Everyday Glory

"Gerald McDermott's Everyday Glory is 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."

"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."

"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."

"McDermott is part of an influential generation of ressourcement figures who are enlivening Protestant evangelicalism. 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: Augustine, Ephrem the Syrian, John of Damascus, Bonaventure, Aquinas, and Calvin along with Edward Pusey and John Henry Newman. With the dexterity of a poet, McDermott argues that the Triune God has written himself into the wonder of creation, a love song to Christ's ecclesial Bride. We should search then not only for the allegorical or typological riches of the Scriptures but also for the typology of creation. The result is a fleshy, incarnational eschatology that calls the Christian to dive with abandon into the mediating mystery of this 'whole sensible world . . . written by the finger of God.'"

"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."