My pastor took an excellent line for his teaching on Pentecost Sunday last week. His main thrust was how the glory of God filled the completed Tabernacle in Exodus, and likewise the completed Solomonic temple, in 1 Kings, but after its judgemental departure (“Ichabod”) before the temple’s destruction by the Babylonians, it is not mentioned as filling the second temple built after the return from captivity. Instead, in fulfilment of the prophecy of Joel, at Pentecost God’s glory (later termed the shekinah) came to dwell within every believer born again in Christ. God is no longer represented in a sacred place, but in his sacred people.
There’s a rich vein of biblical correlation for this view. The widespread conviction in Israel that the return from Babylon had not ended their spiritual exile, which was only to be remedied by the coming of Messiah and the New Covenant promised by Jeremiah (though foreshadowed even in Deuteronomy), is one. The cursing of Herod’s temple by Jesus, culminating in its permanent destruction in 69-70AD, is a second. And the New Testament’s repeated teaching on the Church (that is, the people) as God’s true temple, composed of living stones, is a third. A fourth is the New Testament’s concept of worship, on which I’ve written before, which actually follows from Jesus’s teaching in John 4:21-24.
Now in the column linked above, I express my equivocalness about the cessation of holy places of worship. On the one hand, the Bible’s teaching on this is pretty clear, and is of massive practical importance in many ways. These include the diverse distribution of spiritual gifts, and hence the indispensable value of the meeting of the body, the need to appreciate the living presence of God in the motley crew of believers in order to understand Christ’s command to love one another, and the truth that God is as present “where two or three are gathered” in some prison cell as he was in the Holy of holies in Jerusalem.
This mindset is in complete contrast to the sacerdotalism that developed with Christendom, particularly after Constantine’s adoption of Christianity. As I began to discuss in my column, that legacy has affected our entire Christian inheritance. We have enrobed clergy who, in some traditions, are even called priests. And virtually all our historic churches and cathedrals are designed and furnished after the model of temples.
Think of how (thanks, historically, to Archbishop Laud) a typical C of E parish church has a railed-off most holy place, where only the priest may go to serve at the “altar.” It then has a chancel, for the lesser priests and choir, into which the laity may only venture to kneel at the rail for communion, only a small step conceptually from the temple-building in which only the levitical priests could serve. This chancel is, in turn, railed off from the nave – in the most historical churches and cathedrals by a complete rood-screen. There the common people worship, much like a roofed “court of Israel” before the tabernacle.
In such architecture it is hard not to substitute the idea of “holy place” for “holy people,” even when in Non-conformist circles the holier areas are simply a raised platform or one of those elevated pulpits. Baptists and Methodists may even now be welcomed to “the house of God,” and referring to the meeting area as “the sanctuary” seldom raises a theological eyebrow.
On the other hand, although it is understandable that the Protestant Reformers wanted to dispense with all the trappings of sacerdotalism, many of which were indeed frankly idolatrous (as they understood more than many Evangelicals do now), I don’t think that the New Testament “communalisation” of holiness has anything to do with asceticism. I said a little about this in my former post, wondering if we might benefit from a greater attention to great Christian art and the pursuit of beauty in our meeting places. Today, though, I want to focus on the paradox that so many people, not only those of the faith but those not yet knowing Christ, claim to sense God in churches.
My builder, for example, happening to fall into conversation about getting married in church next year, offered that although not religious, he sometimes goes into an empty church to sit, and at such times awareness of God begins to stir in him. You’ll have similar anecdotes to hand, I’m sure, and many of you (and I myself) have had comparable experiences. So does something of the shekinah of the Lord occupy these ancient would-be temples, even when they are empty of the congregation?
In a few cases, it’s possible to argue that there is a genuine sacredness in a place, as one could say for Mount Sinai (if only we could confidently identify it!), where Israel received their covenant. Such might be the Basilica of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, which for all the dirt and dirty ecclesiastical politics is still the place where God commenced the New Creation by raising Jesus.
Yet I don’t think that mere historical association is the root of the numinous. Many, or most, of us have some sense of imaginative wonder when visiting a National Trust manor house, or an English Heritage Castle, or even Stonehenge. But as far as I can see, not many people resort to their local long-barrow, or Saxon barn, simply to sit and feel close to something beyond the material world. It’s churches that do it.
So is it about the stained-glass, the carvings, the crosses or the wall-paintings, then? There’s no doubt that these were originally placed in churches to instruct people in the faith, and so to encourage worship. Yet what people report is not the profound meaning of the board with the Ten Commandments, but the atmosphere. And as a member of my house-group pointed out, the same sense of the holy may be felt in our own historic Baptist meeting house at Loughwood, built in the 1650s, now in the care of the National Trust and as plain as Jane, as you can see:
At first hand, I know that tourists visiting the place, after reading the information board, often sit and sense God. That put me in mind of my own habit, when we lived in Essex, of going to “commune with God” in the Saxon church St Cedd built at Bradwell-on-Sea in the seventh century, which apart from one cross might, materially speaking, be just another undecorated mediaeval stone hall:
Another member of my study group suggested that the secret is the non-materialist unconscious awareness that many generations have prayed and worshipped in these places – and on the basis of the New Testament theology of God’s temple, have manifested the glory of God in them. That makes sense to me, as I have very little desire to sit contemplatively in our present building, now ten years old, for all its excellence and even simple beauty. There’s nothing wrong with it – it’s just not old enough for the prayer to have soaked into the walls. Our old chapel, destroyed in a fire in 2009, although it was an architectural nightmare, did evoke a sense of the numinous, by all accounts, having been in constant use for 180 years.
Does that explanation sound fanciful? Only to a philosophical materialist, I suspect. Our ancient churches may have witnessed political wrangling, theological heterodoxy, apathy, hypocrisy and scandalous behaviour. But they have also been the places where the glory of God amongst humble saints and, sometimes, prayerful prelates, has left its mark on the place over many centuries. That may not make Ely Cathedral or the Cambridge Round Church “sacred spaces,” like the building on the temple mount in Jerusalem was before God destroyed it. But it does make them, because of God’s holy people embodying his Spirit down the ages, places where one might feel closer to God.
