Christ and the Systematics

I wrote the following to a friend tonight, after we had spent a minute talking about the whole glory-centered vs, love-centered thing:

• It seems to me that the glory-centered theology has to take the OT as its defining framework, because many of the key “proof-texts” for the primacy of God’s glory come from his OT dealings with Israel.  In this scenario, Jesus is a logical extension of what we already certainly know from having read the OT.  (Added: I’m not denying the existence of many NT “glory” texts; I’m thinking according to the way systematics build theology proper - see below).
• The problem I have with this is that I don’t think the OT makes a lot of sense until it’s read Christologically. In other words, I don’t think the OT is sufficient to give us the doctrine of God. I think it is full of “shadows,” and it’s a fuzzy picture. That’s the whole point of the incarnation. We don’t truly start to get a real picture of God until He becomes human. As Luther said, “God does not want to be known except through Christ, nor can he be known in any other way.” So our starting point for the doctrine of God has to be Christ. This is where all our systematic theology books get it flat-out wrong, because they always assume that the propositional truth-statements about the Father are the guiding principle on the doctrine of God, and then those “attributes” of God are usually used to later prove that Jesus is, indeed, God, the Second Person of the Trinity, etc. But this is backwards. We don’t need the doctrine of God to figure out whether or not Jesus is God. We need Jesus, the God-man to figure out who God is in the first place.
• Like I said before, I don’t think glory and love are mutually exclusive, and there may be a false dichotomy, but given that Jesus is the very definition of God, I think I’m more comfortable seeing God first and foremost as the self-sacrificial, rather than the self-glorifying God. The self-sacrificial love is the primary goal, in and of itself; the glory happens because that love deserves glory.