towards God, and will be purified, liberated, and summed up in Him. To limit ourselves to redemption and salvation would mean leaving out God's universal dimension, restricting his presence to what we experience of it, forgetting that God is the God of all the earth, even though we are told in the Epistle to the Colossians that Jesus Christ is not only "the head of the body, the church" (1:18) but also "the firstborn of all creation" (1:15).

But the present world is the scene and the history of a struggle between God's love and the powers of falsehood, slavery and inertia, which challenge the presence of this love. The creation is overshadowed, enslaved, and paralysed by forces which, while originating in our freedom, at the same time try to undermine and sometimes actually destroy this freedom. We often question whether the world is still God's creation and destined for His kingdom. It is therefore impossible to speak of the world either as a calamity written off by God or as a happy paradise which manifests Him. The world is crowded with struggles between light and darkness, speech and silence, hopes and betrayals. The world is a great lawsuit between God's witnesses and God's adversaries, though we cannot equate these with believers and unbelievers, respectively, since there are faithless believers and faithful unbelievers.

The glory of God from now on dwells in the world. The heavens and the earth are filled with God's holiness. This glory and this holiness are active in the world. They are not identical with developments in nature or with the sequences in history. They renew nature in order to make it veritably a creation. They call history to account in order to make it a covenant.

God's glory means, also, that He again takes in hand this divided world, whether anguished or arrogant, in order to make it plain that the whole creation is destined for the kingdom. God finds glory in this world when politics as well as worship, theology as well as piety, aid humankind, the earth and the heavens, to recover their status as creatures of God called to inherit a promise. Glory is not a separate beatitude but a transfiguring benediction.

A few questions

What does it mean and how are we to demonstrate that belonging to the Creator God does not crush human freedom and responsibility but rather establishes and confirms them?
What does it mean and how are we to demonstrate that the hope of the kingdom is not an escape from history nor a utopian illusion but rather a reality already begun and continuing?
How are we to cooperate with non-Christians without either imposing or concealing our Christian faith? How are we to affirm without being arrogant that our God is the God of all the earth?
To what forms of responsibility, criticism and celebration are we constrained by the glory of God in view of the present world economic crisis? What bold yet humble global projects should we have?
Same question in view of the crisis in the political systems of our respective countries. Are we in a position to assert this profound interrelationship between our different situations?
Same question for the cultural and spiritual crisis, especially as between the generations. Can the Christian faith play a creative role at one and the same time against taboos and against vice?
Lastly, what claim does the glory of God make upon us in our relationships with nature? According to the Bible, we are called "to fill" and "to rule" the creation (Gen. 1:28) but also "to till and to care for" the earth (Gen. 2:15). What meaning have these responsibilities today when we have used much, and exploited too much, the resources of nature?

II

Discussion in the group led to the following report which was received in the plenary session of the centennial consultation.

The glory of God and the world

We have looked for ways in which this biblical theme can nourish courage in Christians about the world as they honestly find it to be and engage in its process.

1. Christians occupy themselves in and with the world, believing it to be the creation of God and destined to display his kingdom.

God is active in all the world, giving blessing as its creator, goodness as Lord, hope as its rightful King. The church is the place where believers know him and seek to conform their lives to his through Jesus Christ. To confine thought of God's presence to the church would be to suppress his universality, yet to dissolve the church into the world would be to suppress the particular acquaintance with himself which God has provided from Abraham to Jesus Christ. The church involves itself with the world in all the world's aspects. It does so with humble awareness of how it is itself shaped by the world. But its competence for its peculiar task comes through relationship, in the Holy Spirit, to the biblical testimony of prophets and apostles to Jesus Christ. To these witnesses it listens, reports what it hears, and gives expression to it in the practice of human life,

2. The glory of God is in the history of his creating and redeeming and consummating work.

God constantly contends for the establishing of his world, against the devastation of it threatened from the works of human partners disposed to be arrogant, dispirited, self-deceived. In his glory, God conflates his own suffering love and that evoked in human partners, so that his joy and human well-being coalesce. 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.

3. The glory of God obliges us to combat chaos in our actual world and gives us a role to play in the ongoing renewal of the world.

We mention examples of chaos, and prospects of renewal, which mark out present responsibility for co-workers with God. There is economic chaos: inflation and monetary dishonesty is a grave symptom; so is growing disparity between wealth and poverty, between countries and between social classes; so also extravagant destructive weaponry vis-à-vis unalleviated famine; and nuclear industrial development with future hazards insufficiently evaluated; so is failure, in a context of worldwide interdependence, to bring to birth a new international economic order.

There is prospect of economic renewal: in progressive intolerance of waste; in efforts to reach more equitable assessment of natural resources; in efforts to diffuse industrialisation, to suspend armaments races, to adopt appropriate nuclear moratoria.

There is political chaos: some governments show lack of authority vis-à-vis private and corporate interests; other governments behave with oppressive indifference to human rights, or to racial equality, or to the needs of their people.

There is prospect of political renewal: where governments neither capitulate nor dominate in the practice of their power and serve their whole citizenry effectively,

There is cultural chaos: where cultures seem to be trapped in immobility and also where they disintegrate under alien modernising pressure; where, also, men and women are estranged by masculine discrimination; where people find no joy in work and are not nourished by opportunities of community; where there is failure to achieve a morality which is equally against vice and against taboos.

There is prospect of cultural renewal: where there is discriminating respect for differences and openness for interplay and rapport; where the complementing of life for men by women and for women by men is attained; where work is invested with meaning; and where morality finds roots in truth.

There is ecological chaos: when the physical world is no longer regarded by humankind as a welcome fellow-guest in the world with which we can live as stewards and companions; as nature without man is a solitude, so too mankind without nature becomes solitary.

There is prospect of ecological renewal, when awareness of the interdependence of humanity and the furnished populated world around it keeps each nation or household from absorbed self-defence in a jungle of competitive and self-protective interests.

A clear vision of the collective dimensions of sin opens our eyes to the reality of chaos. Confidence in the collective dimensions of grace opens our lives to the reality of renewal.

4. The glory of God empowers the church to be courageous in enterprises yet humble in its commitments, within the world.

"The world is the theatre of God's glory" (Calvin). He invites us to think of life and of history as a spectacle set within an arena prepared for it. Here human beings live as actors, but not as puppets. They live as performers who are watched by spectators with an interest either in promoting chaos or in promoting renewal for creation. God himself shares in the action, in addressing his sovereign concrete word to the church and also by evoking from the worldwide range of actors the resolute contributions which serve his over-arching purpose. It is God himself who achieves the denouement of the drama enacted in the vast theatre which is the world. We, therefore, must understand ourselves neither as spectators nor as victims of a drama imposed upon us. We are actors, in the presence of interested observers to whom we often witness about the process of struggle between creation and chaos. In this drama God has already disclosed the full weight of his glory in the suffering endured on the world's behalf by Jesus at his crucifixion and in the beginning of deliverance for the world at his resurrection. For us, to live with the Holy Spirit is to accept, freely and communally, as our own the life of God which Jesus shares with his Father, where the suffering is put to the proof in history and the deliverance is tasted in joy.