It seems to me that glory doesn’t work well as a noun, it works better as an adjective. If I say God is glorious, or God’s love is glorious then I am talking about something, and glory helps to describe that something, or better someone.

RonH said “If you believe that your most important function is to give God *all* the glory, then you must constantly be on watch to make sure you don’t give *any* glory to anyone/thing else. This can get really complicated, especially depending on your definition of glory.”

Which raises a question I ask my Calvinist friends but they never answer. Doesn’t the utter depravity of man give too much glory to Satan, that he was able to wreak such havoc on God’s creation?

iMonk you said that “I would suggest that the tool is a definition of “glorifying God” that is violent, narrow and ultimate oppressively negative toward much of human existence.”
I’d suggest that one reason for the destructiveness of this tool is that its an attempt to constrain a wild and passionate God in a religious construct, to make the adjective glorious into the whole of God, to reduce Him to “Glory”, and He doesn’t do that.

I’ve read the claim that God is not only entitled to be ‘selfish’ but that its a good thing that He is concerned with His own glory.
I think that is blasphemy, an slur on the character of God. When God talks about Himself in Scripture He says that He is Love, not that He is Glory.

But its at precisely at this point that its important to be able to say you think that its dangerous to be “too God-centered” because of the massive weight of ‘everything for the glory of God’ exhortation on the landscape of least some of evangelical lives.

I’d also like to say its about something else, because in my view its about God’s character, who God is. RonH is right when he says “I don’t think even God is God-centered enough for some folks. After all, near as I can tell from the Bible, He spends most of His time and energy on creation and humanity.”

But I am not going to do that. Because its not helpful, because it won’t enable us to turn away from the official portrait of the King, to wander outside and look at the stars, and encounter the strangers, beggars, dancers and philosophers.

I think I know how the story goes, because I think God has slipped out of the throne room himself, bored with the endless court ritual, to come to us, maybe as a beggar, a dancer, a philosopher, maybe in the starlight. But we can’t race to that ending, its too slick then, we won’t take the time for the conversation, won’t spend time just looking at the stars.

So yes its about the character of God, but saying that won’t help, going on the journey will help.

I agree with iMonk’s points and am just wondering if someone tell me if anywhere this issue of clear definition and description has been brought up yet. A pastor in a church I attended in England was asked to define “glory” in terms a young mom could understand. After doing so, she asked him why he hadn’t done the same in his sermon. His response was that he didn’t want to “violate the integrity of the biblical language,” whatever that meant.

I had the same experience too a few years back. A girl that I was interested in said that she did not want a relationship with me because she felt that I was distracting her from pursuing God.

I believe “living at that extreme of emotion all the time” used to be called “manic-depressive”, is now called “bipolar”, and is treated with Lithium among other drugs.

This does beg the question as to whether this “Calvary Road” type of Gospel is specifically creating or enhancing manic-depressives.

As well as encouraging a “Can You Top This” attitude of Spiritual One-Upmanship in both the really, really, really, scummy lows and the really, really, really, happy highs.

I thought about my own grandmother, who also was a passionate follower of Christ and who would never in a million years have had a problem with going to the theater. This made clear to me that something is very wrong within evangelicalism.