“Why Not Joseph and David?”

A Sermon by Rev. Douglas Olds

Transfiguration Sunday February 11, 2024

Tomales (CA) Presbyterian Church

 

Bulletin Quote:

A form without form, you say: silence, and yet a voice—a powerful effect from a formless figure, and so it must be. . .The more closely defined its features, the feebler would their effect become. Form and definiteness are incompatible with our notions of Spirit. it is the offspring of the wind that preserves the character of its origin.

 --J.G. Herder

The audio of this sermon (a condensation of this prepared transcript) is linked here

 

[n.b.  error in the audio: David is anointed king by the prophet Samuel; it is David's son Solomon who is anointed by the prophet Nathan.]

OT Reading 1 Ki 19:1-13

19 Ahab told Jezebel all that Elijah had done, and how he had killed all the prophets with the sword. 2 Then Jezebel sent a messenger to Elijah, saying, “So may the gods do to me, and more also, if I do not make your life like the life of one of them by this time tomorrow.” 3 Then he was afraid; he got up and fled for his life, and came to Beer-sheba, which belongs to Judah; he left his servant there.

4 But he himself went a day’s journey into the wilderness, and came and sat down under a solitary broom tree. He asked that he might die: “It is enough; now, O LORD, take away my life, for I am no better than my ancestors.” 5 Then he lay down under the broom tree and fell asleep. Suddenly an angel touched him and said to him, “Get up and eat.” 6 He looked, and there at his head was a cake baked on hot stones, and a jar of water. He ate and drank, and lay down again. 7 The angel of the LORD came a second time, touched him, and said, “Get up and eat, otherwise the journey will be too much for you.” 8 He got up, and ate and drank; then he went in the strength of that food forty days and forty nights to Horeb the mount of God. 9 At that place he came to a cave, and spent the night there.

Then the word of the LORD came to him, saying, “What are you doing here, Elijah?” 10 He answered, “I have been very zealous for the LORD, the God of hosts; for the Israelites have forsaken your covenant, thrown down your altars, and killed your prophets with the sword. I alone am left, and they are seeking my life, to take it away.”

11 He said, “Go out and stand on the mountain before the LORD, for the LORD is about to pass by.” Now there was a great wind, so strong that it was splitting mountains and breaking rocks in pieces before the LORD, but the LORD was not in the wind; and after the wind an earthquake, but the LORD was not in the earthquake; 12 and after the earthquake a fire, but the LORD was not in the fire; and after the fire a sound of sheer silence. 13 When Elijah heard it, he wrapped his face in his mantle and went out and stood at the entrance of the cave. Then there came a voice to him that said, “What are you doing here, Elijah?”

 

NT Reading: Mark 9: 2-9

Six days later, Jesus took with him Peter and James and John, and led them up a high mountain apart, by themselves. And he was transfigured before them, 3 and his clothes became dazzling white, such as no one on earth could bleach them. 4 And there appeared to them Elijah with Moses, who were talking with Jesus. 5 Then Peter said to Jesus, “Rabbi, it is good for us to be here; let us make three dwellings, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.” 6 He did not know what to say, for they were terrified. 7 Then a cloud overshadowed them, and from the cloud there came a voice, “This is my Son, the Beloved; listen to him!” 8 Suddenly when they looked around, they saw no one with them any more, but only Jesus.

9 As they were coming down the mountain, he ordered them to tell no one about what they had seen, until after the Son of Man had risen from the dead.

 

“Why Not Joseph and David?”

[Importance in Mark's Gospel]

a.       Mark’s is the first gospel, and scholars believe that Peter was Mark’s main source of these stories. This fits especially well with his perspective and role in this story. Simon who Jesus calls Peter, the Rock, and Paul calls Cephus in Aramaic

b.      Is no doubt hugging the stones as he falls down in amazement at this dazzling revelation.

Peter's role and his proposal to memorialize the transfigured/transfigurers in tents

a.                The English translation of “dwellings” is unfortunate.

Better would have been “booths,” as in the Festival celebrated then and is condensed in Holy Week that we will celebrate at the end of Lent that Starts this Ash Wednesday.

But the word skene here is what John introduces the incarnation of the logos, and sets up a tent of meeting in the heavenly temple in 

 John’s theology frames Jesus "the word of God as tented among us.” (GJ 1:14) And he is in the heavenly place now, a new kind of temple, in a tent of meeting. Revelation 15:5.

So the Markan theme of Peter’s messianic recognition is that the transfigured personalities are tented in an indwelling relationship with God that emerges, dazzling in the flesh.

In addition to Peter, other disciples are present,  an inner circle that includes John, important to understand John's key to the theology of the messianic appearance to Israel and the world. These thereby make even more profound the one who speaks. In this, Peter is central. Readers are meant to identify with his report. We may take it as symbolic, metaphoric, or historical in a journalistic sense.

The other historical personages do not speak. Instead they communicate toward the messiah's “dazzling” appearance. They are historical figures, but they manifest an eternal and eternalizing contribution. We are meant to ponder who they are, what their role is in the historical people chosen by God to reveal what relationship with God entails. Peter understands it is to “tent” with the presence of God in this life. Not awaiting some rebuilt temple, or some realization “in heaven, the sweet bye and bye” someday. God says over and over to the patriarchs and to Moses, “I am the God of Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob,” and Jesus tells his followers that this was a living relationship that continues. The transfiguration makes clear that God is the God of Moses and Elijah, and as such remains after they fade from view, a special relationship with Jesus that incorporates the Mission of Moses and Elijah but extends them into something much more. Far more ranging in scale and scope. A cosmic shining forth of eternity in Jesus’ transfiguring work.

The figures who to me are tellingly absent include Joseph, a hero to the tribal confederations of Israel that predated the monarchy, and the founding of God’s promised monarchical house, David. They are missing on that tent-revealing mountain. Their absence tells of a tension of the solitary institutional reformers transfiguring here and the institutionalizers of systematized faith: Joseph as an ascendant functionary in the Pharaonic world system and its pyramids of power, and David who receives God’s promise of an eternal house and who then, on his own initiative, vows to mirror that promise by building a house, in the only way he knows from his context—a stone ziggurat--for God to dwell.

So to make theological sense of these three historical figures, let us summarize the germane themes of their mission up to what Peter takes forth into the church age in this story.

Moses, the liberator of the enslaved Israelites from pharaoh, was born to rule this  Pyramid of Power world system hegemony signaled by grandiose temples that enslaves. Instead he is called by God to lead the people out. He goes up to meet God on Mount Sinai, and as his meeting is prolonged, the people down below decide to construct the only god they had known, the idol of new birth by gold, a calf, a financial system in which to revel.

To repair this breach in relationship with God, Moses is instructed to meet with God in a tent, an ohel moed, where a covenant altar was placed. Services were specified for this altar, and then the tent of meeting became more formally designed by explicit instructions from God to make it into a traveling tabernacle, a mishkan, to accompany the people toward the promised land. The tabernacle is to be a place where the people are served and tested by their performances of service and obedience to this indwelling God.

So we see a process personified in Moses, from an unmediated relationship with God to a tented-off meeting, to a furnishing an itinerant set of ordained services in the desert. This process is not a progress of architecture, for which I make the case is actually regress, but in the progress of spiritual repair.  

These deinstitutionalizing reformers are thus agents of historical progress. They are the focus, not the structures. Do not be misled: Eccl. 7:10!

What later prophets call turning the heart from its focus on Egypt in all its idolatries to a focus—really a concern with the living flesh of others.

After 40 years in the desert, the people cross the Jordan, and after several hundred more years of new generational testing, God gives into their demand for a king. Saul fails, and David is ordained by the prophet Samuel and his son Solomon by Nathan so that the kings that follow in Israel have to meet with validation by the prophets. The way this plays out in the imperial period is known by scholars as the Deuteronomist history of the Bible.

 So now we may understand how Elijah fits with the transfigured transfigurer, a prophetic reformer. Moses has reformed the people’s living conditions and idea of leadership by liberation and begins the reform of their understanding of the living will of God. By the time of the kings of Israel, 300 years later, David received God’s promise of an eternal "house,” a beit, an eternal lineage of rule. David intends to mirror this promise by building God a house, which becomes his son Solomon’s project of a temple. While service elements are taken from the tent and tabernacle stages of the people’s history with God, the temple is something else, and it’s not simply a progress of  grandeur or exaltation of relationship with the divine, it is in an unexpected way, part of the process of reform & repair, an instruction in how to dwell with God mediated by a king. 

 Solomon’s temple is modeled on what a new monarchy knows of such temples from pagan neighbors. It is modeled on the stone ziggurat: as a path to heaven.  Perhaps not its Davidic idea, but becomes the basis of the tragedies of transactional theologies of God. Its service, performance, and reform fills multiple strands of the OT's commentary on the imperialistic aspirations and impulses of the collective ethnos (a linguistic group and archive, not a kinship structure as the Day of Pentecost reveals in the Book of Acts).

As later kings sin and point to the continuance of the temple, they and the people ruled take confidence that God’s  “house” with them stands. Continuation of form theology is behind institutionalization.

Until the temple doesn’t stand. Twice.

Into this architectural/imperial narrative strand, Elijah comes to present his reform of the prophetic role that Samuel and Nathan had begun by validating the Davidids as king. Elijah now comes to prophetically denounce injustice in the king and by his temple administration and call them to repentance. In the northern kingdom, Solomon’s temple had a breakaway counterpart at Shechem that became associated with the Omrid dynasty. At the time, Ahab and his consort Jezebel were ruling hegemonically and unjustly, zeroing out the prospects of many of the collective people. Elijah prophesized their doom, and Ahab and Jezebel in turn called forth his doom by sending daggers his way. Their mirror to prophecy is the dagger and the spear, mirrors destined ever to be shattered.

In the stormy chase and challenges that follow in the Book of Kings, Elijah is reduced to terrified “petrifaction.” His mission to reform the monarchy freezes him in fear.  Fear “stones” him, if you will. He sits down and prays to God for death.  God passes by to rouse him. Our first reading this morning notes how Elijah revives with a favored though oblique “appearance.” And a summons expressed in the most gentling and reformative way, that is to become the manner of all prophets hence:

“The word of God said, “Go out and stand on the mountain before the LORD, for the LORD is about to pass by.” Now there was a great wind, so strong that it was splitting mountains and breaking rocks in pieces before the LORD, but the LORD was not in the wind; and after the wind an earthquake, but the LORD was not in the earthquake; 12 and after the earthquake a fire, but the LORD was not in the fire; and after the fire a sound of sheer silence.”

The translation “sheer silence” of the Hebrew  דְּמָמָ֥ה דַקָּֽה is to me better understood as a “slenderest calm,” picking up on the imagery of the opening of the Book of Genesis where the Spirit hovers over the deep. Elijah has been put into a deep sleep by terror, chased by storms of raging malice, and God here reveals that those storms and earthquakes are not God, but the sliver of light emerging from the terror is the briefest breath, a whisper really, a shadow of a whisper, a soothing stillness that revivifies and reforms the prophet and the prophecy. It is by this prophetic gift of voice Elijah now experiences that will set him to reform the rage of institutionalized power establishments whose exclusionary impulses turn murderous when challenged.

God’s voice originates in our nothingness. A shadowing whisper is our savior. Silence stills our inner turmoil and prepares us for mission. We are not commanded by thunder to go forth to reform institutions frozen in place, but with a slightest sense of call that centers and brings forth our own gifts and wisdom, our own commitment to experience and study. We both then recognize and counter the demon rage of false institutions. Their call for spiritual war, their calls to demonize empathy and the advancing civilization of care as the enemy.

 When we move forth from this merest breath of summons we embark on a path to luminous transfiguration that mirrors the divine centering of and in uncreated light. The transfiguration is not portrayed in any physical dimensions; it lights the mountain on which these personalities meet in a quite different way. As I try to envision the Transfiguration I struggle to comprehend and sense something of the essence of the innermost altar, the uncreated light from which the earliest creation and now shines through history from Moses to Elijah into the world to accompany God’s creation-correcting reform. The unchanging, unchangeable light. The eternally enduring figure of which is culminated in the institution negating, creation-reforming, saving Messiah. That I cannot envision the unchangeable, I am emplaced on earth to participate in a generation's reform, not institutionalizing my guesses about eternal form. My participation in the historical and thus ever provisional that carries to new generations by the Spirit that leads humanity forward.

God’s voice originates in our brokenness to reform and reshape us. The prophet’s voice will be sent to the nothing-making of stones—to the hardened servants of temples that have taken hold of the dead hearts of people fallen from the Torah reforms begun in a tent with Moses. Elijah is revealed as the forerunner to the transfigured transfigurer who takes the next stage of reform to call the institutionalizers and the elites to the necessity to care for all the people, to exclude none.

And now let’s return to Peter as he’s making sense of Moses and Elijah appearing as they meet in conversation with Jesus in this dazzling moment. "Six days" before, Mark situates Peter on another mountain, likely Hermon, in ch. 8:

8: 27 Jesus went on with his disciples to the villages of Caesarea Philippi; and on the way he asked his disciples, “Who do people say that I am?” 28 And they answered him, “John the Baptist; and others, Elijah; and still others, one of the prophets.” 29 He asked them, “But who do you say that I am?” Peter answered him, “You are the Messiah.”

This region was replete with a variety of pagan temples, and contemporary Palestine was replete with pretender messiahs, so that alternative visions of the divine messenger were readily at hand. As Peter and the disciples followed the country-side preaching of Jesus encountering real world struggles of the peasantry and other excluded Israelites, only Jesus among the presumptive messiahs and idols promised a program of peace, one that included the reforming impulse that sanctifies outside of institutionalized stones, transforming them.

So next in the narrative sequence in Mark of Jesus’ life is Peter’s identification of a dazzling lighted path unified by his tent-memorializing neighborhood of historical progression from Moses the liberator and reconstitutionalizer of the people, Elijah the prophetic reformer archetype who calls the selfish, unjust, and hegemonic monarch to account, and now Jesus who remains alone shining after being connected in glory on this transfiguring mountain. Standing now alone, Jesus has an integrity of person and role separate from Moses and Elijah and other prophets but as Messiah, he incorporates them all. All their gifts, all their assignments and missions. Peter, the rock, likely prostrate and hugging the ground at the vision, comes to know. Peter is us.

Jesus’ transfiguration is revealed as he approaches the (second) Lenten phase of his ministry that begins for us this Ash Wednesday. That part of the transfiguring messianic story becomes the next 6 Sundays’ preaching.

