The fifth Sunday of Lent

Jeremiah 31.27-34 I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel
Hebrews 5.5-10 Although he was a son he learned obedience through
what he suffered
John 12.20-30 The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified.
And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself

1. The crisis of faith

2. Covenant renewed
3. Persons in covenant
4. Honour and self-respect
5. The crisis of liberalism
6. The Son of Man takes the way of the cross
7. Repentance and redemption

This is the fifth Sunday of Lent, and next Sunday will be Palm Sunday. The
Church has been travelling through Lent on the way to Easter. The
community created by the resurrection can take this way of suffering. It
goes through the crisis of judgment to its redemption. Our country is
suffering its own passion, as its parts divide and distance themselves,
threatening its unity and the well-being of our society’s weakest members.
This is a crisis for the secular liberalism proclaimed by our country’s
leaders, and that it is a crisis is most obvious where that secular liberalism
opposes itself to the Church. But when this country is ready to hear from
the Church and look to its Lord, it can hope to come through this suffering
to its redemption.

1. The crisis of faith

When he comes will the Son of Man find faith on earth?
Our society is undergoing a crisis of self-belief. It has not listened to its
own previous generations, so it does not have their confidence in the
covenant of God with man, and so does not know how to exercise truthful
self-judgment. As a result it swings between unsustainably high and low
estimations of its own worth. The present financial crisis demonstrates
that this is a crisis for our economy. The financial insanity of recent years
is warning us of a long-term failure. We are no longer be taken at our
word, for we ourselves have devalued our word. Money is a series of
promises, a proportion of which have to be kept: when that proportion is
too low, and neither we nor anyone else believes our promises, our money
has no value, and neither does the economy denominated in that money.
In these talks I have demonstrated that an economy is a reflection of a
society. The nation that does not want to hear of the covenant of God with
man suffers a crisis of morale that makes it unable to act for the long
term. The unwillingness of this country to hear about any covenant of man
with God results in the crisis that we have described variously as
ecological, moral, social and economic.

2. Covenant renewed
The covenant theme that we met with Abraham in the second week
returns now in our reading from Jeremiah. The days are surely coming,
says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel
and the house of Judah (Jeremiah 31.31). The new covenant that the Lord
makes is the covenant of God with man restored and made new. When this
fundamental covenant is in good order, all our covenants may be renewed
and redeemed, and we find the confidence to receive their true valuation
from the judgment of God and of man.

In these talks I have suggested that the concept of relationship is

absolutely basic. We are loved by God, we have been brought into
covenant with him, and through this covenant we are in many other sorts
of covenant with all other human beings. Each married couple represent a
covenant, with each other, with their children, and with their society. Each
household comes into relationship with all other households as they meet
in the marketplace, trade and so form an economy. Each household is
judged and assessed by every other, and so by the market as a whole, and
our national household is judged and valued by global markets. We live in
the view of all our peers: we love them and we act in the hope that they
will love and esteem us more.

But in compensating for marriage’s failures, the state has determined that
there is no difference between married and non-married, that is, between
relationships that intend permanence and those that do not. It is
attempting to obliterate the differentiations and asymmetries between the
covenants that ensure our future and those that do not. To suggest that
relationships which do not produce children are equivalent to relationships
that do is not only an untruth, but it has costly economic consequences.
When the state does not give fiscal protection to marriage, the confidence
that enables us to start families, and other more explicitly economic
initiatives, disappears. If the state taxes small businesses as though they
were big business, confidence to start businesses and employ people also
disappears. The need to comply with government demands means that
larger (and older) businesses do better than smaller (and younger) ones,
with the result that the economy is dominated by large corporations, and
capital has less and less relationship to social capital and the practices of
civil society.

All our preoccupation with what we do in our bedrooms is as nothing

compared to the new agenda of bringing it out of the bedroom and
promoting it as a new orthodoxy. The society that promotes such
equivalence at the behest of any group is inflicting contradiction on itself.
The logic of such an ideology is that all particularity is rubbed out, so that
we may not love our own family more than others, nor prefer our own
initiatives and enterprises over others. To eradicate ‘inequality’ is to
attempt to obliterate all differences: without check this will become
coercive and totalitarian. Whether the state intends turn persons in
covenants into uncovenanted individuals who can only relate to one
another through the state’s own mediation, is perhaps a political issue for
one country. But whether the state can pursue this project by consuming
the national product is an economic issue, and therefore an issue which
other economies and the international markets will decide on.

