Doxa #40

In ordinary Greek doxa meant an opinion or, from there, a reputation, and so the honor a person is held in. The Septuagint chose it to translate the Hebrew kabod, whose literal sense is weight, and the New Testament inherits that biblical meaning: the visible radiance of God’s presence and the honor that is due to him.

Biblical Usage

In the Gospels, doxa marks moments when God’s presence becomes visible. At Jesus’s birth the glory of the Lord shines around the shepherds (Luke 2:9). John writes that the Word became flesh and dwelt among people, and “we beheld his glory” (John 1:14), so that Jesus’s life is itself presented as a showing of God’s glory. The Transfiguration is another such moment.

Paul uses the word in both directions. Doxa is what human beings fall short of: “all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23). It is also what believers are promised: they are “changed into the same image from glory to glory” as they behold the glory of the Lord (2 Corinthians 3:18). The verb form and the doxology, in which glory is ascribed to God in praise, run through Paul’s letters and the book of Revelation. Ascribing glory to God, in worship, is the human response to the visible glory.

Theological Significance

Because doxa can mean both the radiance of a person and the honor given to him, interpreters must sometimes decide whether a passage speaks of something God has or something people give him. Romans 3:23 is read in more than one way, as falling short of God’s own glory, of the honor due to him, or of the glory humanity was made to share. Christian traditions have treated glory as the goal of salvation, and the eastern tradition in particular speaks of humans being drawn into it. The word also lies behind “doxology,” a formal ascription of glory to God, and behind “orthodoxy,” which originally meant right opinion and is often explained by Christians as right praise.