To summarize the institutionalization dimension of that story: Jesus goes forth to witness to the temple establishment in Jerusalem and is met with hope by the people excluded by the corrupt authorities. He foretells the temple’s destruction and he acts out [cf. Zech. 14] a condemnation of the false representation of God in the outer temple courtyards where money changing and transactional portrayals of God’s service represent the failures of the temple service and its institutionalizing of finance as witness to the living God. Which devours the houses of widows [Mark 12:40-44] and keeps women outside the inner proximity, and thus distanced from God. Insitutionalization represented and actualized in the temple is not just to be reformed, but destroyed. And the people’s restorative relationship to a tent of meeting with God will bring the Bedouin character and way of life of Abraham to its spiritual fulfillment in Jesus by his atonement on the Cross. The narrative of the crucifixion exposes that he was killed by the corruption of justice in an unholy enmeshment of temple authorities and the most brutal regime ever constructed by humanity. The ungodlike substitutionary ethics of Caiaphas (“better one man to die than the whole nation” John 11:50)  and the most craven politician, Pilate, who asks, “what is truth?” (John 18:38) as he washes his hands and sends Jesus to that death meant to warn other reformers.

 This injustice is transfigured by the supplicating merits that reveal the good news of God's character: God is ever given to mercy, and such "justice" performed on the Cross is not God's, and to the extent that God allows such, it is revealed as subsidiary to the operation of grace. In Christ's supplicating prayer and the blood that covenants it, God's judgment of Christ's followers is expiated on the Cross, dissolved by both blood and word and confirmed by the resurrection. That is the Gospel. 

I’ve tried up to now to portray the historical theology being revealed to Peter, who represents us, on the Mount of Transfiguration. These reformers who were sent to the death-dealing and stone-age making institutions of their day. They were beset with crippling fear and revived by the gentle and gentling voice of the Spirit. In the case of Moses, his heart set on the stone pyramid system of world hegemony became a heart of flesh. In Elijah, his reform of the prophetic call was preparatory to his calling hegemons in Israel to account for injustice. To me, this inner light, this slim still voice starts in the heart and pushes through to the appearance. These  reformers manifest to Peter on the Mount their participation in the messiah's star-skin, the dazzling light of that most inner uncreated light with God. Psalm 104 (cf. Hab. 3:3-4) says of God,

1b      You are clothed with honor and majesty,

2a        wrapped in light as with a garment.

Theirs is a different kind of royal clothing, a garment of a new kind of flesh that testifies to their de-petrified heart--an intention set on stone advertisements. The image of the transfiguration is not distorted by the garish and cartoonish images of superheroes implanted by too much CGI videogames-- the visuals of strategic compulsion: no shoot-em-up lightning bolts, no flames erupting from crowns, nor some strobing, stop action sound-track accompanying the axe-throwing 6-million dollar arm of Thor.

I will conclude with three applications of what I’ve presented of historical and spiritual theology of the transfiguration:

First, the religion of the messiah is reformed, always reforming. Our institutionalization of the church—the way denominations send down instructions about practice and about doctrine—is always provisional. We open the temple walls of religion to the excluded by age, background, gender and scrupling. We are mindful to reform where those walls have been tragically erected. This reform impulse of the medieval church got a lot of people killed before Luther barely escaped to set the modern Protestant reformation program in motion. And very quickly Calvin came to institutionalize it in civil governance, and at least in one case participated in an unjust killing of a political opponent. And yet it’s Calvin’s so-called magisterial, institutionalized reformation that we honor most today.

rather than the excommunicated John Wycliffe or the martyr Jan Hus. And the many others before and as the Protestant Reformation took hold in Europe.

 Second and flowing from the first, the greatest reforming theologian this country has produced, no doubt in my mind, is MLK. I know this is controversial for some. And—that the most tragic are those theologians in the south and at places like "Old Princeton" whose names are on their buildings and libraries--who died never having released their slaves or released their tacit endorsement of slavery as "adiaphora to the Gospel." They prayed the Lord’s Prayer, which calls for Jubilee, and either were too ignorant to make the connection—they did not tent with God-- or were too hypocritical to care. The institutionalizing impulse leads ever to injustice that transmits intergenerational traumas that we are still dealing with. It is up to us as reformers to transfigure the deadening legacies of the institutionalizing impulse. MLK was itinerant and polarizing while blessing, reviled by the entempling elites who construct gated plantations and pleasure palaces to feed and celebrate themselves.

And that was their last will and testament, their binding their slaves to their pyramid like Pharaoh,

but our transfiguring witness transfigures the meaning of the old institutional and binding impulses propagandized as “solutions” that instead sire stigma based on social comforts and so sire crisis after crisis.

The metacrisis today is the institutionalization of the closed off head and the subordination if not exclusion of the open heart, a strategizing logical structure to get ahead in the world of strivers, to get yours before others take your share of a fixed pie. However, it is not some transcendent light in our mind that breaks through to dazzle our skin’s appearance, but transcendent light of the heart that makes others the destination of the pie—the sharing Golden Imperative of neighbor love, concern, and the civilization of care. We are transfigured by our heart never solely by our head, which follows the heart's progress. The ongoing Reformation of the Church is deinstitutionalizing what I call, “the Church of the Discourse over Belief.” "Beliefers" who set up norms of no import, no ethics.  Instead the Reforming Church is becoming recognized in the individual practice of pastoral virtues that redeem the present moment encountered in our awareness as we sojourn through the streets and wildlands of daily existence, recognizing the divinely created emplacement of those, of every encounter intended by God to reform our heart from stone to living, shining flesh in small-scale moments, tented meetings with neighbor and God-in-Christ at the table.

In the end, MLK recognized that the contemporary temple is the military- industrial, predatory capitalist impulse. As every generation gets stuck in stationary darkness, feeling inexorably pulled into the suck of the world’s so-called “realists” ever sending them to war. Reformers who tent with God know the metaphysics behind the Book of Proverbs and the Sermon on the Mount: it is impossible to bring peace through war. Impossible. When MLK moved from civic development to protest class exploitation and the Vietnam War, he was assassinated. Can we recognize that as a “transfiguration?”

Yes: it’s reform vs. institutionalization. It has ever been for the church.

Finally, it's important to note that the most effective reformers, the transfigured transfigurers, are seen as polarizing. They invade our comfortable places and get thrown into prisons like Paul and down wells like Jeremiah, and yes, are put to death as the Bible notes of so many holy men and history of so many holy women. Reformers and their missions are misunderstood because God and Jesus’ mission are misunderstood.

Their mission and their reforming personalities made them itinerant prophets and preachers. They lived out contemporary, Abrahamic expression of living in the tent of meeting.

Transfiguring reformers, on the other hand traveled like Abraham in a kind of spiritually Bedouin existence through hostile deserts with God their oasis. The interiority of such a life is manifest in the earliest Hebrew poetry, and in the Psalms. It is later the vision by the prophet Ezekiel [40—48] of the heavenly dwelling—a tent of meeting in Rev. 15 inside  the vision of temple centered by a Palm tree, its deep roots symbolizing  the processing holy water found in the driest places.

These itinerant reformers attend to God’s gracious will both within and without as they find provision. The bread of life they prayed for daily. They were in terms of their tented existence with God both itinerant and polarizing, blessed by and for the regular people for their sacrificial shepherding of them, and reviled by the elites who wanted their temples and pleasure palaces to feed and celebrate themselves.

 Instead of interpreting history’s heroes beckoning backward calls of institutional return [as if we were to put David and Jacob's son Joseph in a constructed pantheon of transfigured history], we become aware of the inexorable appearance of the anointed reformers in every generation stuck in stationary darkness. 

So now we arrive at this moment in your congregation. A new itinerant tent maker is coming to this building. Your new Pastor Lisa, who will bring change. New pastors always do, and some try to hold to the comfortable way things have always been done. Your committees can try to interview for it—I confess my anti-institutionalizing personality has failed many interviews. So now, how are you going to welcome this itinerant into your tents?

Lisa is a friend of mine: our sons attended pre-school together back at seminary and are joined 15 years later in exploring college options. They are in a place of transitioning into adulthood. They are joining the increasingly itinerant adult generations seeking their place in the world that they will come to know as broken. Lisa too is in a place of itinerant transition, and I imagine some prophetic anxiousness on her part. What I want to suggest is that a pastor has different roles. Like Moses, she has trained to seek liberation of those in bondage to sin, to trauma, to ignorance.  Moses’ followers repeatedly gossiped—the Biblical word was “grumbled”—about how they wouldn’t do it this way, a culture that repeatedly manifested itself in the Exodus generation from Egyptian slavery calling Moses to bring them back to the comforts of Egypt. To the institutions that enslaved them but fed them for their labor but denied them wine. These disgruntled followers of Moses in the desert, on their way to their promise, repeatedly felt the nostalgic call of a golden period when their ancestor Joseph was in charge there. These are the dynamics of the tented meeting place with God of Mosaic, liberating leadership. Please contain grumbling and comparing the way things were done in the past. These transfigurers are not servants of the way things always have been done. She may speak as a community servant to a different space or as a prophet like Elijah as wise to the destinies of the unjust. Lisa will have different audiences in mind as she learns to address you inside the chaos of a world in metacrisis, so that if she speaks on something that isn’t your concern that Sunday, please don’t tell her, “I didn’t feel fed.”

Feed her instead with your joy. Because Joy cycles.

In addition to a reconstitution of a witnessing and mission sent collective like the transfigured role of Moses, all new pastors are trained and gifted to act as prophet—a role for Elijah, by which I mean not that she is subject to direct visions of the future, but that she has a prophetic wisdom of how the world has been constructed to call for the practice of the Golden Rule and to predict that the violations of unjust leaders and rulers to zero out the marginalized will meet with doom. A prophetic pastor knows that if one zeroes out others, that one will become beset with a crippling and fulfilled anxiety that others will see that and mirror the same, first to others of their followers, and then to the unjust leader himself. Their suspicions become a mirror of the leader's own fallen intentions, and these will swallow all up in nihilism—the idea there is nothing to the world other than their own will and self-created methods of achieving power. The Elijah role, the John the Baptist role, is to prophetically call these persons and cultural forms to repentance. This the lonely and polarizing and misunderstood life of a prophetic pastor. Because God is misunderstood, the reformer is misunderstood esp. by those who think they already know God. This is what Jesus means when he says, “'A prophet is not without honor except in his hometown and in his own household.” This is a role too for pastors. Please pray for us. esp. when you are frustrated by us. By this, you pray for yourself as well, a prayer I believe will be approved.

I have attempted to present a critical reading of a traditional, historical text to de-institutionalize God’s word from inside a temple to an outdoors and peripatetic, tent-seeking of meetings. The Transfiguration symbolizes the glory of reformers, and appropriately, it starts the season of Lent when our personal journeys into reform begin by following Jesus into the wilderness.

This year, the fast of Ash Wednesday and the feast of  St Valentine’s Day coincide. The reformed paths of always reforming involves both. A feast of the inward place of meeting with others as joy, and a fast of struggle against the civilizations of stones thrown at others (they will be returned!) rather than bread shared with others.

The radical distance of God becomes human and beautiful in God’s imprint-- the energy, the strain, the joy, the polarizing lack of ready smiles, the grief, the triumph, and the failure of the ministry of Jesus. All of these you will see in your pastors. All these you will see in your neighbors. Transfigure them by your love. Transfigure yourself by your love. Put away the stones of your cultures. Invite others into your tents and serve them, extending them the Golden Rule. Enemies too.  Enemies foremost. Because in their own reform is God’s glory met. Shine a light. Share what is transfigured and transfiguring. May it be so for you and for me, Amen.

 

 Upon Loosing a Tooth: A First Poem for 2024 

Douglas Olds

 Routines of an igneous beast enslabs, consigning,

 pulverizing, uplifting from spine burdened, so

To swaddle gibbeting cradles

swaying pendulous ‘neath the nearwolves’

jutting cloud of teats

driving abutment of templed wind  rousing the reshoring plow 

two-edged masteries such curtains, throats exposed by tides,

its moment in envy's destine:

as mercy massages their Jerusalem-slouching journey.

 As so they wander to mistaken rebirth by the mirror of history’s steel

And as they do, they but mistake the meaning for the slough and slink of lies’ cruel amber. 

 

 

Temple, Ever Tabernacle: A Critique and Repair of a History of Religion’s Proposed Canon as the Summa of Form in Gary A. Anderson’s That I May Dwell Among Them

Rev. Dr. Douglas B. Olds

 

July 2024

 

 “I am a cage, in search of a bird.”

 

          "Religions get lost as people do."

 

~Kafka

 

 

 

Keywords:

 

 

 

Incarnation

 

Atonement

 

Tabernacle

 

Sacrifice

 

Temple [Ritual] Architecture

 

Sinai

 

Priestly Theologian

 

Kenosis

 

Messianic Teleology

 

Theology

 

Canonical Criticism

 

 

 

ABSTRACT

 

·                    The history of religions approach adulterates Christian hermeneutics by placing events of material forms into an institutionalizing focus on recurrence that justifies the endurance of those institutions. By prioritizing material forms and institutional structures and situating them inside recurrent divine space,  the spiritual and transformative energy embodied in the life and teachings of Jesus Christ is misapplied and misunderstood. This article critiques several aspects of Gary A. Anderson's application of this approach, particularly his focus on material architectures as seen in Biblical texts. Debilitating methodological, exegetical, and theological assumptions flow from his faulty hermeneutic and undermine the validity of his conclusions in a book marketed to Christian pastors.

This article argues that contemporary theologians and scholars must conserve the stabilizing and sturdying function of the Biblical archive amid modern theological concerns by correctly aligning structures and spirit. Instead of focusing on synchronizing material forms into a static "summa" across divine space, the appropriate diachronic approach to canonical writings illuminates and proclaims the ongoing movement of the spirit through history as the true essence of Christian theology serving generational  historical change and conditions. The exemplary energies and history of Jesus Christ, as the bridging Trinitarian essence of grace, delivers eternity to the revitalizing essence emerging from the transitory earth and its generations, not a static priestly authority, an Eighth Day summa of created space, or recurrent typologies of material events.

 

   Key Findings

·                    Methodological inconsistencies in the History of Religion(s) approach undermine the credibility of Anderson’s conclusions; a Christ-centered metaphysics of the eternaliziong intentional and virtuous will is subordinated to the requirements of institutionalized ephemera.

·                    The haphazard and unconsidered translation and interpretation of the key term skēnē lead to recurrent theological problems.

·                    The lack of engagement with New Testament sources in favor of medieval and unaffiliated modern sources leads Anderson’s overall argument to a medieval-style institutionalization of heaven and a faulty circumscription of the transcendent, with a concluding note that “paradox” emerges from his approach.

·                    Anderson's focus on architectural nominatives and their continuity of place as “dwelling” subordinates or overlooks the dynamic and processive aspects of divine immanence emphasized in contemporary theology.

INTRODUCTION

The History of Religion(s) approach adulterates Christian hermeneutics by prioritizing recurring material events and forms driven by institutionalizing impulses above the exemplary energies and history of Jesus Christ as the bridging Trinitarian essence of grace, delivering eternity to the revitalizing essence of the transitory earth.

This essay analyzes certain textual, historical, and methodological flaws of the material institutionalism embedded in “history of religion(s)” approaches to Christian theology. As such, its meta-critical review of one recent example marketed to Christian pastors, Anderson’s That I May Dwell Among Them: Incarnation and Atonement in the Tabernacle Narrative finds that it placed Christ’s incarnation and atonement as a theological capstone of the tabernacle for Christian theology.