Here the Church makes its response. It says that because there is a
covenant between God and man, there is a covenant between man and
man, and a covenant between this generation and future generations.
Only the community that understands itself in terms of covenant, can say
this. Man may take his own initiatives, enter covenants, start enterprises
of commerce or public generosity, just as he may marry and start a family.
And it points out that he must do this, if a society is to continue. Such
initiative and enterprise requiring self-control, saving, risk and even self-
sacrifice, must be recognised if a society is to produce a new generation.
The initiatives that create new covenants do not require any permission
from society as a whole, but simply its acknowledgement: law and
government exist in order to safeguard this sphere of individual,
household and corporate initiative, not prevent it.

We are in a single covenant because we are members of a single nation,

and our national economy is in covenant with all others, since we subsist
from our relationship with these other nations and other economies. They
decide what value they give to their relationship with us, so it is for them
to tell us what they think we are worth. They may tell us that we have
over-valued ourselves and are now only worth a fraction of what we were.
If we receive their judgment as constructive correction, and take steps to
renew ourselves, perhaps they will continue to do business with us here in
London.

3. Persons in covenant
In each of these talks I have said that we have a contrast between two
accounts of man. In the Christian account man is both a covenantal being
and an individual. In the non-Christian account, man is merely an
individual, fundamentally on his own. On this account males are on their
own and females are on their own, and masculinity and femininity are
opposites. Man is threatened by feminity or weakness and woman is
threatened by masculinity and power. The realm of man has therefore to
be harnessed and controlled.

Christianity, by contrast, says that man and woman are in covenant. We

can understand them as covenantal beings, and understand that man is
given to woman and woman to man, and that they both contain each
other and seek each other. We saw from the letter of the Apostle to the
Ephesians last week, that though the dividing wall between man and
woman is broken, this does not mean that all difference is gone or that are
dissolved into a unisex. It means that in Christ man and woman are still
two distinct estates, but that they serve one another in freedom. They are
not antagonists, so they don't need any third party to mediate between
them. It is not women, but wives, relational beings, who may freely
represent the inner world of the household and not, men but husbands,
relational beings who may freely represent the outer world of public
square and marketplace. They have come into their covenant in freedom
and in love: they have reasons for coming together and for being distinct
and non-identical.
When man and woman regard themselves solely as individuals, there is no
reason why they should come together in lasting mutual relationship. Male
and females may desire and meet each other briefly for private purposes,
but these can never generate public purposes: sex will result in no
commitment to the upbringing of a new generation. If men and women are
individuals, they are in conflict. Of these two rival powers, the stronger
power of machismo and patriarchy has to be controlled by the creation of
another power to police them – the state. But such a response to
‘patriarchal’ domination can only another form of domination, only
nominally gentler because identifiable with a set of ‘non-male’
characteristics; the pursuit of a less masculine and hierarchical culture
remains a game of power. Concerned to avoid confrontation and upset, we
identify new categories of person who may be offended, we widen
consensus by seeking permission from ever-greater numbers of people,
demonstrating that we have done so by keeping records, and employing
great numbers of people to do so. The machinery of compliance that
enforces the equivalence agenda is limitlessly expensive. Do we imagine
that the rest of the world will continue to give us their savings so that with
this standing army we can turn our self-preoccupation with avoiding
masculinity into a public agenda and the goal of the whole economy?

If we do not understand persons as covenantal, we lose the distinction and

complementarity of the household and the public economy. Then there is
no reason why the household and public economy should come together
in that lasting way that is secured by a marriage. If society does not
recognise the household as the source of the next generation, there is no
incentive to start one. If society does not recognise and commend new
households and all other forms of public initiative- and risk-taking, there
will be fewer of them. If no one can take a loss, no one will take a risk, and
the result is the stagnation of our inflated social economy. Only our own
freely-entered covenants can give us the motivation to take initiatives.
Since we are not free in relationship to it, the state cannot motivate us to
anything.

