Tuesday, February 22, 2005
Torah, Temple, and Early Christianity
It's good to be back into the swing of things. Our training with The Missionary Church, and our refined direction is exciting, and has been time consuming. More on that later though. For now, I have too many other things that I've been itching to share, starting with this quote from NT Wright:
For most first-century Jews, the Law wasn't just a set of instructions. It was the personal self-revelation of the all-holy and all-wise God. When you studied the Law you were in the very presence of God. The Law was a heavenly reality made known on earth; it was one of the places where, and the means by which, heaven and earth were bound together. In the same way, the Temple wasn't just a big building where you went to say your prayers and sing hymns. When you went to the Temple you were in the very presence of God. The Temple was the geographical location where heaven and earth met and overlapped. We will never understand early Christianity, let alone grapple with its meaning for today, until we learn how to think of heaven and earth not as separated by a great gulf but as interlocking, overlapping spheres of reality. For the Jew this cosmology was focussed on Torah and Temple, the two places where heaven and earth, God's sphere and our sphere, came together. For the early Christian, Torah and Temple had come together in Jesus himself, as the gospels tell us in a hundred different ways; and now, by the Spirit, they came together, under the sovereignty of the ascended Jesus, in the persons and community of the surprised early Christians themselves.1
Though I sometimes take issue with his wording concerning the Torah, and the perhaps misunderstood allusion that it has been replaced, I love the studies of Bishop/Historian NT Wright.
1Wright, N. T. New Law, New Temple, New World (Acts 2.1-21; John 15.26-16.15): a sermon at the Eucharist on the Feast of Pentecost. [http://westminster-abbey.org/voice/sermon/archives/030610_eucharist.htm] June 2003.