Gary A. Anderson’s presentation, exemplifies such discourse of The History of Religion(s) approach, situating the incarnation and atonement of Jesus inside a medieval liturgical “canonicity” structured by the recurrent tabernacle. Though marketed to Christian ministers, Anderson’s systematics of architecture belies Christian theology and warranted standards of logic, method, and exegesis.

More is at stake than critiquing Anderson’s “canonical” alignment of the ministry of Jesus with the Priestly Theologian. Anderson’s methodology consistently aligns with institutional temples and is riddled with structural errors leading to a flawed finding of 'paradox.'" This dead end demands meta-critique: the reform of claims and readings advanced by institutional theologizing employing protean--sometimes telic in heaven but materially, physically cyclical on earth--historicism: that objectivity may only be obtained by data structured by the continuance of material tangibles rather than the progressive advancement of logos: the discursive and dialogic ideal of humanity in its reformed, restored, and reparative wholeness that Christically bridges eternity with the regenerative essence of the earth. Meaning-making for modern theology resides not in stone structures, traditional liturgical forms, nor caste hierarchies represented or claimed as summae of form, but in communal flows of the heart--ethics attendant to grace and accountability to the Spirit in the Golden Rule.

After assessing the validity of Anderson’s methodological approach, his interpretation of biblical texts, and his theological institutionalism, this essay concludes that Anderson’s presentation elides into incoherence and fails academic norms, failing to advance understanding of the tabernacle narrative and its significance in Christian theology as a way station and not its summation that kairetically (see Tillich) recurs.

    Anderson’s attempts to link the Old Testament tabernacle narrative with the New Testament understanding of Jesus' incarnation and atonement are flawed. His "canonical" narrative restructures the received OT, conflating historical religious events with a hermeneutic of institutional continuity to transcendentalize the immanent.

    Anderson’s reinterpretation of the tabernacle as a “traveling Mount Sinai” is methodologically unsound as it chops and reconfigures the chronological and thematic order of biblical texts.

     Anderson's exegesis misinterprets key theological terms and concepts, such as skēnē, by conflating different historical structures devoid of a metaphysics of process (conative repair, Olds 2023). The 'history of religion(s)' approach presumes that spiritual process is manifested through recurring material forms, which distorts the complex theological connotations and significance of these items.

     Anderson's presentation omits key rituals and their significance, particularly the scapegoat ritual in Leviticus 16, which is crucial for understanding the concept of atonement in the Old Testament. Anderson’s interpretation reduces complex theological concepts to a simple institutional logic of acceptance in making meaning of the incarnation and atonement. His eclectic use of Talmudic and medieval Roman Catholic liturgical texts deemphasizes the NT witnesses, and that eclecticism moves him to irresponsibly handle the sequence and thematic connections in his selected biblical data.

     Monographs of the tabernacle and temple have explored their roles as sacred (tutelary) spaces and symbols of divine presence. John H. Walton (2010),[1] G.K. Beale,[2] Jon D. Levenson (eg. 1988),[3] Richard Bauckham (2006)[4] and Nathan MacDonald (2023) have emphasized the theological continuity of those structures in both the Old and New Testaments leading to(ward)  culmination of form rather than energetics. Their works differ in the emphases they attribute to transcendence and immanence. Transcendence, often viewed as substantive formalism, aligns with Platonic ideals of unchangeable knowledge and hierarchies and thus given to hegemonies (MacDonald 2023) [2]. In contrast, immanence, seen as a Trinitarian bridging of human essence—spiritually processing activity--emphasizes a reparative and tutelary aspect to these structures, where piety is modeled, capabilities assessed, and functionings redirected and guided.

 

    Gary A. Anderson’s (2023) book That I May Dwell Among Them: Incarnation and Atonement in the Tabernacle Narrative aligns with the former perspective of facultatively recurring forms manifesting unchanging essences. Anderson links the Priestly theologian directly to the incarnation and atonement of Christ. His reinterpretation of historical sequences and symbolic and ritual functions invites Christians to reconsider how God manifests divine grace—how that grace is served in and by architectural structures.

     However, his approach lays forth an idiosyncratic, constricting, and incoherent view of the theological and historical significance of temple architecture and sacrifice for a Christian understanding of the incarnation and atonement of Christ. It extrapolates connections of the Priestly Theologian’s Tabernacle Narrative to fit Jesus’ ministry as it fuses links from non-Priestly sources of theology without submitting these to New Testament witnesses. By imaginative reworking of sources, this book employs faulty methodology it terms “canonical” but, in practice, cuts up and rearranges the canonical Hebrew Bible from an unjustified exegesis that temporally and spatially links the holy ground on Sinai with the interior of the desert tabernacle.

 Anderson’s narrative restructuring proposes that institutional spaces on the way to and within the Promised Land “leak” ontology into external purviews. Anderson thereby conflates the historicity of religious events with a hermeneutics of institutional continuance leading to resequencing by midrash to fit a particular ontological framework. The result of lurching eclectically through the events and places of the canonical narratives is a move that unbridles the immanent with speculative transcendentalizing, removing the warrant of the Old Testament’s witness of an historical religion by a people in a covenanted territory instead to make the temple spaces of Jerusalem a thematic absolute. Consequently, the incarnation and processive economy of Christ’s essence—the messianic teleology of repair—become contingent on serving institutional(izing) logic.

The attribution of contingency to an enabled relationship with God is central to the title of this book: “That [God] may dwell among them.” Although God is always with us, His presence is not always apparent, leading to a misinterpretation of absence that seems to require human initiative to clarify and rectify. The relationship of re’iyyah (appearance linked with provision) to dwelling is relevant to the texts addressed but not explicitly rendered by this book’s attempt to systematically relate recurrent architectural and institutionalized mediations of the human-divine relationship. According to Anderson (2023, viii), human performance of sacrifice within a precise architectural and ritual construction is a “means,” effective in making ontology “leak” into our awareness and thereby “instantiating” a relationship with God.

Once this claim is made, Anderson's hermeneutics make the atonement subsidiary to temple theology rather than allowing Christ's atonement to reveal and launch advancements in messianic awareness of the responsibilities and potentialities of immanence--the Golden Rule entering the world. A cheapening atonement views Jesus as a temple conservative who accepts, meekly and with trusting faith, the coming of death for some higher appeasement or Fatherly purpose that becomes clear only after the Cross.

However, a more comprehensive understanding of atonement suspends and displaces the traditional human compulsion for sacrificial religiosity and ritual repetitions fixed through representational priesthoods. During crises, these practices revert to an foreboding awareness of cyclical time, believing that recurring challenges need divine appeasement (a diagnosis popularized by Girard [e.g. 1989]). In reality, it is generational sin that cycles and is resolved teleologically in the atonement's expiating supplication (Olds 2023 xx). The impulse to prioritize sight and bind it to architectural images, seeking refuge in physical constancy--in something holding out the scientifically unchanging in times of social transition as if divinely eternal or transcendent--constitutes idolatry, regardless of the intent behind these icons.

If Christ’s atonement is understood as a way to escape the compulsion to resist change within humanity and history, and to adapt to the infinite potentialities of the immanent coming, then the icon must be rooted in language and devoid of consequentialism. It should be imparted and actualized through virtue (Olds 2023, xx). However, if icons are built and adorned based on faulty or insufficient atonement theologies, have we truly advanced in understanding what God, through Christ, intended? Misinterpreting the atonement and repeatedly building structures for refuge based on flawed, transactional, or Manichaean/Schmittian theologies will certainly obscure our understanding and hinder our participation in God’s truth incarnated through Christ.

Anderson’s "canonical" rescoping of time and space diminishes the distinct roles that the tent, tabernacle, and temple process as revelatory media in the OT. Anderson’s attempt to fashion these into a unified narrative of continuance culminates with his interpretation of the messiah’s incarnation and atonement with a singular kenotic application. The book’s repeated references to John’s Prologue mistranslates the verbal form of skēnē of Jn 1.14 as “tabernacle” with its implication of a determinate, fixed sanctuary rather than “tent,” which suggests openness to the environment. This translation brings in representational homologies of continued form where distinctions of the imprinted kinematics of Abraham’s faith are intended both protologically and eschatologically. The tent situates processing distinctions in Abraham’s faith in John’s theology in a way that Anderson’s Sinai to tabernacle to temple to incarnated kenosis does not. Psalm 27:4–6 distinguishes this kinesthetics: A temple is a place of “looking” for God, while theʾōhel appears nested inside it, associated with rock/stone as a protected outcropping where the penitent is now the one out looking. Verse 11 situates this nested structure as part of a tutelage function and program. The same word (in 2 Sam. 22:3, 11) associates the rock of God with the tent that “leads me” to salvation.

 Psalm19.4 reveals an ontology of a tent of enduring righteousness--τὸ σκήνωμα is the LXX rendering of ʾōhel, the same word applied when the Israelites end their desert wandering phase, as beginning in Deut 33.18 and tied to right sacrifices in v. 19.  These two words tie the mobility of the sun’s radiance. The sun's radiance situates the Transfiguration’s radiance in a simple structure, which Peter identifies with his proposal to build Moses, Elijah, and the shining Jesus each a skēnē. This proposal cannot refer to plural tabernacles but aligns Peter’s imaging of sukkoth from the Festival of Booths. This word has implications for understanding John’s use of skēnē noted below, as Mark has John accompanying Peter’s diffident proposal at the Transfiguration. Moreover, the condensation of the Festival of Booths imagery with Passover during Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday is implicitly tied by John’s Gospel to the palm imagery of Ezekiel’s temple and which immediately precedes Jesus’s “cleansing” of the outer courtyard of Herod’s temple, fulfilling the details of Zechariah 14.

 From this intertextual reading, it is clear that “tent” and tabernacle, while at times contextually nested in larger realities, are not simple synonyms. The Torah’s miškān is intermediate and tutelary in scope, while the tent is the transfiguring witness, tied by both Peter and John to existential reforming, a new type of structure. The miškān operates between the Golden Calf episode and a less centralizing material context in the historical runup to temple making. The LXX begins to use σκήνωμα as the Golden Calf generation of Israelites gives way to those preparing to cross the Jordan into the promised land for illuminating witness. The tabernacle may not be read into the NT history except as a category mistake.

 It is the ʾōhel môʿēd (tent of meeting/testimony, whereby Jn 1.14’s skēnē is in a construct situated with v. 19’s martyria) and not the miškān (a precisely determinate mobile sanctuary) that frames John’s theology. First, in his gospel prologue and culminating with the heavenly Jerusalem introduced in Rev. 15.5, the heavenly temple is predicated by a tent of meeting with God in testimonial witness, not a sanctuary or shrine soliciting a recondite divinity. The latter is ever given to institutionalizing ritual focus that tames this meeting with human ideas of transactional contingencies and appeasements. John’s rendering of temple overlays a tent of meeting/testimony in concord with Ezekiel’s (40–44) vision.

 Anderson’s hodgepodge rereading of the temple and its sacrificial function “fits” with institutionalizing religion and sanctuaries [see also footnote 2]. Spectacularly, his misreading of the continuation of forms comes to situate Mary at the center of the eschatological place (Anderson 2023, 200–209), applying a medieval Roman Catholic liturgical text as a fulfillment of architectural systematics, venerating the womb in contrast to the enduring word (Luke 11:27-28!). At no point in this book does Anderson suggest an awareness of his heavenly personalities in narrative apposition to Ezekiel’s vision of a Palm-centered, new tented temple manifest in Peter’s understanding of the Transfiguration and the condensation of symbols of Holy Week and Palm Sunday in the Gospel of John as guides of earthbound historical courses of dwelling in and with the divine.

 Anderson’s institutionalization of eclectic vectors of time and space without a responsible consideration of the NT results in such confused systematics of continuation--of stone architecture and ritual, subordinating the atonement as an existential hiatus of self-emptying and bridged entirely by it. While kenosis is a waypoint of atonement, it is not its fulfillment. Atonement participates in the reparative teleology of heart by meritorious expiation of judgment—the atropaic dissolution of sin by supplication and blood--heart repair in the witness of aligning and committed faith rather than simply trusting acceptance of the heart’s stoppage. The essence of the incarnation and atonement “instantiates” this new covenant of the enlivening heart. A sanctifying covenant de-petrifies the temple and  transforms it into the metaphysical performance of, by, and for intentional grace.

 In contrast with Anderson’s method of finding eternity resonating in the stones (see footnote 12, below), a more comprehensive than tabernacled understanding of the OT sacrificial theme in time and space culminates with Jesus’ role and orientations in traveling in these spaces in a later historical context, reforming the physical representation of sacrifice and reorienting ritual outward into spiritual worship and understanding the imprint of sacrifice in prepared witness. Such reorienting recognition means, at least at some point of reference, working backward from NT sources to characterize how Jesus explicitly recognizes, manifests, and re-presents Old Testament symbols, figures, and practices, updating their understanding in a way that seemed to religious institutionalizers a radical, “totally new” (Anderson 2023, 4) reworking of Israelite righteousness now revealed as destined for all people on the earth.

  

II.               Exegetical Critiques

 

Having introduced the methodological flaws in Anderson's approach, I propose that specific exegetical problems in Anderson's work in key Biblical texts serve to invalidate his theological conclusions.

     Anderson’s chart (2023, 154) exemplifies his exegetical issues. The chart rearranges the canonical sequence of verses to claim parallels between the appearance at Sinai and the cloud accompanying the Exodus generation, leading to an incomprehensible portrayal. His chart incomprehensibly portrays, by lurches in time and space, the rearranging of the canonical sequence of verses in order to claim parallels between the appearance at Sinai and the accompaniment of the cloud in the desert trials of the Exodus generation. Anderson claims that the left and right columns of “the following chart make clear…reveal[ing]… the tabernacle [in Exod. 40.34–Lev. 1.1] functions as a moveable Mount Sinai…a traveling Mount Sinai…the portable nature of this shrine.” His three-fold assertion conditions his presentation of the centralizing, institutionalizing nature of the miškān where God dwells. The chart presents invalid narrative exegesis: the verses are reported in disrupted sequence, and report a supposed parallel on the charts between Exod. 24.18 and Exod. 40.35. The negation in the latter is not a parallel but a contrast with the former! In the former verse Moses was able to enter the cloud on Sinai, while in the latter, “he is NOT able to enter the tent of the meeting.” In contrast to the revelatory site for Moses, the miškān is to function as mobile testing and tutelary of the people’s witness, the preparation for living testimony and service.

 

Anderson’s reconstruction of these textual sequences is a seed to his later errors and finding of "paradox." It manifests three signature problems in his book. First, they demonstrate that the focus on the precision of God’s architectural instruction to Moses in the Word is not mirrored or honored in Anderson’s improvisational text criticism. As Anderson reports in Chapter 6, improvisation in the Tabernacle ritual gets Nadab and Abihu killed.[5]

 

Second, the thrice-stated conclusion he draws from his charted exegesis does not follow by reason of his failure to conform to academic norms of demonstrating parallelism. Thus, the Tabernacle Narrative Anderson presents proceeds from this radically flawed “ground.” Third, the liberties Anderson takes with time and space in his featured texts hermeneutically run afoul of the covenant of a promised place and the unfolding historical sequencing (timing) of messianic expectation that originates in Daniel 9 and is the context of the late “Second” Temple and its demise (see below), bringing an end to an institutionalized vassal-monarch temple program.

