The Temple of Jerusalem today.
The desecration of God’s Temple
by Regis Nicoll
January 10, 2019
The lamentable condition - indeed, crisis - of our day in which
heterodoxy and heteropraxy are not only tolerated but celebrated in the pew and pulpit, as well as the public square, was foretold by Jesus in arguably the most startling announcement of his ministry.
On the previous day, he had been received by the townspeople as the conquering king who would restore their nation to its former glory. Then, following an extended visit to the temple, Jesus looks back at the massive complex and tells his disciples,
“not one stone here will be left on another; every one will be thrown down.”
To folks expecting the imminent return of the Davidic kingdom, those words were confusing at best and crushing at worst. Not only was the temple one of the most impressive structures of that era — renovated into a magnificent monument by Herod over a 40-year period — it was central to the religious life and corporate identity of the Jewish people.
Thinking or, perhaps, hoping that Jesus was referring to an event in the distant future, his disciples ask him about the timeframe.
Jesus responds with a list of precursors:
famines, wars, earthquakes; things that have been a part of the human experience from the beginning, things that could be rationalized and dismissed from having any supra-natural significance.
But at the end of the list he adds something that no first century Jew could have mistaken:
“the abomination that causes desolation.” [It's the second time we come across this term in the past few days. Excommunicated traditional priest don Minutella used it twice - in the form 'desolating abomination' as it is found in most Englsih translations - to describe what awaits Jerusalem because of the transgressions of the Chosen People: “Many will be led into sin; they will betray and hate one another. Many false prophets will arise and deceive many; and because of the increase of evildoing, the love of many will grow cold…” (Mt 24, 10-12). Don Minutella refers specificially to the apparent apostasy at the very summit of the Church.]
It is the term the prophet Daniel used six hundred years earlier, foretelling the profane actions of a Syrian king. In 167 BC, Antiochus Epiphanes sacked Jerusalem and defiled the temple by sacrificing a sow on an altar erected to Zeus. The desecration ended the temple sacrifices and triggered the Maccabean revolt. It was a watershed moment in Jewish history, as familiar to Jesus’s questioners as the Boston massacre and American Revolution are to us today.
Jesus’s point was clear:
The awe-inspiring temple that the disciples were admiring would be defiled by a similar atrocity. But unlike Daniel’s prophesy, Jesus’s was fulfilled within the lifetimes of its hearers. In 70 AD the Roman army laid siege to Jerusalem, razing the temple and erecting imperial ensigns over its ruins. (As an aside, the lack of mention of this historical event in the biblical record is evidence of the New Testament’s early authorship; that is, well within the living memory of eyewitnesses.)
The case has been made that
“the abomination” also concerns an eschatological event — a blasphemous action by a future charismatic figure that ignites a period of intense global distress. While Jesus may have been predicting actions involving a re-built Jewish temple, it could be that his answer had to do with another temple.
Upon entering Jerusalem, Jesus made for the temple and, straight away, was incensed by what he saw: the Court of the Gentiles looked like a Damascus bazaar. The space devoted for gentile worship was crowded with stalls and merchandise. What’s more, temple authorities, animal inspectors, and merchants had conspired to exploit worshippers whose sacrifice or currency of exchange was deemed unsuitable.
Jesus’s table-turning reaction caused a momentary stir, but his stinging reproach, “My house will be called a house of prayer,” propagates out to the present generation.
In the Church age, God’s house is made up of believers who are, in the words of Peter, “like living stones, being built into a spiritual house to be a holy priesthood, offering spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.”
As the temple of the living God, the Christian church is not a commercial enterprise, but it is vulnerable to commercial pressures. For instance, in the face of stagnant or declining membership, how do churches respond?
- Do they up the “wow factor” of worship with foot-tapping praise music and “relevant” sermons perfunctorily linked to biblical texts, or does it remain faithful to traditional forms of worship?
