"We seldom get into trouble when we speak softly. It is only when we raise our voices that the sparks fly and tiny molehills become great mountains of contention."
Grace and the Temple: Insights from a Jewish Scholar
by Jeff Lindsay
Some
of our fellow Christians misunderstand LDS teachings regarding grace,
feeling that our choice to obey God and respect His commandments
somehow means we think we earn our salvation and thereby deny the
mercy and grace of Christ.
That
confusion sometimes becomes frenetic when our critics discuss the
temple, which to them epitomizes Mormon emphasis on works and
self-righteousness rather than relying on the merits of Christ.
The
concept of having to keep specific commandments in order to have a
church leader give you a temple recommend may be at the apex of their
loathing of the temple.
In
reality, the temple is a place of turning our hearts to Christ, using
teachings, symbols, and covenants to help us focus our lives more
fully on Him and recognize the power of His sacrifice and mercy to
transform, bless, and save us. It is, however, a foreign place to us
modern people, for it is rooted in ancient Middle Eastern concepts
that are a far cry from the mundane world we live in.
On
the issue of grace and obedience in a temple context, the teachings
of early Christianity help shed light on modern LDS concepts, as I
argue, for example, on my LDSFAQ
pages on covenants and on grace
and works. But useful insights can be found even earlier that that, going back
to the ancient Jewish temple itself.
The
connection between God's grace and our obedience in the context of
temple worship was noted by Jewish scholar Jon D. Levenson in his
book, Sinai and Zion: An Entry into the Jewish Bible
(Minneapolis: Winston Press, 1985).
Early
in his book, Levenson discusses the six ancient steps of the covenant
formulary, the archetypal pattern of covenant making that scholars
only recently recognized in ancient Middle Eastern documents, and
which is also found in the LDS temple and in King Benjamin's
covenant-focused speech at the Nephite temple.
In
discussing how the covenant between God and man was repeatedly
renewed, and how God's requirements for keeping his commandments were
recalled, Levenson reminds us that the basis for the required
obedience is God's past grace, and His desire to transform us into
more holy beings:
His
past grace grounds his present demand. To respond wholeheartedly to
that demand, to accept the yoke of the kingdom of heaven, is to make
a radical change, a change at the roots of one’s being.
To
undertake to live according to Halakhah is not a question of
merely raising one’s moral aspirations or of affirming “Jewish
values,” whatever that means. To recite the Shma and mean it is
to enter a supramundane sovereignty, to become a citizen of the
kingdom of God, not simply in the messianic future to which that term
also refers (e.g., Dan 2:44), but also in the historical present.
(Levenson, p. 85)
Later,
Levenson discusses Jeremiah 7:1-5, Jeremiah's speech at the temple
where Jeremiah challenges the Jewish reliance on the temple as a
place that will protect them. The potential grace available from that
Holy House will not be afforded if the people do not accept the moral
code that goes with it and rely on the temple as a place instead of a
sacred tool to build their relationship with deity. Jeremiah opposes
the disconnect between our morality and the grace God affords.
As
you read this next passages from Levenson, consider it in the context
of the misleading grace versus works argument so often levied against
LDS religion.
I
suggest that Jeremiah's critique of those who claimed "we are
safe" because of the temple is not unrelated to some of our
critics who say "we are saved" because of their belief in
the Bible while claiming that Christ's call therein to "keep the
commandments" somehow cannot mean what it says, and that those
who teach that doctrine actually deny God's grace.
What
Jeremiah does oppose is the idea that the divine goodness so evident
in the Temple is independent of the moral record of those who worship
there, in other words, the effort to disengage God’s
beneficence from man’s ethical deeds and to rely, as a
consequence, on grace alone.
To
the complacent cry of his audience that “We are safe” (v
10), the prophet responds by noting that the Temple is not “a
den of robbers” (v 11). The grace of God does not mean
exemption from the demands of covenant law, from ultimate ethical
accountability.
Grace
and law belong together. In separation, they become parodies of
themselves. For Jeremiah, this means that one cannot ascend into the
pure existence of the Temple with his impurities intact. He cannot
drag his filth into paradise and expect to benefit from paradisical
existence.