 

Of the second problem of the chart in question, Anderson’s reconstruction evades academic norms “by which one can determine that a text is probably dependent upon another text…[specifically] the criterion of ‘density: [that] the more parallels one can posit between two texts, the stronger the case that they issue from a literary connection…[as well as t]he criterion of order [that] examines the relative sequencing of similarities in the two works. If parallels appear in the same order, the case strengthens for a genetic connection."[6]

 

Yet not only are the sequential orders of narrative presentation of theological locations significantly different in the texts rearranged by Anderson’s chart, the density of parallels is vitiated by the negation in Exod. 40.35 lacking a parallel in Exod. 24.18. Anderson’s claim, thrice asserted, that the tabernacle is at the end of the Book of Exodus functioning as a traveling Sinai where people live inside the same place with God as Moses is thereby negated. It is disturbing that the book’s editors did not correct this distorting claim.

 

From this misguiding presentation, Anderson launches through the Book of Leviticus and beyond, entirely ignoring the scapegoat ritual of Lev. 16.20–26; 30 and its origin as an apotropaic sacrifice for the sin of the people. Moreover, as I will develop below, this ritual introduces a relevant figure of Christ’s atoning, outside-the-camp expiation on the Cross. Instead, Anderson repeats his claims that OT sacrifices were not structured to atone for sin. In this way, he continues building his systematic theology of institutional architectures as instantiating the relationship in which God dwells.

 

Other questionable exegetical claims involve the tamid service of the Tabernacle as conditional, “a means by which God is to be encountered at the sanctuary” (Anderson 2023, 82). Anderson reports a translation of the verbs of Exod. 25.8 as consecutives imparting a sense of contingency (his translation of “so that,” pointing to the structure of Exod. 29.42b–46 for support), making God’s dwelling contingent on the Israelites making a sanctuary for God. However, this is problematic theology: it makes the relationship with God contingent on a human act of building a structure. Such adopts ANE ziggurat theology of the human-constructed staircase to heaven, whereby human initiative attains relationship with the divine rather than one’s responsiveness to divine initiative and calling.

 

The verbs in these two passages from Exodus do not support the necessity of reading them in a conditional sequence, and indeed, the LXX (and NIV) of Exod. 25.8 dispenses with the implication of contingency. They simply expose an accompaniment of actions. The LXX of Exod. 25.8 contextualizes the second verb not as “dwelling” but as “appearing,” which will have later import in the tamid service of John the Baptist’s father Zechariah (Luke  8–9) that Christians should consider as its historical role in the eponymous Prophet’s framing of the activities surrounding the temple on Palm Sunday.

 

The verbs of Exod. 25.8 are indicative, and though an imperatival force may carry over from the paragraph’s opening (a force enhanced by the post-scroll imposition of verse numbering), the LXX’s indicative syntax is a simple pairing of activities rather than cohortative or conditional initiated by the first subject.[7] Indeed the LXX makes explicit, by its rendering of the verbs, the witnessing function of these structures, not a contingent coordination of agencies.

 

The LXX renders this verbal syntax by a correlate pair of inceptives: future imperfects with a connecting conjunction which conveys an intended meaning as “sharing of expectation” or volition manifested in aligning images—indeed imaging acts that manifest the correlative processing of divine (viz. Trinitarian) conation. The identified verbal sequence is not conditional but a mirror of relationship, a phenomenology of witnessing where human piety of graciousness (immanence) takes precedence over structural grandiosity in imaging transcendent essence and its attendant features of contingent warrant for sovereign mediation.

 

Anderson (2023, 89) links the tamid service in a way that makes the latter part conditional as the English translation reads the imperative in Exod. 29.46, the same as he proposed on p. 82. However, the infinitive of that verse, in both the MT and the LXX, manifests no usual conditional construct in either original language. Alter (2008) translates the latter Hebrew infinitive in construct with the preposition as purposive--God’s initiative of a “special relationship” with Israel rather than any contingency applied to God’s will from human initiative. As mentioned previously, the imperative fits better as volitional, fitting in with the promise of the free grace of indwelling. As presented below, grace becomes less blocked outside of the institutional stone that radicalizes and hardens the closed-off dimension of the miškān, keeping instead with the Abrahamic context of tenting open to the environment.

 

 The tamid “has nothing to do with atoning for sins…[and] should be understood as part of the ‘care and feeding’ of the deity who resides in the tabernacle… ‘feeding the gods’ to open a place for Israelites to ‘position themselves’…in a subordinate, reverential posture toward the deity…Sacrifice is effective… because it creates [a] relationship by instantiating it.” (Anderson 2023, 100; contrast Ps. 50.12–15; Heb. 9.10a). In this “feeding of the divine” we return to Anderson’s sacrificial anthropomorphization, as of Zeus Bomios noted in footnote 12. Again, Anderson locates a conditional initiative with the sacrifice to “create relationship.” Yet:

 

Ps. 50.7–15: God has no need of food.[8]

 

Anderson’s exegesis of tamid as a means for indwelling presumes something about the later Davidic impulse for constructing a temple with tabernacle allusions. Anderson ties these means to the Ark narrative in the Books of Samuel (Anderson 2023, 120–24): that God’s promise of an enduring house for David has some conditioned and initiating volition on the part of David to construct a house for that God, lamentably tying, in some readings, God’s “house” to the destiny of David’s “house.”[9]

 The sacrificial service is part of the redistributive nature of the sacrificial produce shared with the priests, as seen in Leviticus 19:19. The Book of Hebrews notes that the people are called to become priests. Thus, the tamid service prepares for participation in the performance and extension of virtue (Olds 2023) and the operative witness of the Golden Rule. Jesus reorients ritual formalism to include social concern, preparing for the priestly expansion at Pentecost (the outpouring of the redeemed heart actualized in the renewed covenant of works prophecied by Jer. 33:22). The tamid is a realized feature of the burnt offering of priestly piety exemplified by John the Baptist’s father in Luke 1, anticipating the new covenanted sacramental offerings of Pentecost’s witnessing.

In this view, the detailed and particular rigor of the sacrificial infrastructures dictated to Moses was God’s preparation of a people for Pentecost's witness extended to service of God and then towards neighbor through social charity and addressing human precarity. When ritual and moral service are aligned per Lev. 19:19, God's service initiates the ritual structuring of awareness of creation and obligation. However, when the structure becomes the paramount focus, absent the awareness of God’s processing essence—God's volative and intentional grace—the neighbor tends to be neglected and excluded by ritual scrupulosity and the imposition of priestly legal administration (an implication of Saul's (1 Sam 13:11-14) and Cyrus’ arrogation noted in footnote 16).

Those dedicated to the temple and its treasury (τὸν κορβανᾶν Mt. 27:6; Mk 7:11) and participation in priestly hegemonies (MacDonald 2023) are reoriented by Jesus to human needs (Mt. 15:5; Mk 12:38–44) and toward the sacrifice of repentance (Mt. 23:23; announced by John the Baptist fulfilling, e.g., Ps.51: 6–17). Anderson instead suggests that tamid is conditioned by “sacrifice [a]s effective…because it creates relationship by instantiating it”—an ambiguity when devoted to the transcendent as "instantiating" a conditional or limiting process to neighbors obscured by a "pure" focus on the transcendent. Jesus clarifies the Providential initiatives of grace flowing to the city not mediated by institutional temples and religiosity's focus on escaping obligation by appeasements.

To the extent that architectural constructions become tied to conditional theologies, they can only fail in their operations due to the self-interested sins of new generations of systematizing obscurantists, so that historical destruction looms for the material structure but never for God’s promise of an eternal house, a destiny and legacy. The loss of the centralizing altar of the Ark in the later history of the Solomonic Temple foreshadows the contingencies and responsibilities involved in determining to build a house for God with tabernacle allusions and a tribal priesthood.

A related, questionable exegetical feature of Anderson’s retrojected, institutionalized hermeneutic of continuance is his adoption of the critical academic rendering of Daniel 8 (Anderson 2023, 84–5). He situates Daniel 8, repeatedly contextualized as a vision, as a symbolized report of the temple-profaning event of Antiochus Epiphanes IV. He thereby follows modern academic tradents that condense the reports of the Book of Maccabees with Daniel’s vision. However, Daniel has a profound prophetic dimension that does not require journalism of Maccabean engagements to unscroll. Rather, the reports of historical events in Ezra and Nehemiah are linked to the fulfillment of Daniel’s prophecy in the birth announcement narratives in the Gospel of Luke. (Olds 2023, Appendix V).

  

III. Methodological Issues: eclecticism and faulty authorities

 

Such exegetical problems manifest Anderson’s source methodology and hermeneutics of institutionalized themes that overwrite historical sequence and territorial emplacement in the Biblical witness. Anderson’s presentation locates its support in an idiosyncratic application of Athanasius, Talmudic, modern critical academic, and a single Roman Catholic Church liturgical rite--a lurching through time and space absent consistent rendering of times and spaces as bounded by immanent events as historically revelations. Rather, he moves to inappropriately transcendentalize the historical material. As noted, other than a routine revisting of the Johannine Prologue to translate skēnē as “tabernacle” rather than tent, the NT witness is mostly excluded by Anderson in this book. If he had consulted the NT responsibly inside a book marketed to Christian pastors, he would have had to engage its consistent rebuttal to “continuance of form” history of religion method and findings.

 To wit, Anderson claims that a thematic interruption of narrative validates his reconstructions of temporal sequence as on page 154 discussed above. These narrative reconstructions of structural meaning are situated on the precipices of methodological fault lines that tear and swallow his findings. For example:

 The presentation of the tabernacle across Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers is ordered just as much by theme as it is by chronology. Exodus is devoted to the structure of the tabernacle, Leviticus 1–10 to the service of the altar, and Numbers 1–10 to the role played by the tabernacle in guiding the Israelites to the land of Canaan.

 Sometimes events that occurred in a single moment are separated from one another to fit into their proper thematic section. This is made explicit in Numbers 7 when our writer introduces the story of the tribal chieftains’ gifts of wagons and draught animals to transport the tabernacle. Though the unit belongs in the “guidance” section of our narrative (thus its placement in the book of Numbers), the gifts themselves were given on the day the tabernacle was erected (Num. 7.1). Had chronological time been the strict principle of organization, this narrative should have been located at the close of the book of Exodus (Anderson 2023, 10 emph. added).

 Anderson had proposed, “The Exodus story of the tabernacle’s founding is written in such a way as to fold the dedication of the altar into the rite of erecting the tabernacle (Anderson 2023, 10).”  If there are interruptions in the narrative temporal sequencing, Anderson has noted (in the highlighted opening to the paragraph quoted above) that chronology orders the Torah presentation of the Tabernacle while theme plays a role. All this may be proper and responsible exegesis, but then just prior to that he has made this astonishing statement that does not derive from his explanation so far but finds its authority outside the canon or tradition:

 Because the onset of the cult points back to the creation of the universe, the nonlinear character of time at creation reappears here as well. Beginning in Exodus 25 the restless advance of chronological time slows to a halt and even, in some places, flows backward. Sacred time, as Mircea Eliade has argued, is “indefinitely recoverable, indefinitely repeatable. From one point of view, it could be said that [sacred time] does not ‘pass,’ that it does not constitute an irreversible direction (Anderson 2023, 10 emph. added).

 This methodological move again demonstrates the fatal flaw of Anderson’s work: he makes an astonishing, unsupportable, and retrograde-by-its-very claim that time is flowing backward in the establishment of the priestly Torah, and bases this claim on a non-applicable, canonically non-supported hermeneutic—a politically “gnostic” backlook[10]--of Eliade.

 That God would need to go back in time to reorient history to God’s will suggests that an interruption of God’s will had taken place to such an extent as to reveal that time, rather than the medium of contingencies, is itself contingent to forces outside of God’s free and natural knowledge. At the very least, it seems, this vitiates traditions of divine simplicity, divine omniscience, and divine omnipotence, as well as introducing a non-Trinitarian, dualist metaphysics abridging the simplicity of divine conation (Olds 2023, Appendix I). On the other hand, if the Creator’s eternal purview allows for time’s reversal, it must be asked how such guides creatures to freedom responsible to neighbors and the non-human order. To not create a dilemma of metaphysics, it would have to be proposed that such manifestation of God’s radical freedom serves as a point of necessary human knowledge of God’s absolute transcendence. But such a point makes for another dilemma: that such radical, seemingly mercurial incomprehensibility encompasses and vitiates revealed Christological immanence by a point of hermetic transcendence. Such does not accord with Christ’s words regarding his knowledge of the Father and the Father’s will in the Gospel of John. Moreover, even if it does not vitiate Christ’s immanent ministry, there is no revelation to Christ’s immanent ordering of such incomprehensibility of will.

Retroactive re-construal, such as Anderson's, of a theological narrative for elucidating something unclear or hidebound is a postmodern or existentialist operation. It assigns to narrative, time, and identity a fluid, saltant, and unthreaded to be re-interwoven for historical purposes. Literary  theorists include Samuel Beckett, Borges, and Roland Barthes. Such may characterize the memory of a soul in denial or in the throes of reproach—and the “journaling” intended to recollect or reframe experience-- but is a tricky hermeneutic for stabilizing or sturdying archived texts that began as facultative meaning making and then provided historical witness to their functions of bringing cohesion and ensuring survival for a language group. Such a “heretical hermeneutic” applied to the theological anchor in historical archives ever generationally recruits but may only, as metaphysical witness, find resistance to such re-interpretation. Biblical texts are the summa of tradents that have offered restorative stability to language and ethics (kinesthetically) processing in history. Historico-linguistic critical and contextual analysis begins from this conservative foundation of a text’s “being,” not from a need to conjure support for (justification of) modern institutions' raison d'etre. Rather, the conservative foundation of hermeneutics is then released by homiletics for humanity’s “becoming in grace:” the communication of flourishing and existential repair. 

  At this point, it becomes necessary to extensively rebut Eliade and his commitment to asserting a cyclical view of time derived from non-monotheistic traditional societies rather than an understanding of teleology (however phylogenetically and ontogenetically fitful) that emerges in Judeo-Christian scriptures and traditions.

 The Romanian historian of religion proposed that ‘traditional’ societies lived in ‘cyclical time,’ innocent of history . . .

 In traditional societies, according to Eliade, everything important has already happened. All the great founding gestures go back to mythic times, the illo tempore, the dawn of everything, when animals could talk or turn into humans, sky and earth were not yet separated, and it was possible to create genuinely new things (marriage, or cooking, or war). People living in this mental world, he felt, saw their own actions as simply repeating the creative gestures of gods and ancestors in less powerful ways, or as invoking primordial powers through ritual. According to Eliade, historical events thus tended to merge into archetypes. If anyone in what he considered a traditional society does do something remarkable – establishes or destroys a city, creates a unique piece of music – the deed will eventually end up being attributed to some mythic figure anyway. 

