1Cor3v17-18 - being-as-temple
Texting One Corinthians
“..If anyone destroys God's temple, God will destroy him. For God's temple is holy, and you are that temple. Let no one deceive himself. If anyone among you thinks that he is wise in this age, let him become a fool that he may become wise..” 1Cor3v17-18
It is interesting that Paul repeats this being-as-temple question:
🕍 Later in: 6v19 “..Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit..?” - within the context of speaking to individuals about their sexual behaviour - the temple here is holy-as-set-apartness in the perfection of pure distinction.
🕍 Here in: 3v16 “..Do you not know that you are God's temple and that God's Spirit dwells in you?” - within the context of speaking to the collective on the theme of division - the temple here is holy-as-wholeness in the perfection of peaceful unity.
🗼 We are a temple: a building not buildings. Paul is addressing us, us-as-one. 3v9 “You are .. God’s building.” Elsewhere, yes, a man builds his house on the rock etc, but here the architectural analogy is strongly about the coherence of the united megaproject, the cathedral of parts, the arcology, the gesamtkunstwerk.
📍 We are a temple: here not elsewhere. He goes on to emphasise this singularity of “foundation” v10,11,12 - the foundation specifically and securely places, immovably roots, permanently establishes a building here-and-not-there. The building here has a terrestriality, related to a theology of the land, and to a mandate to exercise earthly dominion.
📚 We are a temple: growing by accretion not multiplication The process of growth in view here is a layering-on-gold-and-stones-and-hay-etc activity. This is an accretive accrual of material over time, a deepening intensification. Distinct from the sower parable 30-fold, 60-fold etc. Here growth is a bolstering, compacting, meshing enrichment, as wax layers, tree rings, and double underlining.
🔥 Our temple material is tested by fire We are to be a building that lasts. Success looks like resilient, non-combustible shelter provision. As Ruskin’s “Let us think that we build forever..” This can be misused, in a nostalgic obsession with the inflexibly historical, or with a dogmatic neurosis about fire-proofing, or a moribund ossification of the church as a merely monumental form. But. In contexts, as London, of fleeting, faddish, fast-church, with thin relationality, emotional irresilience, therapeutic stage-play, liberal showmanship, membership-as-presenteeism and social-works as virtue-signalling, there is a large and acute need to be a substantial temple that can weather fire. 2020’s plague, riots and recession will sift what of church is actually church.
🎈🎈🎈 Our temple form is tested by fluid dynamics. And the purpose and the measure-of-success for that whole, is Spirit-indwelling. Will the jug hold the water? Do we think of church as a vessel? [Vessels vessels vessels] Do we attend to the coherent topology and surface integrity of that vessel? Crudely, if the Holy Spirit was a thousand red balloons and we-as-church were gathered in a hall holding hands in a circle, are we coordinated close enough to be able to say the red balloons can “dwell” inside our circle? Sure, it will leak, and sure the metaphor is limited. But. In truth, we are, for the most part, actively-not-encircling-the-balloons, we’re on our phones, we’re arms folded, we’re cliqued in subsets, we’re part-time, we’re staring at the wall, we’re having personal balloon experiences On. Our. Own.. Somehow, there needs to be a strength of imperative to make that common-life urgent. And, the measure of its vitality is the degree to which the church can functionally collectively be indwelt by the Spirit. This multi-personal envesselment is not nothing. It is a temple that you can v17 “destroy” What is this temple? What is templing, right now, very practically for us in London? Answers on a postcard.
❓ What is Temple? ~ some further tentative extrapolations
🛐 Temple as Symbolic Totality + Organising Principle
I’ve been a big fan of ‘Kingdom’ as an organising principle and chief metaphor for church as an economy and system, but I wonder if ‘Temple’ has something additional to offer. If the ‘Kingdom’ describes the rule and rein of the new world order, ‘Temple’ conjures in my mind the equipment, vehicles, artefacts of this culture. ‘Kingdom’ is adjectivised to describe the character of activity and the code of ethics in this domain. ‘Kingdom’ refers to the ruler: King Jesus, and to his charismatic servant leadership and his spiritual equipping power and his pure personal character which pervades all participants and which colours all activities which the ‘Kingdom’ consists in. So there is a ‘Kingdom’ mindset. The corresponding and entirely complementary ‘Temple’ mindset considers the practical tools for the task of living in this Kingdom. Somehow ‘Kingdom’ theology subtly allows a disembodied intangible immateriality. ‘Temple’ theology, for me, conjures a way of being in the world that is observable, durable and very practical - whilst being such for a symbolic greater-than, and whilst being necessarily predicated on a supernaturality. The ‘Kingdom’ can exist within and between the hearts of its citizens, whereas the ‘Temple’ stands starker as a human pyramid in a town square conspicuously a signpost for onlookers. Perhaps this is semantic.
🌉 Temple as Holiness + Infrastructure
To be a ‘Temple’ the whole has to be set-apart, and the parts have to be joined-up. Can it be said of the church in London that you are a Temple? Is it legible as such? Is it functional as such? Does our life-together constitute a thung thing. The supply and distribution rails for foodbank food suggest in a small way what such an intentional infrastructural city-within-a-city might look like. What if this applied to other aspects of wealth redistribution? What would it look like for your small group to be visibly a ‘Temple’ if an outsider looked at your finances and was able to discern a more-than-sum-of-parts coordinated whole in the way you-plural were a cathedral with your monies?