Without the covenanted understanding of the human being, our society

sees men and other initiative-talkers as those who have to be controlled
and is investing its energy in doing so. It has created a hierarchy of
controllers and mediators, and a sclerotic society in which no one may act
without them. The Church has faced this situation many times before.
Christians in this country in the sixteenth century had to throw off an
inflated clerical caste that had made itself a universal mediator. Christians
wrenched back into the centre the truth that every human being is directly
before God and before man, and that no ranks of mediators may take that
dignity away. This insistence on the dignity of the individual Christian
reformed the Church to make it the Protestant Church of England. Its
understanding of the individual has been the bulwark against the
absolutism and totalitarianism that periodically captures other cultures.
When we despise the Christian faith that bulwark disappears. God calls us
into freedom and enables us to judge for ourselves, enter relationships
with one another freely and take the initiatives that bring benefit our
society as a whole. The society that does not wish to hear this will descend
into self-inflicted social conflict, and its economy will suffer a painful
collapse.
4. Honour and self-respect
Our society is undergoing a crisis of self-respect. We do not seem to be
concerned for our own reputation or what previous generations called
‘honour’ or ‘glory’. We have been given this social capital, this bundle of
attitudes and this system of laws, shaped by the Christian tradition. This
moral, social and constitutional capital is the silver spoon we were born
with. We have inherited the good will that came with the UK brand, which
was created by all the Victorian, imperial and post-imperial twentieth
century generations that shaped the City which we now see. What will we
do with all the social capital that they have left us? Are the British really
going to disavow all that they have been? Do we regard this country’s past
as though it were all mistake? Here again is the Manichean fear, by which
we oscillate between excessively high and low estimations of ourselves.
Where we are uncertain about our value we see wild swings in the
valuation the markets give to our currency and our economy. When it has
been long divorced from a confident society, the market becomes a thing
of pure emotion, a herd plunging between greed and fear, hubris and
despair, that cannot be headed off by any political force no matter how
concerted. When the virtues and the social capital of the UK are not
understood as good, they cease to motivate us and supply us with good
reasons for our undertakings. When the risk-avoidance mechanisms in the
market turn into responsibility-aversion, instead of damping down on
volatility the markets can magnify such fears, until the unreason that we
see as economic crisis becomes wild and destructive. There are storms in
the market because we have let go of so much of our social capital that
we are no longer sure what we are worth.

The self-respect that extends into fellow-feeling and sense of belonging is

the glue that holds people together and makes them a nation. Each of us
considers our interests in the light of those of our various communities
and the nation as a whole. Yet we do not seem to care what others think of
us. Our government has not considered whether other economies are
really likely to carry for us the burden of the national welfare that we have
awarded ourselves. If we do not believe in our society it is not likely that
anyone else will believe in our economy. This, incidentally, is the basis of
Islam’s question to the West. The West seems to have no self-respect, it
despises manliness and no longer sees its own reputation as reason
enough for its public actions. We revel in moral ambiguity. Islam is very
properly puzzled and disgusted by this. It looks as though we have
undergone a collective loss of self-respect, so that we could never admit
that we could do something simply in order to defend ourselves and
establish that we are here for the long term. We are undergoing a
collective auto-immune response. We must either recover from it, which
involves diagnosing it for what it is, or our society will break up. So, oddly,
the Church now has to defend the concept of self-respect and tell us that
pride and loyalty to our community are basic.

5. The crisis of liberalism

Christianity understands that, because he is the image of God, man is free.
We are free to use our own judgment, and able to decide to act well for
one another. We may fail of course, but when we do so, we may admit our
fault, ask for forgiveness and start again. There is a dignity in admitting
that we have failed, and terrible failure and loss of dignity when we cannot
bring ourselves to admit failure. The Christian faith gives us the dignity of
public confession and repentance. Christianity is not a political programme
or an economic programme: there is no set of instructions in which our
every little act is laid down for us. God invites us to act publicly, using our
judgment. Our conscience may be formed from a tradition of judgment,
such as Christian discipleship, but we decide for ourselves. Only the
Christian faith insists that we have the freedom of individuals who may
judge ourselves. It gives us the dignity of confession and repentance.
There is a terrible loss of dignity when we cannot bring ourselves to admit
that we have acted partisanly and badly, and so failed, and this is what we
are now witnessing.

