Canter Bridge

The apostle Paul has few compunctions about mixing metaphors, particularly when straining for descriptors of God and his redeemed people. In the second chapter of his letter to the Ephesians, he weaves together metaphors of citizenship and temple construction. When read against the background of the Hebrew Bible, this is not an unlikely amalgamation of images. Temple, after all, is shot through with communitarian and nationalistic overtones. Citizenship, in the same context, always means belonging in a community that worships this god or these gods and not some other.

It is less a stretch for Paul than for modern readers, then, to create a portrait of purposeful reconciliation that reads like this:

So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are citizens with the saints and also members of the household of God, built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the cornerstone. In him the whole structure is joined together and grows into a holy temple in the Lord; in whom you also are built together spiritually into a dwelling place for God.

His roots sinking deep into Hebraic soil for the nutrients his vision of redeemed humanity requires, Paul is certain that the reconciliation of Jew and Gentile that he envisages taking place as a consequence of Jesus’ achievement on the cross is a purposeful conjoining. For the apostle, the dignity of YHWH is served when this new humanity is forged in the cross’ long shadow. Indeed, this newly created nation becomes God’s very living space. He takes up residence, he signs the deed, he moves into the environ created by a people where former enmities fade as new identity takes shape.

Yet we do not stand before a mere leveling of the spiritual playing field. It is important, if we are to understand Paul, that we not lose our grip on what temple imagery actually connotes. Paul does not envisage, say, the recycling of Marduk-ian cultic ritual in the interests of YHWH’s universalizing project. There is no widespread cleansing and reemployment of Persian ideology or Egyptian religious motifs.

Reunited humanity becomes not just a temple but the temple. The bedrock is unmoveably Jerusalemite, the worship is that found in Zion’s sacred house. As constitutional language would have it, the nations make pilgrimage to Jerusalem rather than to some generic, cosmopolitan destination. Together, then, nations become YHWH’s temple not the cultic shrine of some other God. Salvation is still, insists the very deep structure of Paul’s thinking, of the Jews even if it is for all peoples.

So does the Isaianic vision, to choose just one antecedent, find fulfillment in Paul’s conception, for that ancient text had fairly longed for the day when the ‘the law would go out from Zion and teaching from Jerusalem’. So do all nations retain their capacity to present an offering that is made up of their hayil (riches) and kabod (glory).

So does the paradox of biblical redemption press its way forward. All of us, each given group of us, does not become something we never were in order to become something we long to become. Rather, we bring all that we are and ever have been to a new destination where all things become new, better, what we always knew they must one day become. In that place, as Ezekiel’s book would have it, YHWH lives.