Mount
Zion is morally positive. It does not accept the moral debits of
those who seek only protection there. Rather, the protection follows
naturally from the relationship with God which is appropriate in that
place. Such a relationship excludes the practice of the sins
prohibited in the Decalogue (v 9). (Levenson, p. 168; emphasis mine)
Brilliantly
stated! The temple is about the relationship between God and man. It
is a cosmic mountain intended to pull us higher, but we must seek to
climb toward the ideals that are before us.
We
must seek to shed, or rather, allow Him to rip away, the impurities
that weigh us down and hold us back from God's presence. We cannot
cling to Him while clinging to our dross. It is in a covenant
relationship with Him in His holy temple where we can most fully
receive of His grace. As Levenson puts it, "Grace and law belong
together." Levenson continues:
For
them [Jeremiah's audience], the delicate, highly poetic image of the
cosmic mountain has become a matter of doctrine, and the doctrine can
be stated in one prosaic sentence: In the Temple one is safe.
The
Temple does not thrill them and fill them with awe; the vision of it
does not transform them. For them, the appropriate response to sight
of the Temple is anything but the radical amazement of a pilgrim.
Instead, the Temple in their eyes is simply a place like any other,
except that there the long arm of moral reckoning will not reach.
Hence,
they approach Zion in the stance of one about to take possession of
what he deserves, not in the stance of one humbly accepting a
miraculous gift which no one can deserve. Jeremiah’s audience
seeks to profit from the Temple without committing themselves to the
moral dynamic that animates it. (Levenson, pp. 168-9; emphasis mine)
Ironically,
it may be that some of our critics — some, not all! — who
speak of the security of grace reach for that gift with the same
flawed attitude that Jeremiah condemned in the Jews who misunderstood
God's work and failed to grasp why they needed to repent in order to
obtain the true blessings available through the temple of their day.
The
greatest miraculous gifts of the gospel, gifts that we cannot
possibly deserve, are offered with conditions in covenant
relationships, not that earn us anything, but allow God to transform
us into the people He wants us to be as we strive to follow Him and
seek to enter His presence.
As
for the notion of standards of worthiness being connected to entry
into the temple, the LDS concept may not be as innovative and foreign
to the Bible as our critics would like to think. In the paragraphs
shortly after the previous quotation, Levenson makes further points
about the temple as he discusses Psalm 24:
This
psalm [Ps. 24], chanted by Jews today on Sunday mornings, opens with
a cosmic perspective. The first stanzas (vv 1-2) reminds us that the
earth rests upon the waters of chaos and owes it endurance to the
power of the creator who so established it.
This
image of God’s putting the earth upon a foundation resting over
the waters is, once again, a reflection of the idea of the Temple as
cosmic capstone, holding back the waters of anti-creation [note: I
would add that this resonates with the creation story that begins the
LDS Endowment and with the LDS concept of the baptismal font in the
lowest part of the temple, which may be symbolic of the waters of
chaos and death conquered by Christ and His Resurrection].
The
term “all that it holds” (v 1; literally, “its
fulness”) reminds us of the chant of the seraphim in Isaiah’s
vision in the Temple:
Holy,
holy, holy is the Lord of Hosts, The fulness of the whole earth is
his glory (Isa 6:3)
In
Isaiah 6, the “fulness of the earth” is God’s
glory; in Psalm 24, it belongs to God, who is the king of glory. In
both instances, the term indicates the cosmic scope of the Temple.
Thus, the second stanza of the psalm (vv 3–6) does not change
the subject significantly. We have simply moved from a description of
the cosmic rooting of the universe to the question of who shall be
admitted to the mountain shrine which still incarnates that original
creative energy.
In
this and in the last stanza (vv 7–10), there seems to be an
antiphonal structure. One group of worshippers asks the questions,
and another answers. It is not readily evident how the roles were
divided, who said what, but one can imagine that vv 3, 8a, and 10a
were recited by worshippers seeking admission to the Temple complex
and that vv 4–6, 8b–9, and 10b–c are the answers of
the priests who guarded the gates.
