What is a temple? The Bible has more than one answer

By John Hamer, Director of Outreach and Innovative Mission

The focal point of Community of Christ’s international headquarters complex in Independence, Missouri, is the Temple. Across Christian denominations, significant places of worship are commonly called cathedrals or basilicas. Very few use the designation “temple.” The primary exception is other denominations within the Latter Day Saint or Restoration movement, especially the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS church) headquartered on Temple Square in Salt Lake City, Utah.

Temples have become ever more central to the LDS church, which has constructed hundreds of them around the world and is currently engaged in building dozens more. Entrance into LDS temples is restricted. Only fully committed church members who pay a “full tithe” (understood as 10% of their income) and pass other tests of “worthiness” are allowed inside. The interiors of LDS temples are set apart for temple rituals unique to the Mormon tradition, including proxy baptisms on behalf of the dead, the “sealing” of married couples and families in the afterlife, and the “endowment” ceremony, which is also seen as a preparation for the afterlife.

Our own Temple in Independence is very different. It is open to everyone. There are no tests of fellowship to enter. It is the symbol of our mission initiative of “developing disciples” by fostering a culture of life-long learning. The Temple houses the library and archives of the church and our Center for Innovation in Ministry and Mission (CIMM). Most importantly, the Temple in Independence is dedicated to world peace, and our sole temple ritual is the prayer for peace.

Though very different today, both the LDS and Community of Christ temple traditions ultimately spring from the same source. This was the longing of members in the 1830s to “restore” the practices of the earliest Christian community as described in the Book of Acts. Acts chapter 2, verse 46 says that “day by day” the first Christians in Jerusalem “spent much time together in the temple.” Having read this passage, members of the Restoration longed to restore the same experience by building a temple of their own in Kirtland, Ohio, the headquarters of the church in 1836. This vision of the earliest Christians sharing and worshiping together in the Jerusalem temple has continued to inform our understanding of the Temple in Community of Christ.

The LDS understanding of temples changed when early members moved from the original goal of “restoring” the early Christian church to an expanded goal of “restoring all things,” including ideas and practices found in the Old Testament. According to the traditions recorded in the Hebrew Bible, the worship of the God of Israel was confined to a single location: the Jerusalem temple (and its predecessor, the tabernacle). It was in this single location that Aaronic priests and Levites ritually sacrificed offerings of animals and plants. And God’s presence was understood to dwell behind a veil or curtain within the temple’s innermost precinct, the Holy of Holies. No human was allowed to enter this sacred space, except the High Priest, who entered it on a single day, to offer a sacrifice that atoned for the entire people. While LDS temple practices did not revive animal sacrifice, Mormon temple rituals were believed to be based on rituals practiced in the Jerusalem temple at the time of Solomon. (In fact, the direct inspiration were rituals of contemporary Freemasonry, which were inaccurately thought to have great antiquity.)

Besides the idea of temples found in the Old Testament and Acts, the Bible includes a third vision of the temple. The gospels tell the story that at the moment of Jesus’ death on the cross, the veil covering the Holy of Holies in Jerusalem was torn open—symbolizing the end of the idea that God’s presence was confined to a single, physical house. The universal God is present everywhere in the universe and can be worshiped everywhere. Christ himself served as the ultimate atoning sacrifice, ending ritual sacrifice at a physical temple.

This third Biblical view of temples is found in the First Epistle of Peter. The author of First Peter names Christ, the living stone, as the cornerstone of a spiritual temple:

Come to him, a living stone, though rejected by mortals yet chosen and precious in God’s sight, and like living stones let yourselves be built into a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ. (1 Peter 2:4–5)

In this understanding, the meaning and imagery of the temple as “the house of the Lord” lives on for Christians—even as the physical temple in Jerusalem lost its function and was soon afterwards destroyed forever. Disciples who follow Christ’s example allow themselves to become the living stones of a temple that is spiritual rather than material. Thus, in the same way that God’s Church is not a building—it is the people—the true, living temple—the house in which the Lord’s Spirit can dwell—consists of all of us, everywhere, as we seek to embody Christ in the world and in our own communities.