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By Root 2377 0

more permanent spiritual effects than the vision Moses received. The church has witnessed a theophany as important as the one vouchsafed to Moses but the Christian theophany is greater still, as Paul himself experienced and testified. The Corinthians were said to be a message from Christ (2 Cor 3:2), who was equated with “the Glory of God.” The new community of gentiles was not given a letter written on stone (Jer 31:33) but God’s message was delivered by Paul as Moses delivered the Torah to Israel. The new dispensation was more splendid than the last, not needing the veil with which Moses hid his face. Paul’s own experience proved to him and for Christianity that all will be transformed.

Paul’s term, “the Glory of the Lord” must be taken both as a reference to Christ and as a technical term for the Kavod, the human form of God appearing in Biblical visions. In 2 Corinthians 3:18, Paul said that Christians behold the Glory of the Lord as in a mirror and are transformed into his image.40 For Paul, as for the earliest Jewish mystics, to be privileged enough to see the kavod or Glory (doxa) of God was a prologue to transformation into His image (eikon). Paul did not say that all Christians made the journey but compared the experience of knowing Christ to being allowed into the intimate presence of the Lord, to be given entrance to God’s court. And he himself had made that journey.

The result of the journey (over several years of proselytizing) was to identify Christ as “the Glory of the Lord.” When Paul said that he preached that Jesus was Lord and that God “has let this light shine out of darkness into our hearts to give the light of knowledge of the Glory of God in the face of Christ” (2 Cor 4:6), he seems clearly to have been describing his own conversion and ministry, just as he described it in Galatians 1, and just as he was explaining the experience to new converts for the purpose of furthering and strengthening their conversion.41 His apostolate, which he expressed as a prophetic calling, was to proclaim that the face of Christ is the “Glory of God.” It is very difficult not to read this passage in terms of Paul’s description of the ascension of the man to the third heaven and conclude that Paul’s conversion experience also involved his identification of Jesus as the “Image” and “Glory of God,” as the human figure in heaven, and thereafter as Lord, Spirit, Christ, Son, and Savior.

The identification of Christ with the Glory of the Lord brings a transformation and sharing of the believer with the image as well. This is the same as regaining the image of God which Adam lost. This transformation is accomplished through death and rebirth in Christ, which can be experienced in direct visions as Paul apparently did, or by anyone through baptism. But the important thing is to note how completely the theophanic language from Greek and Jewish mystical piety has been appropriated for discussing what we today call conversion. It was Paul’s primary language for describing the experience of conversion, because it gives a sense of the transformation and divinization (or angelification) that he felt was inherent in his encounter with the risen Christ. This transformation and angelification is authenticated in communal life, in social transactions (for instance, 1 Cor 12-14, also 1 Cor 5:1-5).

Concomitant with Paul’s worship of the divine Christ is transformation. Paul said in Philippians 3:10: “that I may know him and the power of his resurrection and may share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death” (symmorphizomenos toi thanatoi autou). Later, in Philippians 3:20-21, he said: “But our commonwealth is in heaven, and from it we await a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, who will change (metaschematisei) our lowly body to be conformed in shape (symmorphon) to his glorious body (toi sēmati tés doxes autou) by the power that enables him even to subject all things to himself.”

English does not allow us to build such a vivid image into one word. If we had an English word for it, it would be symmorphosis, like “metamorphosis” but