“Theology is based on liturgical experience,” writes Metropolitan Hilarion Alfeyev in the preface of Volume III. Cain and Abel, Noah, Abraham, Moses, all offered sacrifices to God and served the Father in prayer. The presence of God was once in Eden and everywhere in creation. The first parents were shut out of this paradise. The Hebrew patriarchs did not construct a building for worship in contrast to the advanced cultures around them, most notably the Egyptians, who had built extravagant and elegant temples for worshiping idols of nature and deities of power, fertility, and war. The Old Testament patriarchs did revere holy places where the presence of God visited and appeared to them, and not merely like the sacred groves of Greco-Roman mythologies, but places that became witnesses to a real manifestation of God’s power and presence. Pillars of stone were held to be sacred to the Hebrew tribes in these places and they built altars wherever they dwelt. Some of the psalms of David are called miktams, translated into Septuagint as stelographia, or pillar inscriptions, which testify to these sacred stones.
After the Hebrews were delivered from Egyptian captivity, Exodus 27 begins to lay out the plan for building a transportable tent for worshipping God called the tabernacle. It consisted of twenty posts in the north and the south sides, ten posts in the east and west sides. There was a sanctuary with seven lamps of gold, a table of showbread, an altar for incense, and the holy of holies with the art of the covenant that was separated by a veil of blue, purple, and scarlet linen. There was a tent of meeting that filled with a “cloud of smoke” in the day and at night a fire appeared, both of which were understood to be the glory of the Lord. The people followed the presence of God wherever they traveled. The nomadic Hebrew nation experienced liturgical worship in this sojourning way. Sacrifice and temple worship have been deeply connected to the problems of human nature and social behavior in general. In Psalm 50, David wrote that God does not desire, nor does He really require, the blood of animals, nor our own blood, but a hymn of praise and humility with a “broken spirit.” Some rabbis referred to the Psalter as the Tehillim, “Songs of Praise.”
There were different kinds of sacrifices offered on the altar: burnt offerings of animals, peace offerings, and sin or guilt offerings. 2 Samuel recounts that King David wanted to build God a temple, but the Lord did not wish to have such a place to dwell. David made Jerusalem the political center of the Judean kingdom. King Solomon, David’s son, took unprecedented amounts of labor and resources to build the first temple. Animal sacrifices filled the temple yearly with immense blood and burnt flesh. It became a place of pilgrimage for pious Jews. The prophets often warned that sacrifices and rituals were pointless if the priests and the people did not throw away their idols and cease from mistreating and abusing others. The prophets warned that the Temple would be destroyed completely if they did not repent. The history of the Hebrew people is inseparably from the Temple. The Babylonian empire took it around 586 BC, as Ezekiel prophesied. The Jews returned to the Temple in 538 BC and began the period called the Second Temple in 516 BC with the help of King Cyrus of the Persian Empire. Ezra prophesied its destruction and it fell in 164 BC to Antiochus Epiphanes, the Hellenistic king of the Seleucid Empire. The Pharisees, the scholars and “spokesmen” for the people and the religion, approached the scriptures with hermeneutical liberty and promoted worship separate from the Temple. They viewed the nationalistic Zealots and animal sacrifices performed by priests as less important, and they invented the synagogue as the center for Jewish study and worship. Flavius Josephus, a Pharisee much in favor of Roman culture and rule, is an example of the progression of later Judaism.
But for the most part, the Temple in Jerusalem was still central for Jewish worship and identity. It once contained the Law, the Ark of the Covenant, God’s presence, the sacrifices, the offerings, and the kingdom. It stood against many empires of the world until Rome. The Temple became deeply connected to Jesus Christ’s life, death, and resurrection. He cherished it and He was often there worshipping and teaching about His Father. In the New Testament, Jesus identifies the Temple with His own body, which became the universal, “worldwide temple” of all humanity. Christ Himself became everything and He crucified all these earthly human relations to teach us to walk this path to God the Father again. The desires of mankind, the scapegoating, the violence, the powers hidden in religions and civilizations are unveiled. Christ, the King of Glory, crucified this fallen reality. Because of Christ’s resurrection, the people of God cannot ever be limited or consolidated into one locale, be it Corinth, Jerusalem, or Rome. Wherever Christians are, Christ is there too, just as the Hebrews followed the Lord in the Old Testament with the tent of the glory of the Lord. The building of a temple, then, seems to have been an inborn search to find and worship the Good Father. The religious authorities in the first century, before and after Christ, had lost sight of this sacred sojourning, and they had tragically made the physical type higher than the prototype. The Book of Acts records that the protomartyr Stephen boldly stated to the religious leaders, “the Most High does not dwell in temples made with hands.” Christians and Jews soon, with the Temple having been destroyed finally in 70 A.D. by Titus, dispersed throughout the Roman Empire. The kingdom of God, however, found now in the bodies of Christians and manifested at the Eucharistic communion, entered the empires of the world with these bodily, spiritual, indestructible temples of Christ united in the Eucharist, specifically in Orthodox Christian temples. The Church relies on persuasion. It does not, like many other kingdoms, operate based on fear, an elaborate system of punishments, however necessary those may be, and bloody sacrifices. The veil of that reality has been torn. The Orthodox temple is modeled on this history and theology, and it influenced the way that the Byzantine culture traditionally built churches, especially after Constantine’s rule.