"Temple Themes in Christian Worship is a complex work, drawing on a wide range of sources composed in different languages, and originating in different times and places. The argument is detailed and intricate, and a brief account of the book is simply impossible without failing to do it justice. There are three particularly important areas, however, which the book highlights, and these should be very carefully noted.
1. The Temple and its Service provided from the very beginning the "raw materials" for Christian understanding of the major sacraments and the Church’s liturgy. The author notes how standard treatments of Christian Liturgy often fail to engage with this. This failure is astonishing, especially given the explicit assertions of the non-Jewish NT writer St. Luke, who begins his Gospel in the Temple, gives details of its Service and the personnel involved, goes out of his way to emphasize the integration of Jewish Temple practice and thinking with the beginnings of the Gospel, and ends the Gospel with Jesus ascending to Heaven while conferring the Priestly Blessing on his followers. What is truly remarkable about this, and not often taken as seriously as it should be, is that when the Gospel was written (say 80 CE?) and addressed to a Gentile of high social status, the Jews were by no means a favoured nation in the Roman Empire. On the contrary, they were loathed for their tenacious opposition to Roman authority in a war which had lasted effectively for seven years, and had centred on the very institution which Luke so assiduously puts before his readers. Why, then, did St. Luke so determinedly talk about Temple and Jews? A large part of the answer to that question can only be that he perceived that no-one could properly begin to comprehend Christianity without knowing that these things constituted its foundations. Margaret’s book makes much the same point.
2. The author’s sense that Christianity from its very inception involved "mystery" is likewise of critical importance, bringing into focus a key element which is often underestimated, or altogether overlooked. Thus she cites (page 162) the words of the Apostle in 2 Cor. 3:18, that the Christians "with unveiled face" are transformed from glory into glory, and invokes a wealth of evidence from Qumran and the Enoch traditions which put this into perspective. We may in passing note that those with "unveiled face" are like, yet unlike, the celestial Seraphim of Isaiah’s vision, who with two of their wings "cover the face" in the presence of the Almighty. Thus the Christian believers to whom Paul writes are credited with open faces, with sight of heavenly realities, and consequently a more or less direct knowledge of the heavenly "mysteries". This link which Paul makes, in the very earliest days of the Christian Church, between the worshippers and the Seraphim, a link in which the Seraphim seem less privileged than the worshippers, is astonishing only if we forget that in the NT’s own words: the Gospel is a heavenly reality which "the angels desire to look into" (1 Peter 1:12). For a dramatic presentation of such ideas we need look no further than the Anaphora of Ss. Addai and Mari, which many argue is the oldest extant Eucharistic Prayer, in which Christ’s ministry is described as a mystery to be celebrated by believers in company with the celestial hosts.
3. The references to the order of creation, and its symbolic expression in the Temple and its service, should resonate with modern readers concerned about the environment. Christian worship in the West is perhaps nowadays more aware than it sometimes was in the past about those aspects of the Eucharist which have to do with Creation and its continuing stability; and this book is a welcome re-assertion of the Church’s direct debt to Judaism, through the theology of the Temple Service, in reminding us of the proper human response to the Creator’s blessings and goodness. These must never be abused: the Service of the Temple, however many complex ideas it included, was always understood as a public recognition of the Almighty’s Kingship over the whole of the created order, and of human responsibility to act in accordance with His will within that same order, as He commanded.
These are but three of the most important aspects of Margaret’s book which, in my opinion, should be stressed. In the course of such an elaborate and richly textured argument, it is also inevitable that one might find items for disagreement, and here I might briefly signal two matters. First, I am more persuaded than Margaret of the value of the Second Temple and its Service for a study of Christian worship: granted what she says about Rabbinic texts which show that some Jews held it to be in some ways "incomplete", it is also true that writers like Ben Sira held it in the very highest regard – and his book, with its praise for the Second Temple, was used by the Christians as Ecclesiasticus. Second, the very existence of a site like Dura-Europos (see page 28), where Synagogue and Church stand side by side, perhaps suggests a lesser degree of antagonism between Christianity and Rabbinic Judaism than is sometimes presupposed. My suspicion is that Margaret has opened up for us a world of exceedingly complex relationships, which will become more complex the more we study them."
Robert Hayward is Professor of Hebrew and Hebrew Scriptures at the University of Durham, UK.
Recent Comments