The alternative notion, that history is actually going somewhere (the Last Days, Judgment, Redemption), is what Eliade referred to as ‘linear time’, in which historical events take on significance in relation to the future, not just the past. And this ‘linear’ sense of time, Eliade insisted, was a relatively recent innovation in human thought, one with catastrophic social and psychological consequences. In his view, embracing the notion that events unfold in cumulative sequences [teleologies in ethnic—language-bound structures], as opposed to recapitulating some deeper pattern, rendered us less able to weather the vicissitudes of war, injustice and misfortune, plunging us instead into an age of unprecedented anxiety and, ultimately, nihilism. The political implications of this position were, to say the least, unsettling. Eliade[’s . . . ] basic argument was that the ‘terror of history’ (as he sometimes called it) was introduced by Judaism and the Old Testament – which he saw as paving the way for the further disasters of Enlightenment thought (Graeber and Wengrow 2021, 497 emph. added).

 Applying Eliade’s religious phenomenology, Anderson thereby misapplies a traditional society’s understanding of time as nonlinear (recurrent, ateleological) to the ethnic archive of the Israelite people—to the Torah—in which linearly unfolding "divine" time (teleology) processing fitfully and generationally takes hold of the Israelite (Priestly Theologian) religion from the creation ex nihilo. Other than post-Biblical midrash cited by Anderson and wishful thinking of those in the existential crises of reproach, God does not go backward in time in the Biblical witness. God is a God of history, not a systematic principle of force(s). Perhaps God could do so outside the cosmos in which the Bible witnesses to the Word of God--the Beginning, which includes the relationship of cause and effect. But as God’s witness to humanity--God’s relation with temporally and geographically bound humans directed to live morally and responsibly—living accountably with both freedom and necessity (obligation)--within both the future and contemporary boundedness of regions, God in and with humanity does not move backward in time! For if so, what is the need for the Gospel’s atoning repair and the death of the Son? For the incarnation? Anderson’s temporally loosed and metaphysically undocked hermeneutic and any midrashim on which he claims to find warrant are out of the bounds of mature, academic witness to Biblical history and the unfolding flows of grace and reparative processing of the Spirit.

 

[Eliade’s kind of ]“terror of history” leads… [to] a cyclical, palingenetic reading of history to… make the God of the Bible into a [recurrent]  Baal. A vindictive Canaanite war god …The Hebrew and Christian scriptures repeatedly demonstrate that … the living God desires progress in peacefulness, in courage, in commitment to life, in virtuous neighborliness so much that even the terror of death be conquered. And that terror, to be vanquished, has to be unexpectedly conquered by embracing the [future not living mired in past regret or dreamy nostalgia. With justification, Christian hermeneuts commit to a more generational re-engaging, mirroring, bumpy yet] linear, ontogenetic trajectory [and] the Spirit-led unfolding of history revealing …the wonder of advances and betterments, albeit recognizing they are subject to episodic loops of [spiritual, interior lives experienced as] reversal. Yet these loops are always followed by recovery of trend—of Spirit-led historical development. [Teleology] is the ever-renewing though challenging [awareness of the] forward trajectory of collective and individual soul growth that overcomes the margins of sin, chaos, fear, and anxiety (Olds 2023, 153–55 emph. added).

     Anderson’s substantial errors in introducing his interpretation of religious history—his existential misinterpretation of time that reports that the tabernacle makes Sinai mobile--are compounded by his rerooting of place. By incorporating both the Aqedah and Golgotha within the “tabernacle narrative” as he ignores the Kippurah implications of Leviticus 16 suggests a bounded trace from the perspective of the Priestly theologians to focus on their “furnishings.” These participate in revealing (using tendentious translations)[11] “God’s face” accelerating with the Book of Numbers (Anderson 2023, chap. 3 esp. pp. 62–6; 212). Whether this “face” is of an essential portrayal or a symbolic representation of divine attributes is unaddressed.[12] Then, after a considerable historical gap in the architectural archive of the OT, the sacrificial cult resumes in Solomon’s temple with the architecture proceeding from David’s volition (Ps.132.4a–5; cf. footnote 9 above), and then another considerable gap into the period of the Second Temple decreed by Cyrus on his architectural format (Ezra 6.3). These meaningful gaps in the narrative of sacrificial structures presented by the OT histories are unaddressed by Anderson. When, in Part II, he connects historical texts with the Priestly source, he reaches not into the NT for confirmation but for Talmudic and contemporary scholars outside the confessing Christian tradition to support a Systematic Theology of territory and structure—P’s theology of time and place that Anderson (2023, 102–103) presents as the Priestly theology that the tabernacled altar and ritual service complete—as the eighth day—of God’s creation. In this, Anderson refers to the linkages of unnamed medieval rabbis summarized by a modern academic (Schäfer 1974).

 Does the Eighth Day of Creation invert providence, making the human subject responsible for “feeding God” at the sacrificial spot? Here, a deeper investigation of the tabernacle processes requires unpacking regarding subject/object and client/master relations. As an example, in Exod. 25.2 the appended first person suffix objective pronoun is translated by Anderson (2023, 29) as a dative of advantage, but the LXX has it as a genitive (source or possession)! What is being returned to God who has provided. But why is this an advantage for God? Anderson (2023, 100) later locates the sacrificial impulse in the ANE ritual concern to “feed God.” But can that be so when God “appears and provides” as in the Aqedah?

 God specifies to Moses to construct an altar in the plan of the tabernacle (Exod. 25.1–8; 27.2)--a mizbeaḥ:

 

Mizbeaḥ “throughout the Semitic linguistic sphere [follows] the semantic scope of Hebrew zāḇaḥ, “slaughter, perform a zeḇaḥ ritual, sacrifice… mizbēaḥ can refer to the slaughter site… to the place of zeḇaḥ, and to the sacrificial site in the general. (Dohmen 1997, 8.210 emph. added).

 

The translation “slaughter site,” noteworthy for its ANE contextualization, is chosen by Fox (1995, 410).

 Here, the LXX points to a categorical distinction involved in emplaced sacrificial ritualization: “The Septuagint renders mizbēaḥ primarily with thysiastērion; 23 times it uses bōmós, though only in reference to illegitimate pagan altars” (Dohmen 1997, 212). Of θυσιαστήριον, LSJ notes this “altar” is a place of sacrifice and a place “fitted for sacrifice.” To the question: what are the “fit” objects for such sacrifice? God gives the list in Exodus after the Golden Calf episode beginning with the peace offerings in 25.2.

 Exodus 27.1 contextualizes these offerings as “contributions,” not in the sense that God needs to be fed, but what humans offer up in sacrifice of their own appetites that derive from a particular, pre-reformed human nature--personality types driven by the covetous and hoarding instincts of flesh. In giving up these things--these features of their enmeshment in and by nature--they move toward the Godly essence, which is the conation of grace (Olds 2023), sharing provision and dispensing with the hold on human personality (its heart of stone set on stone) that these commodities exert and which inhibits their sharing.

 To trace the ebb and flow of the collective ethnos in its archived witnesses and its changing ideas of God’s “dwelling” in mediated or direct sovereignty, the canonical proxy for Anderson is the Priestly Theologian’s claim that the temple is the Eighth Day completion of God’s intended creation (Anderson 2023, 103; chap. 7) and its sacrificial dimension. To be canonical in a more collective and archival way, such must include at the outset a consideration, if not incorporation, of the preceding historical datum of the Aqedah followed by the Bethel stone pillar of Jacob in Genesis 28. AND Leviticus 16’s ritual of atonement. In both of the former, God initiates a meeting. In the first, a call and then a resolution for sacrifice, where God provides, calling Abraham’s awareness to God’s sourcing all gifts and therefore righteous in calling for their offering. In the second, the Abrahamic (natural human) impulse is to follow an encounter with God with a stone structure—to settle at the spot as if the finite ground has an institutionalized signification from theophany. The twice-utter repudiation of the temple-making impulse and role performance and the various intermediate profanations and sackings of the implements should make commentators notice that the institutionalizing impulse rendered in stone is not religiously or historically progressive in the canonical witness. Instead, it is the mobile tabernacle that is specifically decreed and designed of God, and its summary as a place of witness (testimony, tutelaries of signification) when the miškān is linked with the ʾōhel môʿēd in integuments of signification. The ʾōhel môʿēd is where God’s appearance is signified in the NT witness, though the distinctions of the two structures are entangled in the OT as translated by both the LXX and the Vulgate.

 Exod. 40.34 distinguishes, by way of cloud and kəbôd, the miškān and the ʾōhel môʿēd. To see that these are processive distinctions of process, not instituted forms, revisit Anderson’s (2023, 154) chart. Moses entered the cloud on Mount Sinai in Exod. 24.18 but is unable in 40.35. The tabernacle is a stage of the pilgrimage of Moses' followers, not a recurrence of a stable Mosaic investiture.

 The miškān is covered by a tent of ram’s skin curtained by goat hair Exod. 26.14; 36.14. Anderson consistently reads the ʾōhel môʿēd, as indeed sometimes does the LXX, as a synonym for the tabernacle. In this, he initially follows this translation practice by quoting Brown but misreads the latter’s conclusion (Anderson 2023, 2 emph. added):

 The theme of “tenting” is found in Exod. 25: 8–9 where Israel is told to make a tent (the Tabernacle—skēnē) so that God can dwell among His people; the Tabernacle became the site of God’s localized presence on earth…. When the Prologue proclaims that the Word made his dwelling among men, we are being told that the flesh of Jesus Christ is the new localization of God’s presence on earth, and that Jesus is the replacement of the ancient Tabernacle.

 If replacement, how then does Anderson immediately and elsewhere consistently “link” John’s Prologue to his translation that the Word “tabernacled” among us? Why does a replacement for the tabernacle in the incarnation come to be incorporated into it by Anderson’s translations and his almost exclusive, concentrated focus on John’s Prologue as the proxy for and signature of the incarnation? Because Anderson ignores most other relevant NT considerations, it would seem he would have to be very careful about how he translates skēnē in John 1.14. Rather, to apply some necessary linguistic and contextual frame from the perspective of the replacement going forward, not from what is replaced going backward! Why not read the verb of Jn 1.14 diachronically: “ἐσκήνωσεν”—as tenting’s transitional, spiritualizing feature, from Bedouin abode to traveling sanctuary to an effulgent tent’s sent witness (skēnōma) in the immanently situated mobility of teaching in the spiritual deserts of the earthbound marked by generational change and renewal?

 Does Anderson think Jesus, as incarnated covenanter, manifests the Tabernacle’s curtaining integuments of goats and rams, its implements assembled altar-ward (rather than outward) forefronting ritual garb and pieties?

 Anderson’s synonymizing of tent and tabernacle needs far more validation before it can be said to lead to the temples, or that Jesus’s incarnation is institutionalized by the tabernacle-to-temple narrative in the way Anderson proposes. That Jesus is in some meaningful way following and endorsing--by a simple restructuring of the priesthood--an architectural path of incarnating stone rather than a tutelary and atoning incarnation of enspirited and inspiring flesh that reveals, on the Cross and in ministry how sacrifice is righteous not by its justice but by its mercy and self-discipline for the sake of and commitment to grace.

 Unpacking the textual history of the LXX, the MT, and the Vulgate of this set of residential-made-institutional constructs in various territorial and spiritual settings manifests the complexity that leads translators to synonymize the ʾōhel môʿēd and the miškān, both contemporaneously and diachronically. Thereby ignoring the layering of elements: altar, sanctuary, curtains, roof coverings, tentings in the Tabernacle and the ʾōhel môʿēd, that is then incorporated into the miškān and the later temples, both on earth and in the visions of Ezekiel and John the Revelator.

 The solution of the history of religions approach is to harmonize and institutionalize these structures as a foundationally recurrent and thus enduring form. A spiritual, reformed approach rejects eternities of earthbound forms and instead looks for the process of eternity’s synchronic imprint in the texts and history, discerning any diachronic teleology of what is materially and historically represented. Because teleology is expected as Christ becomes all-in-all, humanity shares in Christ’s mission and destiny. The rise and fall of Judeo-Christian institutions impart historical meaning: either of teleology or of cyclical recurrence.

 When the Clementine Vulgate terms the ʾōhel môʿēd a tectum fœderis (Exod. 40.30; 33), it seems appropriate to consider the meaning of an "integument of signification." Such follows, by way of denotation, from the skin-clothed Adam in Genesis 3 and of  "doppelganger" moments that both mirror and distinguish Esau and Jacob in the sequence of Genesis 27. Animal skin integument thus reveals character in some way that may be tested and assessed.

The tabernacle integument consists of curtains made of skin and hair, which portion a body’s integument, and we read of its ram skin and goat hair. The tabernacle has as its tent-roof a covering of signification and covenant. In this frame, the Exodus generation meets ritually to develop, or not, the faith of Abraham with testimony to this commitment. According to the Shema, the OT people’s call to love God with all môʿēd (commitment/strength of testimony: Deut. 6.5) is part of its call developed in the tabernacle and reflected on earth by a tent-bound integument. Might the ram skin be the integument of Davidic warrior forces (the death of beloved sons securing the Zion’s mode of confederation—e.g., Jonathan) or the goated hair the integument of angels ascending mountains (contra Song 6.5b) or turning traitor when Azazel is met, re-engaged of it and set climbing mountains by other tactics? Might the integument be the manifest part of the testing and spiritual body derived in a tabernacle movement of covenant signification? Might not these structures be designed to stimulate awareness that God already is dwelling within and above, and that our approach to holy constructs are part of an unfolding tutelary set of experiences and assessments? 

  

IV: Theological Critique: Hermeneutic gaps in the architectural systematics of recurrence

 Anderson’s 'temporally loosed hermeneutic' is connected to his 'spatial looseness' and 'ontological leakage.' He blurs boundaries of text and source to interpolate the Aqedah (Genesis 22) and the Cross into his materialist systematization, institutionalizing the Temple as an absolute in the "canonical “formalism” of the Priestly theologian. Before he makes these moves, he omits two crucial historic-spatial aspects of sacrificial time and place: the Scapegoat ritual of Leviticus 16 and how, after a 300-year historical gap, the temple-making impulse of monarchs ties with the Tabernacle-centrality of his systematizing narrative.