Alternatively,
it may be that the priests asked the questions by way of examining
the congregation to determine whether they indeed met the
qualifications for entry, and that the answers were supplied by the
congregation to demonstrate their mastery of the requirements.
In
either case, the issue in the second stanza (vv 3–6) is, what
are the ethical characteristics of life within the Temple precincts?
What must one be like to reach the top of the sacred mountain?
The
last stanza (vv 7–10) makes it clear that the presence of God
enters the Temple only after the ethical prerequisites of vv 3–6
have been met. It may be that these verses accompanied a procession
of some sort, with the Ark, perhaps, symbolizing YHWH. At all events,
it must not be missed that the second and third stanzas are parallel.
Each
records an entrance to the Temple complex, one by visiting
worshippers and one by YHWH the king.
In
light of the first stanza, it is clear that YHWH might have chosen to
dwell anywhere. The world is his. His presence in the Temple, as I
have argued, does not imply his absence elsewhere. Rather, he
intensifies his presence and renders it most dramatic at the cosmic
center. It is there that his power and his sovereignty are most
vivid, for it is there that we see the palace he founded upon the
tamed body of his primal challenger, the seas.
Similarly,
according to the second stanza (vv 3–6), those who enter there
must represent the apex of ethical purity. They must be people of
“clean hands and a pure heart” (v 4). In no way could the
cultic and the ethical be more tightly bound together.
They are two sides of the same experience. The cult celebrates the
glorious victory of God the king, through which he established order
in the universe.
The
ethical tradition, as it appears in Psalm 24, celebrates the order
and lawfulness of man, through which he qualifies for entry into the
presence of God in the palace he has won. It is significant that in
Hebrew the same term (sedeq) can indicate either victory or
righteousness/justice. The Temple represents the victory of God and
the ethical ascent of man. (Levenson, pp. 170-172; emphasis mine)
The
victory of God and the ethical ascent of man are linked, reminding us
of what the gospel is all about. "For this is my work and my
glory, to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man"
(Moses 1:39). God's victory, Christ's victory, is about enabling our
righteousness and eternal life through the power of the Atonement,
enabled by the transformational covenant relationship offered
therein.
When
Christ was asked what we must do to obtain eternal life, His answer
was unmistakably clear in Matthew 19:16-21: "If thou wilt enter
into life, keep the commandments." Christ followed that with a
request, carefully tailored for the needs of the rich young man He
spoke to with love, to go and sell all that he had in order to follow
Christ.
To
sell all for the Kingdom of God was not an impossible request
intended to sarcastically mock the notion of keeping the
commandments, but was what many early Christians actually did, and
what this rich young man needed to do. It's also what modern
Christians in the temple covenant to do, potentially, in consecrating
themselves and all that they have to the building of God's kingdom.
In
this way, the wealthy can let go of the dross that weighs them down
and hinders their climb on the temple mount, a climb in which God
reaches down to us in grace and pulls us into his presence in a
sacred grip of grace, if only we will let Him.
Jeff Lindsay has been defending the Church on the Internet since 1994, when he launched his
LDSFAQ website under JeffLindsay.com. He has also long been blogging about LDS matters on
the blog Mormanity (mormanity.blogspot.com). Jeff is a longtime resident of Appleton,
Wisconsin, who recently moved to Shanghai, China, with his wife, Kendra.
He works for an Asian corporation as head of intellectual property. Jeff and Kendra are the parents of 4 boys, 3 married and the the youngest on a mission.
He is a former innovation and IP consultant, a former professor, and former Corporate Patent
Strategist and Senior Research Fellow for a multinational corporation.
Jeff Lindsay, Cheryl Perkins and Mukund Karanjikar are authors of the book Conquering
Innovation Fatigue (John Wiley & Sons, 2009).
Jeff has a Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from Brigham Young University and is a registered US
patent agent. He has more than 100 granted US patents and is author of numerous publications.
Jeff's hobbies include photography, amateur magic, writing, and Mandarin Chinese.