The Christian doctrine of God gives us the break-through concept of the

person that gives us these concepts of freedom and responsibility. Though
it declines to acknowledge this, the liberal tradition lives from its memory
of the Christian tradition. It takes different elements of the unitary
Christian teaching about man but sets these elements out without
relationship to the doctrine of God which alone can hold them together.
The result is one part of the Christian concept of man is set against
another. The independent and autonomy of man is set against the
covenant of each man with others of his community and mankind as a
whole. So we oscillate between seeing ourselves as deracinated
individuals and collectivism that strips us of our individual dignity.

In Christianity, God hold himself responsible to us and gives an account of

himself: this is what the Church’s Scriptures are. But where no such
covenant and personal relationship between God and man is understood,
God can only be understood as fate, and so as a threat to our freedom. So
for secular liberalism God could only be a large will, and so it mistakenly
understand Christianity as though it were some form of submission to such
a will. Such raw will is not interested in being answerable to our questions
or protests.

When the British decline to hear the Christian account of God and of man
his creature they take on a ferociously fatalistic conception of God, in
which power dominates and weakness is punished. It is the metaphysics of
paganism and tribalism. When power is the fundamental category, and
God has all power, why should God be interested in whether we live or
die? And if he is not interested in us, he is also an irrelevance, for it makes
no difference to us whether he exists or not. Or if he has submitted us to
contradictions that cannot be resolved in an arbitrary cruel and
meaningless universe, such a God is a monster. Either way, such a
conception of God knows no redemption and no hope. Atheism is an
appropriate rebuttal expression of this sort of power claim, but atheism is
also a result of this deist or pagan conception of God, for in acknowledging
no other authority, it allows no challenge to the ‘gods’ of power that we
experience in the market and state. The Christian doctrine of God does not
offer us naked, unmediated will or power: the God of Jesus Christ is
entirely unthreatened by loss of power. We may know the God of Jesus
Christ only in this newborn child at Christmas, and in the single isolated
figure of Christ on the cross at Easter in whom all human self-assertion
and power is exposed and shamed. The Church insists that God is only
accessible in this dark way as someone who has given himself into our
hands, utterly without fear of what we may do with him. As the result the
Church gives itself into hands of the world unafraid of whatever grief lies
ahead. We are on our way to Good Friday.

Without the practices of the Church, of confession and forgiveness,

liberalism does not remain liberal. Without such a discipleship liberalism
turns Christian humility into another game of power. This has created the
inversion by which we all now claim to be victims, with the resulting
culture of resentment. But the practices of Christian discipleship teach us
that we may work so that we may be generous and have something to
give to one another. Such labour is its own reward, for we may take pride
before God in those whom we have loved and served. For the Christian,
work is valuable regardless of whether it receives explicit financial reward.
It is labour that gives the economy and currency their value, not the other
way around. The value of money can only be established by what is not
money: labour is a fundamental economic concept only as long as it is
defined by a Christian account of the work, and the pain, of self-giving.

Church as guardian of secularity

It is the Church that provides the true secularity. It insists that we are free
to meet and encounter one another, without the mediation of business or
government. It says that we may do so, and thus we may live together,
and thus we may live well. The Church insists that the individual may
undertake whatever he wishes in the open field of individual and
corporate enterprise and responsibility in which we demonstrate
leadership and generosity. We have seen that over many decades
commerce has outbid the mutual service of husbands and wives, and so
monetised the provision that belonged to family life. Then whenever
husbands or wives can no longer pay the market price for such services,
the state steps in to provide for the need that the market has created. We
have outsourced so many of the functions of the family, but the economy
that tries to take over these functions takes on an impossible burden. No
economy can sustain itself by paying some people to dig holes and others
to fill them in again, for the worth of our total economic output must also
depend on what we can sell to other economies. Since these holes are
being dug in the social capital gathered over centuries, no amount of
welfare spending in one generation can repair or compensate for this
moral-ecological disaster. Social capital is money in the bank, but as soon
as it is cashed into explicit money to compensate for love not given or
received, it is gone. Our needs are non-finite, insatiable, until they are
satisfied by love: love is personal and regards each of us as irreplaceable.
When everything is denominated in terms of money, we cannot know
whether to enter services on the debit or credit side, with the result that
money itself suffers a crisis.

