When God creates Adam, he speaks “Let us make man in our image” (Gen. 1:26). Adam wakes as a speaking creature. He is in dialogue with God. To be human, on some basic level, means to be in dialogue with God. Adam and God speak with one another.
Adam is also supposed to speak like God in the act of creation. God brings animals to him, and Adam names them. In naming them Adam realizes something: he wants a dialogue partner to be with him in dialogue with God. God creates Eve.
Adam rejoices over the new dialogue partner and finds himself not only naming the world around him but also being named himself. Before Woman he “Adam” which means ‘earth’ —he is the mudman. After Woman he is no longer Adam but “‘Ish” which means he-Flame and is related to the name which Eve bears: “‘Ishah” she-Flame (Gen. 2:23). Ignus and Igna. Fireor and Firerix. (Note: I am indebted beyond my ability to account to James B. Jordan’s and Peter Leithart’s lessons on Genesis 1-2 for much of this material).
Each of the two new humans find the veracity of their being in the name of the other. They too are in dialogue.
Dialogue, biblically speaking, is glory. To be brought into speech with God and to share in communion with one another, this is glory.
But the relationship between speech and glory can become perverse when speech-as-glory is dislocated from the God who speaks —from the God who is himself the Word. One sees this in the Homeric epics in which kleos —the Homeric word for ‘glory’— becomes unhitched from dialogue with God and located on being immortalized in epic song. One no longer wants to speak with God —we have given-up on that hope— we have even given-up the hope on speaking well with anyone at all. Kleos is the glory of being spoken well about, in the perpetual cycles of heroic poetry.
It is for glory (kleos) that Achilles is willing to give-up his life, knowing he will surely die (for the gods have sided against him). He chooses to perish in order that by his perishing he may attain a kleos that is unperishable —he will be sung about forever (Iliad, IX; cf. Nagy, 2013, 31-33).
It is not surprising that the New Testament, written in Greek, chose to use another word for “glory” instead of “kleos”. They could have used that word, but they didn’t. Instead they use “doxa” —another word for glory, the root of which gives us words like “doxology”. Doxology recovers the biblical concept of glory from death-bound kleos by placing us back in relationship with the God who speaks. Glory is not merely being the inert subject of an epic poem, but being a living person in blessed conversation with the living God.
There is more to glory than being sung about loftily by minstrels. There is being sung with in the myriad of angels and archangels in glad raiment, among all the company of the Body of the Church (Heb. 12:22-23). There is being spoken to by the Father “well done good and faithful servant” (Matt. 25:25). There is being spoken through by the Spirit in “groanings too deep for words” (Rom. 8:26). And there is the glad speaking of the Son who calls us by name and who has made known to us the Father’s doxa (Jn. 1:14).
Glory means more than being spoken well of. It means speaking with one another and with the Living God.