👨🌾 Temple as Membership + Partication
Wendall Berry’s essay ‘Health is Membership’ in ‘Art of the Commonplace’ considers modernity’s Health Industry of clinical facilities and professionalised care and contrasts it with the healing power of belonging at a relational scale to circles of personal care. The priestly priesthood of the Temple is a doing the doing of non-trivial, non-incidental, not-merely-accessory mutual aid. Local Trust’s report with The Long Crisis, which pictures post-Covid-19 scenarios also contrasts a possible dystopian future “Big Mother” wherein the state provision smothers all initiative, with “Winning Ugly” where unglamorous nodes of joined-up mutual aid organise to a more-than-sum compassionate cooperative - distinguished also from the anarchic self-help of “Fragile Resilient” which probably better characterises the atomised efforts of not-joined-up sub-Temple churching.
🕸️ Temple as Fractal Collectivity
Thatcher is mostly right in the assessment that “there’s no such thing as society..” We have not got a substantially enfranchised intermediate scale of organisation that would enable cooperation of groups at a size between the nuclear household and the monolith of the state. If our nation were a tree, it would appear as a vast singular trunk and a clump of leaves pasted directly to the flank of the main column. Representationally civic participation is a Potemkin affair - it is resented by both sides, arduous for the state, meaningless for the citizenry. Big-tech is organised similarly and more exploitatively. Twitter and its billion users. Airbnb and its billion users. Amazon and its billion users. Monolithic giants, with no locality, no purpose to the inefficiency of arbitrary coagulations of agency at any scale other than the atom or the network-whole. The Temple however, is a different proposition to organising. The preservation of personhood and the display of the glory of a personal God and the integrity of a relational universe being its chief end. It has nothing to gain and nothing to prove by excessive or impatient giantism. The temple exists wherever two or three are gathered in His name, and then can and must fit into subsidiary deaconries as fronds in a tree fern or stone tracery in rose window. For me, the key missing scale in this fractal is the household scale. Intentional, economically active, intergenerationally reconciled, households are the organs of a healthy organism - whereas, just now, as churching-christians, we’re mostly cells in tumourous medium-sized churches, weird demographic monocultures of 150+ individuals inadequately disambiguated, amateurly unspecialised, ungranularly purposed, lumpen consumers of a floppy body of generic christianing.
🦵💪 Temple-as-Body
Paul makes the your-body-is-a-temple starker in 6v19, and that individual and more biological body metaphor is more visceral. Sarah invoke’s Alastair Roberts’ theology of the body, quoted below and it bears thinking about for me as a human body carries a more urgent indivisibility in its metaphor. There is just one circulation system, if you bleed from any part long enough the whole dies. There can be no schismed magician’s assistant sawn through in a box. What if our church-being-as-body were so substantial and so conceptually utterly indivisible? Whereas, today, the church body-as-body is transhuman and synthetic, less than the sum of its phantom limbs, iron-lung and blood-bag.
“The body is objectivity, materiality, exteriority and priority in the sense that it comes before subjectivity, our sense of self and activity. .. It’s embeddedness in the natural order, in tradition, in society and in culture - are simultaneously pre-conditions-for yet also resistance-to the freedom of my subjectivity and action. .. These root me in a particular place and identity. .. The body alerts us to the givenness of the self. .. We are not autonomous. I must always express myself from the unchosen site of identity and meaning represented by my body.” Body and Baptism - Alastair Roberts (~10:01-10:58)
💯What if we were so literal about a church-as-temple-as-body? Covenanting with the givenness of a church-in-a-place - the massive opportunity cost of going all-in with one fallible church in one place. Going all-in with all eggs in one basket, for one throw of one dice in one postcode lottery? Actively using proportionate resource to redress the wounds in other parts of the church? No transplants, no amputations, no subsidy, no half measures, no cosmetics..
😇💸 Temple-as-Social-Holiness
Kim Tan’s vision of a Jubilee Gospel is so vital, and so Temple. It is so practical, in foregrounding a harrowing and personal financiality. He thinks about the intermediate scale: “community of goods” in shared households. And, his heart is for a total system through a language of the holy: “social holiness”
Non-vague Glocalism must start with the household.
Non-sentimental householding must start with holiness.
Non-trivial holiness must think systemically
🏡 The Temple must start with the household - as the Holy Club, as the Clapham Sect, as the Barnets and the university settlements, as the Schaeffers and L’Abri, as Emmaus and their industrious homes, as Green Pastures and their weaponised refurb, as Benedict et al’s redemption of the land by organised monastic dwelling, as Octavia Hill’s profitable dignity to homes for all, as Cadbury et al’s enduring landscapes of care, as George Muller for a certain era, and Hudson Taylor’s London salon and network of mission homes, as I’ve been learning from Newspeak House and Hacker houses generally, as Mounier saw to do with and for his cause of Personalism through living and publishing Espirit from an open home, as Habitat for Humanity has so organised, as Bonhoeffer thought to use the home, as Tobias Jones’ research at Pilsden and the Place of Refuge’s experiments, as the Bruderhof have displayed what can be done at massive scale today, as Little Gidding has kept on keeping on, as Henri Nouwen’s L’Arche shows dazzlingly inclusive humanising tooling of the home for care, as Rosaria Butterfield's gospel comes with a house key. The Temple must start with the household.
🏘️ From there, thence to assail the system with plausibility structures for social holiness.