 Taking up the second problem first: Anderson gives the scriptural warrant that theophany in 1 Kgs 8.10–11 provides the basis for the continuance of the Mosaic Tabernacle and its services. But Anderson’s continuance of form theology does not analyze the historical contexts of the tabernacle and the two succeeding temples.[13]

 In the former, the precise instruction given to Moses made the Tabernacle an initiative detailed by God, while for the temples, the initiative to build emerged from the dynastic impulse. In David’s case, after he receives God’s promise of a house, he intends to mirror that promise by situating God in a house as he understands such for an externalized and validating warrant (Ps. 132.4–5; 2 Sam. 7.5–7). In the case of Cyrus, after he received Israel’s God’s instruction to liberate the captives to return from exile in Babylon. In each of these cases, God initiated a reform of temporal sovereignty inside new national (qua sovereign) conditions (first under a king, then as a vassal state).[14] The historical function of the later dynastic temple on Cyrus’s format is a re-figured and refiguring institutionalizing of the Davidic temple under ephemeral conditions of dynastic vassalage and expanded in its terminal phase by Herod, an ambitious client of Caesar.

 In both cases, the temple institution flowed from dynastic impulses to advertise, by mirroring, a special relationship with the divine. At that point, the survival of institutions is portrayed in the scriptures as contingent on the dynast’s and their proxies’ performances of these intentions to mirror the divine volition, and to the extent they proclaimed such, they were held to that account (cf. Mt. 7.2; 2 Samuel 7).[15] At this juncture, we might trace the architectural dimensions of material institutionalization of these claimed special relationships:

 

1)      The miškān altar was made of acacia wood and is 5 x 5 x 3 cubits (Exod. 27.1; 38.1) while Solomon’s temple’s altar was overlaid with gold (1 Kgs 6.20) and the bronze altar far larger:  “twenty cubits long, twenty cubits wide, and ten cubits high” (2 Chr. 4.1).

 

2)       The house that King Solomon built for the Lord was sixty cubits long, twenty cubits wide, and thirty cubits high (1 Kgs 6.2; cf 2 Chron. 3.3).

 

3)      Cyrus’ temple magnifies these dimensions: Ezra 6.3 (NRSV): “In the first year of his reign, King Cyrus issued a decree: Concerning the house of God at Jerusalem, let the house be rebuilt, the place where sacrifices are offered and burnt offerings are brought; its height shall be sixty cubits and its width sixty cubits.”[16]

 

Thus, the dimensions of institutionalization of the Tabernacle become magnified by temple form to portray the grandiose representations of dynastic intentions, whose heart is far from the pious service of the Mosaic type. Whereas Isaiah prophesied Cyrus rebuilt “city” (Isa. 45.13), like Saul Cyrus diverts from administration into religious venues: the second temple is built on Cyrus’s format (Ezra 6.3). It introduces a spatial dimension to the vassalage (cf. Deut. 17.14–20) of post-exilic Yehud and becomes more grandiose during Herod’s puppet hegemony. This material and institutional magnification accompanied a reduction in sovereign autonomy, imposing pagan hegemonic aesthetic impulses into the mix of ethnically assertive dynastic and pious impulses addressed earlier by the Josianic reforms.

 

Anderson addresses none of this. He situates the temples as the natural outgrowth of the tabernacle phenomena in a history of religion approach to recurrent institutionalization.

 

Friedman (1997, chap. 10) discusses the connections and the continuities of Temple and Tabernacle and the Hebrew Bible’s--not the OT’s--final redactor (R), whom he identifies as Ezra (Friedman 1997, 242), a post-exilic Priestly theologian who reorganized the various source tradents (source strands) to leave an assembled text that reveals a tension of God’s grace and righteous justice, a tension lingering into the second temple period, a tension left hanging and poised for the expected messiah’s resolution.[17] In addition to leaving unsettled questions regarding God’s primary attributes, the various strands from pre-R literary sources had different constituencies when posing their religious life inside this tension.[18]

 

The redaction of J, E, and D occasionally can picture God as acting strictly according to justice, and P can picture his mercy. But, on the whole, the distinction between them is apparent and dramatic. P’s focus primarily is on divine justice. The other sources’ focus is on divine mercy. And the redactor combined them. When he did that, he created a new formula, in which justice and mercy stood in a balance in which they had never been before. They were more nearly equal than they had been in any of the source texts. God was both just and merciful, angry and compassionate, strict and forgiving. It became a powerful tension in the God of the Bible. (Friedman 1997, 239).

 

It came for Jesus’ atonement to reveal the priority of grace and the subsidiary operation (and human corruptions) of justice in the Trinitarian essence. Getting them out of priority leads to the Anselmic error and the institutionalizing corruption of Caiaphas’ vassal administration (esp. cf. Jn 11.50). The atonement reveals that God does not require substitutes, though God will provide the means of sacrifice in which we become aware of God’s presence. Indeed, God has the power to extricate from all evils of history. And the atonement reveals a god not contingently bound to some human (Anselmic) idea of righteousness qua consistency that makes its idea of justice (a distorted mirror of the Cross situatedness in Pax Romana) foundational a priori to the liberation of grace (Mt. 5.45; Ps. 145. 9).

 

The hermeneutics of assumed continuance of material form underlies the institutionalizing impulse and grounds its frames of recurrence. This works both ways: eisegesis grounds institutionalism (and the dynastic impulse), and dynasty grounds the application of tradition-recovering and static hermeneutic principles of (ontological) continuance. Abraham's recurrent temptation was to sit down and fall asleep, whence God calls him to go forth (Gen. 12.1).[19] Hence the necessity to attend to the full—not eclecticized--witness of the canonical Bible’s development: Its implications of mobility of structure and calling, the tension of camp and wilderness, of Zion as a city of people and as a dynastic building program of David and continued later, of the initiative of agency in institutionalization and the following of appearances of grace’s initiative with a mirroring claim of processive righteousness. From these, appropriate interpretive methods are necessary to enter the historical archives of an ethnos (a language group, not a kinship structure) for interpreting social arrangements and the (re-)ordering of sovereignty inside the people of God.

 

Again, both the non-P strand of the Aqedah and the institutionalizing impulse of temple making (in DtH and post-exilic strands) must be integrated, per a “canonical” reading of the OT, not from the centrality of P as manifesting the recurrent call of the divine to institutionalize God’s stone dwelling but from a hermeneutical perspective that takes into account the repeated failures of the institutionalizing impulse interpreted by the prophetic denunciation of monarchic injustices and the twice-destroyed, much-prophesized, much lamented doomed temples. In other words, the hermeneutics of human construction of God’s dwelling cannot emerge from a “continuance of form” theological hermeneutic but rather a hermeneutic of the continuance of Spirit—the Spirit-processive, heart- [intention-] centered (Deut. 6.5–6) hermeneutic remains tethered to the historical dimensions of time, space, and their sequential imposition of necessity, generational change, and open challenge. While reinterpretations of history are appropriate as hermeneutical methods are updated by the processing Holy Spirit, traveling above the immanent collective in a transcendentalizing approach to material forms is not.

 

David institutionalizes a mediating relationship of sovereignty over the people, mirroring God’s living promise of an eternal “house” with his impulse to find a “house” for God in the manner his son knows from his context, the ANE ziggurat constructed along an architectural path of blazing a climb to heaven. While this may not have been David’s idea, Solomon is represented as building the temple where the institutionalzing impulse attempts to secure the Davidids confidence in the enduring promise of earthly sovereign continuance. The OT does not address how God directs the temple construction, detailed as it is by God for the tabernacle. The altar and Tabernacle have a direct design that is delivered to Moses by God. Not so the Solomonic temple. The Tabernacle and altar services were taken up into the temple rituals (and may, from a critical point of view, have originated there).

 

So as the Temples fall, at least two competing strands of explanation are discerned in the OT witnesses. 1) The Temple service and ritual performance failed or were illegitimate (an explanation more prominent during the Herodian temple phase of Judaism, where both King and Priestly castes were [seen as] invalid) or 2) the collective people’s sins were responsible (this perspective characterizes the dominant southern prophetic strands accompanying the first temple’s destruction and the tension of city and temple in the Psalms).

 

 

 

Aqedah

 

re’iyyah in the Aqedah is linked to God’s provision of a sacrifice. So that in sacrifice is God’s provision manifest and dedicated. re’iyyah is made a substantive in the place name of Mount Moriah.

 

The place of the Aqedah is stated to be Mount Moriah in 2 Chron. 3.1, the site of the Temple Mount near Golgotha (Schnittjer 2006, 133). All Biblical and archeological accounts cited by Corbo (1992) place the site of the Crucifixion outside the city limits of Jerusalem at the time:

 

 “It must be noted that after the death of Jesus, the area of Golgotha was included within the Jerusalem city walls by Herod Agrippa I (AD 40–44)” (Corbo 1992, 1072 emph. added).

 

While Schnittjer places the site of the Cross at the site of the Aqedah, Mount Moriah, Anderson places the temple on Mount Moriah following 2 Chron. 3.1 and assumes the site of the Cross and the Aqedah into an historical harmony and geographic overlap with that temple.

 

However, Drinkard (2006 emph. added) notes a basis to question such a triple historical linkage:

 

Moriah is mentioned twice in the OT. 1. Moriah is the region (the Hebrew is literally “the land of the Moriah”) where Abraham is sent to sacrifice his son Isaac (Gen 22:2); specifically, he is directed to one of the mountains that God would show him in that region.

 

2. Mount Moriah is identified as the place where Solomon built the Temple; it is the place previously revealed to David, the THRESHING FLOOR of ORNAN the Jebusite (2 Chr 3:1; Ornan = ARAUNAH in the full account in 2 Sam 24:16–24 ). This is where David built an altar and offered sacrifices to stay the plague God had sent as a result of David’s presumptuous census.

 

Since these are the only occurrences of the name Moriah, they are often assumed to refer to the same place. The distance from Beer-sheba (where Abraham and Isaac’s journey began, Gen 21:31–33 ) to Jerusalem is about 45 mi., a distance appropriate for the three-day journey (Gen 22:4). However, it is surprising that there is no mention of Abraham, the near-sacrifice of Isaac, or the altar (Gen 22:9) in the account of the threshing floor in Samuel or Chronicles.

 

From this, it seems reasonable to assert that the Biblical witness is more definitive in its witness that geographically links the Aqedah to Jerusalem (and Moriah) than the Davidic site of purchase to the Aqedah. If this is so, it is more reasonable, and thus necessary, to link the geography of the Crucifixion to the sacrificial site of the Aqedah first, and only then to explore the geographic parallels with the Temple. Again, this is inverted in Anderson’s presentation of a geographical “narrative” of form.

 

Moreover, Golgotha as a geographical parallel prefigures the typology of sacrificial substitution of blood (NOT for wrath [see Olds 2023, Appendix III])—of the ram for the people embodied in the hope of the promised child Isaac—and the sacrifice of the promised child Jesus as a substitute for the people.

 

Leviticus 16’s Atonement

 

Porter (2021, 284) subordinates the place of the sacrifice in Leviticus 16 to that of the place in Numbers 7: “references to atonement in Leviticus 16 are secondary to the revelatory function of the ‘mercy seat.’” He links ἱλαστήριον not to a place of sacrifice where blood is sprinkled, but to a site of revelation of declared righteousness, thereby bringing sacrifice to a relationship with forensic mercy, such that mercy in declared righteousness is effected in some way by sacrifice, linked by Porter, predictably with “faith.”

 

Porter at least engages, though errantly, with Leviticus 16. Anderson (2023, 11; 90), on the other hand, omits references to it except as “spiritual repair” for “gross priestly errors:” “According to the opening verses of Leviticus 16, the purpose of this atonement rite is far more specific: to deal with the aftereffects of what Aaron’s sons have done wrong” (102). Contrary to his statements that sacrifice in the OT was not concerned with sin (p. 76;  contrast 90 n. 17), if he were to include a responsible reading of the entirety of Leviticus 16, he would engage its testimony that the goat sacrificial rituals apply to sin and transgression of the people (Lev. 16.15) —the children of Israel (Lev. 16.21) not just of the priests.

 

Sacrificial atonement processes through antecedent allusion in the Aqedah and Leviticus 16’s outside the camp] sacrificial system rather than the “inside the camp” (Num. 1.1) site of the ritual service of altar’s mercy seat (Num. 7.8) that is the antecedent of the temple’s. The “outside the camp” sacrifice fits the context of Golgotha’s (Moriah’s) crucifixion outside of the town of Jerusalem and picks up the “outside/apartness” nature of God’s revelation of righteousness proposed by Rom. 3.21.

 

The place of divine revelation (ἱλαστήριον) is a place of speaking in Num. 7.89 (Exod. 25.22). In Num. 12.8 Moses speaks with God pe ʾel-pe, “mouth to mouth,” which the NRSV translates, inappropriately, “face to face.” The mercy seat is not a form of showing—nor a forensic seat of justice defined by images (so Porter 2021). And indeed not of a bloody and crucified body which visual representation to the condemnors is a mirror of their injustice. When God speaks at the ἱλαστήριον, the message not the visual is the mercy seat, the kippurah, the seat of atonement. The visual is the mirror of human injustice. The ultimate message of the atonement on the Cross is the embodied blood that draws off sin and the verbal supplication of the Logos met by the transcendent grant of mercy! Both the earthly site of the atonement as mercy seat sprinkled through blood and its verbal message that accords with what happens at that “seat”--where embodiment of revealed injustice that sheds blood is transformed by the transcendent speech act--where expiation is throug the divine blood and supplication! Mercy revealed flowing from the spoken supplication/petition and confirmed by the resurrection of the body and following speech acts, not a body left hanging and bloody: this mercy is the expiatory atonement that reveals the  definitive expression (heart logos) of the operation of righteousness.

 

Rom. 3.21, which Porter (2021) misreads as he links it to the material ἱλαστήριον of v. 25, proposes that God’s righteousness-- δικαιοσύνη θεοῦ--is the Cross manifest apart from (or outside of) law/legalism/earthly law, as opposed to what is witnessed by (Torah) Law ὑπὸ τοῦ νόμου. The first use of “law” is anarthrous, while the second use has the article. The meaningful distinction of Law in this verse is imparted by the attachment or absence of the article which is essential to recognize in the spatial scene at the Cross. The Cross is a manifestation of law that is not of God’s righteousness, while God’s righteousness is witnessed by The Law, the Torah as indicated by its context with the prophets in this verse. It is likewise essential not to bring inside the camp what is outside the camp at Golgotha. Or to imagine that righteousness is revealed as an imaged forensic forum rather than in a speech act of the Logos.

 

 

 

Rom. 3.21 Νυνὶ δὲ χωρὶς νόμου δικαιοσύνη θεοῦ πεφανέρωται

 

Therefore, any consideration of atonement looking for the revelation of God’s mercy seat needs to investigate outside the camp for a blood sacrifice in a speech act, not in a material form in the operation of entempled, administrative legalism. This latter is the error of Porter (2021, 289; 298), who links the ἱλαστήριον to a Num. 7.89 emplaced implement that reveals the justice of forensic sacrifice that is linked with mercy (292; 299 n. 31) rather than its tutelary or cosmically expiatory functions. Anderson’s associated error is the placement of the atonement inside the camp by incorporating it in some way into his “tabernacle narrative,” in the environs of the temple precinct by an abstruse application of Louth’s historicizing diagram (pp. 214; 225) that detaches the incarnation from the atonement (p. 228) except the atonement is situated with the incarnation situates in “the paradoxical, sacrificial logic of Genesis 22” (pp. 222–23).[20]

  

This does not mean denying the role of the cross, but it does entail subordinating the sacrifice of Christ to God’s primary providential end—the divinization of humanity by dint of the incarnation. If we follow Augustine’s reading of St. Paul, however, we should be suspicious of this sort of subordination. The Old Testament does link the indwelling of God to creation as we have seen, but it also creates an unbreakable bond between the act of indwelling the tabernacle and the sacrificial service that will be conducted there. These arches, to return to Louth’s striking image, are in parallel to one another; there is no subordination. But Louth was correct to indicate that incarnation can be thought of apart from the demand to rectify human sin. It is not the case that the incarnation has been made contingent on an act of rebellion against God (Anderson 2023, 228).

