Devotional Poetry and the Temple of God

Where does one find the presence of the divine? This is a question that has fueled religious conflict but has also inspired personal spiritual quests and poetry like George Herbert’s The Temple. The title implies that his volume is a sacred structure, a place where he seeks and worships God. But even as Herbert contemplated the possibility that his poetry would be published, he used the title “The Temple” even knowing that doing so in print would be controversial. Because it evoked the ancient Jewish Temple, it raised for English Protestants the problem that had preoccupied Christianity from its inception: what is or should be the relation of Christianity to the Judaism from which it emerged?¹

In the New Testament, the Jewish Temple is the symbol of Judaism – it is the place and institution where, and against which, Jesus defines himself. Mary and Joseph bring the infant Jesus to the Temple to perform the custom of the law, which requires the sacrifice of doves or pigeons to redeem the first-born male child, who belongs to God (Luke 2:27). When he is twelve, his parents take him for the annual Passover feast to the Temple, where he stays behind. They return to find him in the Temple, listening to the “doctors,” asking questions, and giving answers that show his exceptional understanding (Luke 2:46-47). The Gospel accounts describe Jesus teaching “daily” in the Temple, but also narrate the increasing opposition between Jesus and the Temple. He drives out the sheep and oxen that were to be used for the Passover sacrifices, and overturns the tables of the money changers (Mark 11, Matthew 21). The Jews in the Temple take up “stones to cast at him; but Jesus hid himself, and went out of the temple, going through the most of them, and so passed by” (John 8:59). When he tells the Jews in the Temple, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up,” they think he’s speaking of the building that took forty-six years to build, “But he spoke of the temple of his body.” While in Gethsemane, the “chief priests and captains of the temple and the elders” confront him as a thief, a blasphemer, an enemy (Luke 22, John 18), and on the cross he is mocked, “Thou that destroyest the Temple, and buildest it in three days, Save thyself” (Mark 15:29-30). The gospel’s point is that Jesus takes the place of the Jewish Temple (which is defined as anti-Christ) – a point reinforced by the Pauline gospels, in which the Gospel contrasts with and supplants the Law.

The Jewish Temple, in the New Testament, thus stood for a religion that was displaced as inadequate. Christians interpreted the destruction of the Temple by the Romans in 70 CE as conclusive proof that the divine presence had left the Jewish Temple. God now dwelt with Christians, whether in the spirit or in the increasingly elaborate churches that came to be built after Christianity became the official religion of Rome.

But although Christianity defined itself in opposition to the Temple and the Judaism from which it separated, the separation was never neat or final, in part because the New Testament depended upon the Old, and in part because elements of Judaism were incorporated into the Christian religion and liturgy, even as they were transformed. Two columns in St. Peter’s Basilica supposedly were from the Jewish Temple, brought to Rome by Constantine the Great in the fourth century.² With the Reformation, the relation of the Jewish past to reformed Christian identity needed to be defined, and once again we find the Jewish Temple assuming a prominent place in the discussion and debates.

Zealous Protestants were keen to draw a sharp line between Christianity and Judaism. Didn’t the Roman Catholic churches, with their gold, visual beauty, and elaborate rituals, emulate the Jewish Temple and its worship, which Christ had abrogated? For John Foxe, the Church of Rome was anti-Christian not only because it incorporated supposedly pagan religion but also because it failed...