Everyday Glory: The Revelation of God in All of Reality - Paperback

by Gerald R. McDermott (Author)

How do we know and speak about God's relation to this world? Does God reveal himself through his creation? This book recaptures a Christian vision of all reality: that the world is full of divine signs that are openings into God's glory. Bringing together insights from some of the tradition's greatest thinkers--Edwards, Newman, and Barth--Gerald McDermott resurrects a robust theology of creation for Protestants. He shows how and where meaning can be found outside the church and special revelation in various realms of creation, including nature, science, law, history, animals, sex, and sports.

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An invigorating book in which the reader is challenged to reject the disenchantment of modernity in order to see how God actively reveals himself in the created world.
--Bruce Ashford, Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary

"Jonathan Edwards said that the moon symbolizes the waxing and waning history of the church, the prophets and apostles of the early church, and the Virgin Mary who reflects the light of her Sun. 'How quaint, ' we're tempted to say. 'Why spend time with such speculations when the world is falling apart?' McDermott believes that this reaction shows how impoverished the Christian imagination has become. In his richly suggestive new book, McDermott calls our attention afresh to the types of the kingdom that teem around us, in nature, science, history, sex, and sports. Read this book, and learn to see the world through new eyes."
--Peter Leithart, president, Theopolis Institute

"The 'natural' world McDermott describes is the world I want to inhabit--and sometimes do. Profound faith is required of those who want to live there constantly, far more faith than most moderns are able to muster every day. But for those with eyes to see and ears to hear its wondrous beauty, it is gleaming with an eternal weight of glory that exceeds our paltry efforts to reproduce, abstract, or counteract it. It enchants the bodily senses--and awakens the spiritual senses--with its still too elusive satisfactions."
--Douglas A. Sweeney, Jonathan Edwards Center, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School

"One of the most important living scholars of Jonathan Edwards, McDermott takes his beauty-saturated theology of creation and demonstrates that the Edwardsean vision has a remarkable and polyphonous harmony with a dazzling, unexpected array of pre- and post-Reformation voices. With the dexterity of a poet, McDermott argues that the Triune God has written himself into the wonder of creation."
--Matthew S. C. Olver, Nashotah House Theological Seminary

"McDermott reminds believers that there is a depth of meaning to Scripture and creation beyond what we can see in the text and the visible world. By unlocking this meaning through the spiritual interpretation of types, believers begin to discover how every tree and leaf proclaim the greatness of God and God's purposes. We desperately need to recover this unified vision of 'everyday glory' as a balm against the secular materialism of our modern age and its stepchild of biblical literalism."
--Dale Coulter, Regent University

Author Biography

Gerald R. McDermott (PhD, University of Iowa), now retired, was Anglican Chair of Divinity at Beeson Divinity School. He is an Anglican priest who serves at an Anglican church in Crozet, Virginia. He has authored or edited numerous books, including Israel Matters, World Religions, and The Theology of Jonathan Edwards, and has written for Christianity Today, the Christian Century, and First Things.