  

Anderson then goes on to conclude his book with,

The purpose of sacrifice in the Tabernacle Narrative is not first and foremost that of effecting atonement. It is rather to enable the enactment by Israel of a radical self-emptying before her God (228).

 

Nowhere in this book does Anderson explicitly link divinization with grace or (especially and most revealingly) the Golden Rule. Indeed both terms are absent from the index, a giveaway of an ignorance of both the incarnation and atonement revealing God’s essence—the conation of taxic grace in providence and repair. These are not “paradoxically linked” in sacrifice but developed, tutored, and witnessed in the tabernacle, and sent into the world as the skēnōma of Israel, its illuminating force of grace. The glory of the sun that gives growth by witness and force of gift-giving sustenance. The ultimate of the latter is the atonement, while the incarnation prepares others to follow this path into the eternity of aligned and attendant—at-one-ment with—grace.

 

 

 

 

CONCLUSION: Implications for Contemporary Theology

 

Gary A. Anderson’s (2023) book That I May Dwell Among Them: Incarnation and Atonement in the Tabernacle Narrative aims to contribute to Biblical Theology through canonical criticism, seeking to link the Priestly theologian directly to the incarnation and atonement of Christ. This work revisits key canonical relationships between the Old Testament and New Testament, encouraging Christians to consider the continuity and development of theological themes across the biblical canon.

 

While Anderson's intent to foster dialogue on messianic religious reconciliation is commendable, his approach reflects a trend in contemporary theological circles that revisit traditional institutional orthodoxies, proposing formal 'summas. This prioritizes the endurance of material forms and institutions, suggesting that what is eternal is manifested in these enduring immanent structures. However, this view inverts the continuity of the Spirit with the development of the immanent, failing to recognize that human generations enter and exit into the heavenly temple and that each generation requires new means of tutelage, integration, healing, and hospitality. The nostalgic impulse for an absolute and perfected institution, upheld by a housed priestly, does not address the necessity for ongoing development, reform, and repair in church and society by responsibly maturing and accountable individuals relegated as “laities.”

 

The deinstitutional impulse of Jesus was not to reorder “the heavenlies” by making God the Father more well-disposed to us but to embrace us into the project of repairing creation, which was created “good” by the Father well-before the institution of temple priesthoods. Humanity becomes incorporated into wholeness by committing to immanence, to the messianic role of repairing the renewing essence of the earth, the arena of new generations of life. Jesus did not come to recaulk crumbling temples but to bring us all into the priesthood of the heavenly temple that repairs what was created good.

 

The way we interpret sacred texts has profound implications for contemporary theology, including how we understand the relationship between Old Testament narratives and New Testament witnesses. Only by linking the spiritual and the material and the sequence of creation, fall, and repair correctly can we hope to present a theological framework that feeds the hunger of modern seekers for coherence and commitment to the essences of renewal and emergence all around us. Tikkun Olam. Shalom. Beauty.

 

However, the methodological flaws, exegetical inaccuracies, and speculative theological assumptions identified in this review, characterizing a “history of religion” approach to material architectures witnessed in ancient texts, significantly undermine the validity of Anderson's conclusions. Rather than Anderson’s (2023, 154) assertion that the “tabernacle serves as a moveable Mount Sinai,” the meeting at Sinai and the subsequent sending of the mediator Moses in the tabernacle have distinct, not recurrent, theological and narrative functions.

 

A metacritique of this program highlights the need for contemporary theologians and scholars to foster a more coherent and meaningful dialogue that bridges the gap between ancient texts and modern theological concerns by putting structures and spirit in their rightful and righteous alignment. This has become the legacy of both the Protestant Reformation and the Protestant Enlightenment: the ethos of semper reformanda is always on the lookout for recrudescent impulses of temple-making priesthoods.

 

Anderson presents a book on the narrative role of temple sacrifice without sufficient engagement with NT sources and portrayals of Jesus’ redirection of forms and modes of meaning-making and relationship with the Trinitarian essence (conative grace [Olds 2023]). Anderson’s methodological flaws hinder a broader interpretation of sacrificial worship. He overlooks how Jesus condenses Old Testament prophecies and symbols in and by his person into a reparative fusion of Israel’s religion as serving God in and by neighbor love as the Golden Rule.

 

When religion is primarily viewed as institutionalization in stone, the deeper meanings of the incarnation and atonement may be diminished even to the point of nonsense and as failure. Such interpretations may be the negative value of an approach such as Anderson’s, but it is otherwise destined to become, at best, a curio in Christian theology subordinated to a history of religion’s approach. Anderson’s exploration of specific Biblical sources reveals how a history of religion hermeneutic applied to them leads to the malign institutionalization of physical and stone-bounded space.

Anderson's theological terms and concepts rest on the fulcrum of skēnē, conflating different structures processing in history into a “history of religion(s)” approach that presumes spiritual continuities manifest in material recurrence. Such institutionalization of forms leads Anderson to inappropriately Christianize architectural symbols in the OT with the spiritual emergence of incarnation and kenosis, thereby trivializing the latter to serve contemporary institutional programs of ritualized passivity and continuities of priestly authority. While Christ’s 'self-emptying' is often understood as a voluntary renunciation of divine privileges to fully embrace immanence and commitment to creation’s repair, Anderson links kenosis to the temple, suggesting a transactional aspect of propitiatory atonement and appeasement-- the incarnation embracing death to change heavenly dynamics. Such “Anselmic” constructs institutionalize what Jensen calls a “most dubious picture of God.”[1] I propose elsewhere (Olds 2023 Appendix III) how the atonement is grace revealing and non-contingent—the Cross’s supplication meriting its effectiveness in revealing (not liberating) the primacy of grace.

 

Anderson imposes a fixed, institutional meaning onto skēnē, a term that John intended to convey a more dynamic and open-ended concept of divine presence. This imposition has significant theological implications; it refocuses from the incarnational and relational, immanent metaphysics and kinesthetics of Jesus' ministry to a static, institutional, Platonic framework of top-down ordered forms and absolutes as if a finite church can know the infinite transcendent which we call the “Living God.” The broader implications of “history of religion(s)” approaches sustain institutional formalism where idiosyncrasies may take up residence in the grouts of putative eternal bricks or the folds of maidenly robes. At best, this is theology for institutionalized and institutionalizing priesthoods.

 

 

 

NOTES:

 

[1] The temple inaugurates cosmic functionings, [where creaturely capabilities are assessed for repair in part or in whole]

 

[2] Beale (2004, esp. chap. 10) consistently aligns with formalism/platonizing institutions. Repeatedly translates skene as “tabernacle” rather than tent (see esp. 236). In his chapter 5 (171 emph. added) Beale “survey[s] those parts of the New Testament that portray Christ and his people either composing the beginning form of God’s end-time temple or being a part of its consummate fulfilment.” Thus the Revelation 22 heavenly temple (equated with “tabernacle” is an “end-time” temple (393) reality rather than a tutelary site to send reformers to repair the creation that is progressing even now in our awareness.

 

[3] E.g., 1988: interprets the new creation of Isaiah 65-66 in terms of the culmination of preceding expanding priesthoods.

 

[4] Bauckham, Richard. Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony. Eerdmans, 2006.

 The reports that Jesus' ministry transformed sacred spaces and divine scope and character, incorporating them by his person rather than vice versa is at the core of the debate regarding the nature and implications of eyewitnesses to the Gospel: that his incarnation, atonement, and proclamation reveal the essence of Trinitarian will to ensure the repair of the total creation rather than substantives of stone temple service. Bauckham presents reports of the fluidity, relationality, and openness of divine presence in immanence which is fitting for eyewitnesses as additional testimonies of Jesus' self-understanding and divine access. Bauckham (esp. 188-93) notes that, especially in the Gospel of Mark, there is an open distinction between the operations of Jesus and of the temple.

 In contrast, Mircea Eliade’s history of religion approach (see below) analyzes sacred spaces as fixed and institutionalized in history, recurrently proposed to mediate material transcendence and thus open to ideological or ideational (re-)constructs. This facultative perspective toward transcendence conflicts with contemporary theological trends toward more egalitarian access to sacred spaces as proxies of and introductions to the directly immanent and personally relating Spirit.

 

[5]As well as perhaps prefigure role confusion of Saul and Cyrus who move from their appointments as administrators into acting as religious entrepreneurs.

 

[6] Kozlowski and Chodyko 2023, 472 emph. added. Quoting MacDonald (2015, 13).

 

[7] If we take these as indicatives as does the LXX, as indicatives of shared volition and intention, promise rather than commands, then the “so that” English translation ceases having a justified transactional import—ceases an explication of a contingent consecutive in a sequence of conditionality. Rather, the LXX is non-conditioned, a coordination of volitions witnessed inside the sanctuary’s architecture and ritual services.

 

The LXX translates the vavs in the Hebrew text as simple conjunctions alongside a change in voice for the second verb: “and will be seen among you.” The sacrificial system here is NOT a means of dwelling with God, but for heightening awareness of the individual and onlookers of God’s indwelling, God’s participation in the awareness of pious worker, not vice versa, and the thanks which flow ad intra and ad extra. The import of the LXX translation is that the conjunctions coordinate the flow of relationship mediated by the sacrificial structures in a less determinate manner than its reduction to conditionalities.

 

 Of the Hebrew verbal flow, we note these potential technical options:

 

wᵊqātal (waw + perfect) — A form of the suffixed (perfect) conjugation with a prefixed waw (modern: vav). Unlike the waw-prefixed forms of the imperfect, there is no ‘strong’ waw to clearly differentiate when the waw is conversive/consecutive versus when it is a simple conjunction (see wayyiqtōl and wᵊyiqtōl). The consecutive perfect sometimes shows a shift in accent, but that shift may be missing for any number of different reasons, including: the hifʿîl stem, the pausal position, the presence of a pronominal suffix and certain ‘weak’ verb patterns. Thus the only way to determine with certainty that a waw + perfect is a consecutive perfect is to examine the context. Consecutive perfects often seemingly conveys the equivalent of the prefixed (imperfect) conjugation, which often conveys imperfective aspect but has other uses, such as conveying volition. Consecutive perfects are also used for the apodosis of conditional clauses or other result clauses that are contingent on something described previously (Heiser and Setterholm 2013).

 

From this discussion, the verbs of Exod. 25.8 may be read as consecutive perfects (as does Alter [2008]): conditionally, as a cohortative followed by an apodosis) or as dually inceptive portraying that the flow of volitional alignment will process through witness. Read on this side of the NT and contextualized by it, it is clear that the latter option is favored. Though again, Anderson eschews, by a methodological lack of engagement, contextualization of these texts from the perspective of the NT.

 

[8] Cf. b. Ḥagigah 16a, part of the Mishnah tractate concerned with reʾiyyah—appearance and provision, picking up allusions to the Aqedah.

 

Jer. 7.22 notes that sacrifice did not originate when Moses led the people out from Egypt. They had then been directed to obey  God’s voice (Exodus 20). The tabernacle sacrificial system began with the directions to Moses after the Golden Calf episode and the people’s rebellion.

 

 

 

Isaiah 11–17 notes that the theological initiative of the Israelite lies in the sacrificial posture and nature of justice (cf. Micah 6.6–8). Anderson’s claim (2023, 82) that the “so that” of Exod. 25.8 and the infinitive of Exod. 29.46  conveys conditionality of means or contingency of ends from the perspective of human initiative. Anderson’s presentation had earlier introduced the concept of the means in the sacrificial structure at Numbers 3 (p. 55), a discourse that led “some rabbinic texts [to] understand viewing the furniture as a means of ‘seeing God’” (Anderson 2023, 66; 75). Anderson recognizes a “distinguish[ing]” gap in the sacrificial purpose and role between Leviticus 8 and 9–10 (Anderson 2023, 126), at which point the evaluation of “effectiveness” enters into the exegetical import of sacrifice. It is not the ritual of service but the priestly role performances and dedication to temple treasuries that come to define temple pieties, at least in the critical view of the writers of the Gospels.

 

[9] 2 Sam. 7.13 relates the syntax of consecutive verbs as do the verses from Exodus noted. The NRSV translates these with contingent force: that David shall build God a temple, and God will establish his kingdom. Notwithstanding the complicated textual history and fraught context of this passage, it is again preferable to read these as structuring volitions in the context of Psalm 132 rather than conditions. David’s intention is dynastic, a mirroring of divine action as preparation to mediate divine sovereignty over the collective people. The first verb is a simple imperfect, and the latter a perfect of a polel stem, emphasizing a strong though not contingent strengthening of commitment conveying surety. Again, the vav-connection of the verbs does not structure them in apposition as necessarily sequential or concessive—as indicating conditionality. The latter verb again is conjugated and interpreted as discussed in footnote 7 by citing Heiser and Setterholm (2013).

 

This latter condition is not marked in this verse. The verbs are not consecutive perfects, so interpreting this verse as containing a contingent syntax—a protasis and apodosis—is questionable.

 

Alter (1999, 233) translates this verse accordingly—contrasting with his (Alter 2008) conditional translation of Exod. 25.8—with no sense of contingencies imparted by verbal syntax other than a correspondance of inceptive futures: “He it is who will build a house for My name and I will make the throne of his kingship unshaken forever.” (Cf. NIV).

 

 

 

[10] Ellwood (1999, viii emph. added) characterizes Eliade as “nostalgic for the unities of the distant past...reaction[ary in his] gnosticism” that delinks the individualist’s obligation to collective progress—where only the “wise” individualist can escape the entrapments and enmeshments of the rootless and ignorant modern collective. Eliade committed to “antimodernism and antirationalism tinged with romanticism and existentialism...deeply suspicious...[of] the Enlightenment...decr[ying] ‘decadent’ democracy [and] the rootless’ mass man’ its leveling fosters.  In contrast, [he] lauded traditional ‘rooted’ peasant culture...’ the people’ [and] the charismatic heroes...who allegedly personified that culture’s supreme values...[Eliade’s] distinctive mood of world-weariness, a sense that all has gone gray [by modernism]—and, just beneath the surface, surging, impatient eagerness for change: for some tremendous spasm, emotional far more than intellectual, based far more on existential choice than on reason, that would recharge the world with color and the blood with vitality. Perhaps a new elite, or a new leader capable of making ‘great decisions’ in the heroic mode of old” (Ellwood 1999, xi).

