ABSTRACT

“For God … made his light to shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ.” (2 Corinthians 4:6) It is a text that could plausibly stand as a summary of everything Michael Ramsey 1 believed mattered most in Christian life and theology. 2 The best work to be written on his theology to date has the simple title Glory: The Spiritual Theology of Michael Ramsey, and anyone at all familiar with his writing will know the omnipresence of this theme. But Ramsey’s theology was not just a celebration of the divine radiance or beauty; or rather it was a celebration of divine beauty which assumed that ‘the knowledge of glory’ was more than merely a metaphor for the enjoyment of that beauty. Ramsey spelled out in several places the sense in which the Pauline phrase was a quite specific prescription for doing theology. And in this, as in many other ways, he stood close to perhaps the greatest theological mind in twentieth-century Roman Catholicism, the Swiss Hans Urs von Balthasar, whose first major multi-volume work on theological method was entitled Herrlichkeit, ‘Glory’. Indeed, as we shall see, the connection was more than a matter of parallels: Balthasar uses Ramsey’s work in some key sections of his discussion of the New Testament, and helps us see where the Archbishop’s fundamental theological insights might lead if developed more systematically.