We have looked at some of the challenges that our society faces. We have
been able to do so only because the Church is able to find the resources
from its long memory by which it can ask these questions. But Scripture
does not leave us alone with such an appalling vista. The community that
lives from the promise celebrates publicly in its every act of worship, the
reconciliation and restoration of all things, and the confidence of this joyful
community spreads to the wider society amongst which it lives. But the
society that turns away from this promise and the community that
celebrates it condemns itself to increasing short-termism, and will be
unable to comprehend what is happening to it. It will hate the only
community that is able to predict what is on its way, the Church. We
already find it difficult to discuss some of the issues that these talks have
raised. If people told you that you are wrong, or even that you are being
offensive, that would just be part of the debate that makes for a healthy
public square. But concern not to be shushed up means that we shush
ourselves up. Self-censorship and self-inflicted totalitarianism creeps up on
us. Its own unhappiness and urge to self-destruction drives this society to
refuse to hear the questions of the Church so that it is not confronted by
the issue of its own long-term survival.

6. Repentance
Individuals are responsible. We are a mature and independent individuals
if we can take responsibility for what we have done, name it in public, and
not merely apologise for it but bear the cost of it. We are individuals if we
can repent. If we cannot go back and take responsibility, even for the
things that we have not been directly responsible for, we blemish the
image of God in ourselves. You can go back to your wife and family and
apologise. You can go back to your clients and tell them that you are
responsible for their loss, and to the extent that that is possible that you
will repay them. We can mark our balance sheets down, take our losses
without demanding that they be nationalised, we can go bankrupt. We can
admit our failure and our weakness, because the covenants of which we
are members make us strong enough to do so. After fifteen centuries in
which the British have been soaked in Christian culture, we have the
intellectual and ethical resources to repent. We understand what asking
for forgiveness means. Because the Church receives its life and strength
from Christ, it is strong enough to lead the repentance, and the nation and
its leaders are free to follow, to endure the ignominy, If we do this, we will
survive.

The society that loses Christian habits can reclaim them. But the society
that does not wish to reclaim them will not continue as it was. It will
become a society that increasingly experiences the retribution and
stagnation of the pagan economy, in which no one may get ahead without
arousing envy and creating enemies who will vow to pull him back and be
revenged on him. It will have public square and economy in which one
man can win only because another loses, and one man can win only for a
while until the forces of envy and rage catch up with him.

Christian discipleship forms us for freedom. The Church speaks into the
spreading chill and silence, and it speaks even in the face of the outrage
that the Church is still here. It tells us that we have been giving up our
freedom as we have been giving up responsibility, allowing the market to
provide household service for us and the state to carry risks and
responsibilities for us, we give up our freedom and enter a period of
listlessness and fecklessness. Our society is not even searching for
reasons for its problems, and is no longer able to raise its eyes to the issue
of the future. The Church will continue to say this, for the sake of the
country, even when all other individuals and institutions have ceased to
say so. As the Apostle Paul says, such things will sound like foolishness to
some. Only the Church that is absolutely sure of the covenant of God with
man, secure in the love of God and of the promise of this resurrection can
look into abyss, see the extent of this disaster and name it. Only the
Church dare say that things are indeed bad, that other people did not
impose this crisis on us, but we inflicted it on ourselves. It is our sin. The
Church can say what a generation of political leaders, a whole political
class is unable to say, that we are responsible and that we may repent.

7. The Son takes the way of the cross

The reading from the Gospel of John tells us this: The hour has come for
the Son of Man to be glorified. Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat
falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it
bears much fruit. Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate
their life in this world will keep it for eternal life. Whoever serves me must
follow me, and where I am, there will my servant be also

The job of the Church is simply to be holy, and so to be a distinct

community with a distinct form of life and discipleship. The Church is here
to stand out from the rest of society, and to take the ignominy and the
suffering that this brings. In Christian discipleship we are undergoing an
apprenticeship which we cannot put off.

This apprenticeship in holiness is good for our entire society. We are in the
world full of other people, and our lives consist in the meeting and
deepening relationships with them. As long as we remain in flight from
other people, this apprenticeship will be agony without end or purpose.
Coming into relationship with others is what all our communal, national
and economic life is about. In business we hope to create relationships
that we can sustain, and which will sustain us. This requires a process of
growth on our part, and this requires a form of apprenticeship too.