 

Eliade’s philosophy of religion was not theologically-derived, but phenomenologically. The principal organization imposed onto sacred time and space occurred at a religion’s origins (Ellwood 1999, 5–6). From this, religious phenomena cycled in folk culture and consciousness, recurring, thereby confirming the continuation of its forms and figures locked to material nature. Eliade’s ideology of history described above coheres with his philosophy of religion attendant to forms in time and space, unifying them as a matter of gnostic—salvific and sanctifying—method. It is from the phenomenological past that our salvation will recur, and thus we must look ever to the past for the form of the future transcendent (Ellwood 1999, 11).

 

[11] Anderson (2023, 62 emph. addded) writes, “The Hebrew original of Exodus 23.17 reads: “Three times a year (during the pilgrimage festivals) all your males shall see the face of the Lord, YHWH.” Notwithstanding that he is quoting not the “Hebrew original” but an English rendering, it is worth noting the BHS:    שָׁלֹ֥שׁ פְּעָמִ֖ים בַּשָּׁנָ֑ה יֵרָאֶה֙ כָּל־זְכ֣וּרְךָ֔ אֶל־פְּנֵ֖י הָאָדֹ֥ן׀ יְהוָֽה  As a niphal, the verb יֵרָאֶה֙  yē·rā·ʾěhʹ has the sense of "appear" [cause to be seen] as indicated by the locative preposition in the verb's object  אֶל־פְּנֵ֖י. The better translation of this verse is the NRSV’s: “Three times in the year all your males shall appear before the Lord GOD.”

 

nifʿal — In Biblical Hebrew, ‘stem’ refers to the relationship of the verb’s subject to the action of the verb. That is, stems convey grammatical ‘voice’ relationships (Heiser and Setterholm 2013 emph. added).

 

 Anderson’s translation interprets the verb as a Qal and does not account for the Hebrew locative.

 

    Anderson (2023, 64) presents a similar rendering of Exod. 34.23 which his source translates the verb as “must see,” as if the change from the locative preposition to the direct object markerאֶת־פְּנֵ֛י   introduces intensification of a verbal imperative (from “shall” to “must”). In contrast to the earlier cited verse, however, what is increasingly marked in this latter verse is the direct object which is no longer prefaced by a locative preposition. By the direct object particle אֶת, the object is more markedly involved than the previous quoted verse in coordinating the voice of agencies embedded in the niphal stem, not by a change in the force of the verb. The syntax imparts passive voice not imperative mood to the verb, consistent with the Hebrew stem:

 

Nifals also have at the same time the passive meaning, e.g. נִסְתַּר to hide oneself and to be hidden; נִגְאַל to redeem oneself and to be redeemed.

 

Nifal tolerativum. In some cases the meaning is that of to allow something to happen to oneself.

 

(Joüon and Muraoka 2003, Vol. 1:150, emph. added).

 

The “toleration” by the subject indicated by the niphal stem accords with or suggests a (developing) awareness of the passive voice, a feature of the subject agent being seen by the object agent.

 

In both cases, the predicate of Anderson’s translated sources imparts a mistaken English rendering of perspective from that of the verbal stem in the Hebrew text. The niphal is not simply “reflexive” (Joüon and Muraoka 2003, I: 150) but it does indicate relationship—processing, coordinating and elucidating—of initiating and acted-upon agencies. The translation “appear” is far more indicated in the syntax of the verbal stem and in the processive marking of the direct object as guiding the interpretation of the niphal in these verses. More awareness on Anderson’s part of these syntactic features is required before he claims “The Hebrew original” meaning of how the face of God was encountered.

 

[12] This focus on crafted material form—on furnishings—leads to Anderson’s speculation that the stones of the temple themselves resonate with divine energy (Anderson 2023, 59–60; viii). Like in Anderson’s presentation of sacrifice likened to ANE rituals of “feeding the gods,” this representation of “resonance” seems to accord with pagan ideas of a hypostatized divine “numen” in temples that “leaks” or resonates. As an example:

 

Zeús Bōmios or Beʿel Madbachâ, i.e., a numen dwelling within the stone ...[for some] communit[ies is] the tangible manifestation of the highest god. Similar interpretations may be found...within the Phoenician-Punic sphere (Dohmen 1997, 8:211 emph. added).

 

If this feature of temples is intended—a numinous ontology from stone—it evidences another feature of Anderson’s history of religion approach to the Hebrew Bible.

 

In contrast with the resonating numen of stone architectures as presented by Anderson—[and in contrast with the link of the cloud in Exod. 40.38; Num. 9.15 et al. by the Shekinah in the Targum of Isa. 6.5]—the tamid service of God in the temple is the witness of an opened heart of its servant—the appearance of God in and linked to the provision of God [re’iyyah]. Revealed as being transformed by witness as commitment—by the repentant witness of steadied and awakened eyes and disciplined hands and intercessory and thanksgiving prayer applied for neighbors. The temple is a place for the hearts of generations to be renewed for witness. The sacrificial system trains the servant to recognize the imprint of the master, not by “feeding God” but by giving up what the possessive eye is attached to and sacrificially committing to the heart of God (Deut 6.5) to share what is hoarded—to align with the metaphysics of conative grace. While the divinity is not fed as an object, God may be fed in his people, part of redistributive function of the sacrifical altar and ethic deriving therefrom.

 

Since sacrifice in Egypt exhibited primarily the character of a meal for the gods,the altar itself can also be understood as having been modeled on secular eating utensils such as the dining mat, table, bowl, etc. The original form of the altar in Egypt is that of the food plate placed at the cultic location. An offering mat portrayed with a loaf of bread also serves as a hieroglyph for offering as such. (Dohmen 1997, 212).

 

From this, it can be seen how the temple architecture and furnishings are part of a reorientation of sacrifice away from feeding God (by feeding priests and elites and earning conditional merit) and toward a conative sharing of providential gifts in a sending of transformed hearts into the world for mission and witness. First the tabernacle and then the temple provide a physical space that conditions the penitent’s awareness that God will be encountered in some way by the sacrificial offerings, and the operation of the tamid demonstrates and cultivates awareness of “pleasing” reorientation. 

 

 

 

[13] Rather, that Temple worship is a mandate for the people is a claim Anderson validates in Athanasius (pp. 7; 193–4). However, Anderson does not present whether Athanasius is applying this direction for the first temple or for both (and all succeeding?).

 

[14] A vassal state is one in which its in-group political claims are subject to being overturned by a stronger or controlling authority.  See Smith (2003, 28).

 

For an extended discussion of these historical dimensions in the theological witness of the Deuteronomistic reform of the monarchic progression of Judah, see Olds (2020, 100–102).

 

[15] 2 Sam. 7.13 is again translated by the NRSV as a conditional set of verbs but the verbal syntax allows a simple temporal sequence, as does Alter (1999, 233). The rest of the chapter, one of the most complicated textual reports in the OT for its consequences and salvation historical context, feeds back on v. 13 in the conditional translations. However, unpacking the discourse flow of this chapter indicates a change in relationship with the house of David when he undertakes to build a house for God. His line then becomes accountable to God—by shepherding the people (cf. Ezekiel 34) in upgraded accountability, befitting David’s role as a monarchic witness by way of his asserted institutionalization of a material temple as a feature of his sovereign program.

 

[16] Josephus (Antiquities XI.5–7) suggests that Cyrus ordered the restoration and rebuilding of the temple after reading Isaiah’s prophecy [45.1–17]. He also claims Cyrus himself ordered the temple’s dimensions (Antiquities XV.386; see Ezra 6.3).—Silverman 2016.

 

[17] Though Friedman does not explicitly note the messianic expectation in this context.

 

[18] While Anderson prefers to label his method “canonical criticism” as a mode aligned with Rendtorff and Childs (esp. 3–6, 159–60), he centers his narrative of architectures in P and deriving from P, the Priestly strand. He is aware of other source strands, though he does not explicitly label them as Yahwist (J) or Deuteronomist (D). Instead, Anderson proposes that Childs’ “canonical criticism” begins with P in order to “understand fully who Jesus is, we need to correlate how he is understood in both testaments” (x, emph. added). However, this method approaches Jesus as a priest would, as if Jesus came to institutionalize another priesthood by his incarnation and atonement.

 

A Documentary source criticism approach (classically of J, E, P, D sources) would present a different historical flow and set of theological emphases to the narratives in the Hebrew Bible depending on how these strands were organized. Without a reference to the full witness of the NT and the Gospel’s settlement of the primacy of mercy over judgment, a more universal consideration of the various source theologies and constituencies other than priests (such as monarchs, people, prophets) would most likely emphasize a different awareness of both the atonement and the incarnation (the latter’s “at-one-ment” of God with humanity, not just with OT priests).

 

[19] Mobility is an Abrahamic course intention set forth in divine imperatives: לֶךְ־לְךָ go! Rouse yourself. (Gen. 12.1, קַח וָלֵךְ  go and take 12.19 ). Get up [ קוּם qûm] and go, get up and take (Gen. 19.14–15; Num. 22.20; Deut. 9.12; 10.11; other non-Torah references.

 

 

 

[20] The Aqedah (binding and contemplated sacrifice of Isaac) tests Abraham’s resolve to sacrifice his son by whom the promise is to take its next processive, generational step. The sacrifice tests whether the gifts of God derived from God may be called for by God and intended for God’s purposes—God’s people. The Aqedah thus demonstrates at least six comprehensible, incarnational principles of sacrifice: 1) all gifts come from God and may be repurposed by God. 2) As God provided the original gift, God will provide a substitute. In this, God may be recognized in providence’s teleology.3) Sacrifice as a human act offers up attachments to the material gifts of nature and bounty as a training and discipline feature of developing the virtues of the Golden Rule. However, covenanted providence does not require human death. 4) The idea and structure of sacrifice is tutelary and preparation for a life of witness through service so its context retains its religio of reverential service even after the altars of Israel fall. 5) God’s arranging a ram as a substitute re-validates the “genetic” (qua faith) dimension of the promised destiny for Abraham. 6) The Aqedah prefigures a later, universally effective atoning sacrifice of supplicating blood (embodied witness of the Son to the divine essence) which reveals that God is not a nepocidal agent but a giver of life restored and enduring for purpose (Isaac) and eternalizing (Christ).

 

 

 

 

 

CITATIONS

 

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Alter R  (2008) The Five Books of Moses: A Translation with Commentary. New York: WW Norton.

 

Anderson, GA (2023) That I May Dwell Among Them: Incarnation and Atonement in the Tabernacle Narrative. Grand Rapids: Eerdman’s.

 

Bauckham, Richard. Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony. Eerdmans, 2006.

 

Beale, Gregory K. The Temple and the Church’s Mission: A Biblical Theology of the Dwelling Place of God. New Studies in Biblical Theology 17. Downers Grove (Ill.): InterVarsity press, 2004.

 

Corbo VC (1992) Golgotha (Place). In: Freedman DN (ed) The Anchor Yale Bible Dictionary New York: Doubleday, vol. 2, p. 1072.

 

Drinkard JF Jr (2009) Moriah. In: Sakenfeld KD (ed) The New Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible (electronic edition). Nashville: Abingdon Press.

 

Dohmen, C (1997). מִזְבֵּחַ. In Botterweck GJ, Ringgren H, & Fabry H.J. (eds.), & Stott D W (trans.) Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament (Revised Edition, Vol. 8). Grand Rapids: Eerdmans.

 

Ellwood RS (1999). The Politics of Myth: A Study of C.G. Jung, Mircea Eliade, and Joseph Campbell. SUNY Series, Issues in the Study of Religion. Albany: State University of New York Press.

 

Fox E. (1995) The Five Books of Moses: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy. Schocken Bible 1 New York: Schocken Books.

 

Friedman RE. (1997) Who Wrote the Bible? San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco.

Girard, René. (1989). The Scapegoat. Translated by Yvonne Freccero. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Graeber D and Wengrow D (2021). The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

 

Heiser MS and Setterholm VM. (2013). Glossary of MorphoSyntactic Database Terminology. (electronic edition) Lexham Press.

 

Jenson, Robert. Systematic Theology, vol. 1: The Triune God. New York, Oxford University Press, 1997.

 

Joüon P and Muraoka T. (2003). A Grammar of Biblical Hebrew Rome: Pontificio Istituto Biblico.

 

Kozlowski JM and Chodyko M (2023) Socrates’ Triple Accusation in Plato’s Apol. 24b–c as a Source of Jesus’ Triple Accusation in Luke 23.2. New Testament Studies 69, no. 4 (October): 472–75. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0028688523000188

 

Levenson, Jon D. (1988), Creation and the Persistence of Evil: The Jewish Drama of Divine Omnipotence, San Francisco: Harper & Row.

 

[LSJ] Liddell HG, Scott R, Jones HS, and McKenzie R (1996) A GreekEnglish Lexicon, with a Supplement. Rev. and augm. Oxford : New York: Clarendon Pres ; Oxford University Press.

 

MacDonald DR (2015). Luke and Vergil: Imitations of Classical Greek Literature. Lanham/Boulder/New York/London: Rowman & Littlefield.

 

MacDonald, Nathan. The Making of the Tabernacle and the Construction of Priestly Hegemony. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023.

 

Olds DB (2020) Praxis for care of the atmosphere in times of climate change: analysis, quantitative methods, and ecclesial development. D. Min. Dissertation 2020. San Francisco Theological Seminary. Available at https://shorturl.at/hsLMR (accessed 15 January 2024).

 

Olds DB (2023) Architectures of Grace in Pastoral Care: Virtue as the Craft of Theology beyond Strategic and Authoritative Biblicism. Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock.

 

Porter N (2021)  Between the Cherubim: The ‘Mercy Seat’ as Site of Divine Revelation in Romans 3.25. Journal for the Study of the New Testament 44, no. 2: 284–309.

 

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Schnittjer GE (2006) The Torah Story: An Apprenticeship on the Pentateuch. Grand Rapids: Zondervan.

 

Silverman JM (2016) Cyrus II. In: Barry JD, Bomar D, Brown DR, Klippenstein Rm Mangum D, Wolcott CS, Wentz L, Ritzema E, & Widder W. (Eds.), The Lexham Bible Dictionary. Lexham Press (electronic ed.).

 

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[1] “The idea [Anselm’s theory of atonement] that God cannot show mercy without the satisfaction of justice, and that he views yet an additional crime as constituting such satisfaction, casts a most dubious picture of God.”

—Jenson, Systematic Theology, 186.

[2] Contrast Plato’s Demiurge in the Timaeus is the Divine "Craftsman" who shapes Creation from chaotic substrates according to eternal archetypes of cosmic mind which are stable epigones of the "good" and thus defined so. A platonic hermeneutic leads both to expecting and awaiting recurrence of institutionalized forms and formalisms and the defense of and boundaries of their perceived earthly references and substantives. Any shared “participation” in such representations, while distinct, are partial--situated along the ego's dimensionless arc in the infinite, and so thus parochial. In this, Platonism is neither metaphysically unifying nor telic, and thus not “catholic.”