One reason for our present crisis is that that the Church has not clearly
told this country that man is loved by God and that this country is also
founded in that love and covenant. Whether this country is on its way to
Easter and to its resurrection, or simply on its way to an extended and
never-ending crucifixion and misery will be decided by whether the
country is ready to tolerate the Church and even to be informed by it, or
determined to impose silence on it. We have lived on the social capital
accumulated under the many centuries in which we received the shaping
of Christian discipleship, the discipline that turned us into more or less
self-respecting, self-controlled, generous and initiative-taking people. We
have spent that capital and not renewed it. The Church has not passed on
to the comfort of God, and so the Church has been unfaithful to the nation,
and the nation is suffering as a result. The Church carries the cross. It is
Britain’s cross, and the Church carries it on Britain’s behalf. The Church
must repent, and in Lent it does repent. In coming years the Church will
suffer. The Church will go through its Passover here in London, and take
whatever is thrown at it. It must do so for the sake of the world and so for
this country which, because it is discovering that many of its hopes have
been delusory, is going to undergo great anguish. The Church, which is the
Body of Christ, will suffer the rage of this panicked and angry nation. The
Church knows how to suffer and how to live under alien government, for it
lives under a hostile culture and government in many parts of the world. It
is ready to do so in this country too.

Lent is the preparation and unburdening that accompanies the teaching of

the Church’s candidates for baptism. For the Church knows how to hear
judgment, and it knows the joy of repentance, honest speech and
unburdening. The Church can repent and beg for forgiveness. The Church
can repent of having failed to be the intercessor and prophetic and priestly
intermediary for the country. The Church that hears the promises of God
and sees the nation in agony cannot not speak to it, and offer it the
correction, and comfort and hope. The Church comes with judgment. The
Church has the confidence to be able to repent and accurately to name
our sins, to look down into the widening pit of our trespasses and debts,
and to cry to our creditors and to God for our forgiveness and release. So
the Church represents a question to the nation. The Church that has
confidence in the covenant of God with man can ask the nation to hear
this promise and this judgment, to receive them and with them new
confidence and new life.

This brings us back to the first gospel reading. Jesus answered them, "The
hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified. And what should I say -
'Father, save me from this hour'? No, it is for this reason that I have come
to this hour. Father, glorify your name." Then a voice came from heaven, "I
have glorified it, and I will glorify it again." Amen, Lord, Glorify it again.

Summary

1. The Church is a holy community that distinguishes itself from society.

This is its distinctive contribution to national life.

2. The community that is made strong by the resurrection can suffer

weakness, remain open and vulnerable. It can repent, and lead the
repentance of the nation.

3. As the state takes on excessive responsibility, it loses its mandate and

legitimacy as the realm of the public service of citizens.

4. The state wants to demonstrate its legitimacy in order to justify the

ranks of mediators it supports. Increasingly unable to acknowledge any
power outside itself, it will be determined not to acknowledge the Church.

5. The state that determines not to receive the Christian contribution to

civil life becomes desperate to demonstrate its legitimacy through its
omni-competence. It will become an alternative Church.

6. The atheism of secular liberalism cannot restrain the unmediated power

of state and market.

7. The society without confidence in eternal life will sacrifice the future for
now. The society of secular liberalism attempts to pull the future forward
and consume an increasing proportion of it. It does so because it only
knows about ‘now’; it knows of no ‘later’.

8. As the state loses its legitimacy, it will attempt to efface the

differentiations and asymmetries of the covenants that make up civil
society. Ideological polarisation will ensue.

9. Such tensions will ensure that the state is not able to motivate the
existing generation to produce a new generation. The state will so over-
determine the present that it will render the possibility of the future more
doubtful.

10. The Church announces the limits of the market and state, and is
prepared to undergo the suffering that results for this witness. The Church
is able to undergo the suffering transferred to it by a society that is in
denial about its own limits.

11. In the long-term those societies in which men and women, in the
covenant and discipleship of the Church, are content to allow ourselves to
be explicitly (financially) dependent on their marriage partner, together
with the families and households that derive from such marriages, will
flourish.

12. The Church worships God on behalf of all men and all societies.
Whatever happens to the Church is for the glory of God and the glory that
God gives to man.