- Do they back off or water down the historic Christian teachings, or do they proclaim them boldly and unapologetically?
- Do they host more bingo nights and youth events featuring pizza, Coke, and movies, or do they invest in a structured, life-long process of catechesis to create a transformative community of Christ-like Christians?
A church obsessed with Wall Street indicators — bodies, bucks, and buildings — and Madison Avenue strategies — increased relevance and entertainment value — is a church that has filled its sacred spaces with marketplace kitsch. And like the temple court that Jesus happened upon 2000 years ago, it may be full of activity and people, but a divine eyesore bereft of true worship and worshippers.
Finally, there is a third temple that has bearing in Jesus’s Olivet warning.
Earlier that day, Jesus had been approached by a group of religious leaders and political loyalists. The curious teaming of Pharisees and Herodians — normally adversarial factions — signaled that something was up. Indeed, they wasted no time putting the gotcha question to him: “Is it right to pay taxes to Caesar or not?” If he answered, yes, he would be labeled a traitor to Jews; if, no, he would be labeled an enemy of the state; either was a potentially life-ending response.
As was his custom in these “gotcha” situations, Jesus answered their question with one of his own: “Whose image is on the coin of the realm?” When they reply, his comeback silences them as their gimlet eyes go wide.
Jesus’s memorable line, “Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s,” conveys the dual allegiance of Christians. As citizens of the city of God, living in the city of man, Christians owe respect and duty to the civil magistrate: he is God’s instrument for restraining evil and promoting justice, and his image on our coinage reflects his material claims on us.
But there is another Authority, a higher one, to whom allegiance is owed.
- His image is not on the coin of the realm but on us.
- The Imago Dei is a stamp of divine ownership on mankind. Of all creation, humans alone bear the divine image of rational thought, aspirations, imagination, creativity, transcendent yearnings, philosophical questions, and moral awareness; and
- Humans alone are duty-bound to the One whose image they bear.
While all humans carry the imprint of the Imago Dei, Christians carry something more — something Paul described as, “Christ in you!” It is the fulfillment of Jesus’s promise to his disciples that he would abide in them through the Holy Spirit.
Paul told the Corinthian believers that their bodies are God’s temple, with a reminder that his temple is sacred. To a church that was gaining attention for carnality, rather than incarnational living, he warned:
“Neither the sexually immoral nor idolaters nor adulterers nor male prostitutes nor homosexual offenders nor thieves nor the greedy nor drunkards nor slanderers nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God.”
Emmanuel (God with us) dwells with his people, in the collective body of the Church and in the individual life of each believer.
- We honor him and maintain his sacred temple when we offer ourselves as living sacrifices, serving him with our minds, hearts, souls, and bodies as he has instructed us in his Word.
- We defile his temple when our affections for material success, social esteem, and sensual satisfaction result in the intrusion of a competing altar — that devoted to the sovereign Self.
Throughout the ages, God’s people have been identified by the “flesh.”
- Under the old covenant, the Israelites were identified by the circumcision of the flesh.
- Under the new covenant, Christians are identified by the works of the flesh — behaviors and lifestyles aligned to Jesus’s teachings with integrity of character reflecting the fruits of the Spirit. Problem is, as reported in various surveys over the years, the “flesh” of most Christians is not very distinctive.
This suggests that another gospel (an abomination) has found its way into our sanctuaries — one that, in the words of Protestant theologian Richard Niebuhr, famously tells of “a God without wrath who brings men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross.” [What a great definition for Christianity-lite and/or the church of Bergoglio!
So while the Christians have been looking for an abomination “out there,” in an individual or organization an ocean apart or galaxy far away,
it could be that the Invader has been patiently, but surely, setting up residence “in here,” where it was least suspected. If so, it follows a familiar pattern of biblical prophesy, one that calls for serious self-examination for every denomination and every believer.
Fr Z takes off from Mr. Nicoll's reflection...
Of desecration of liturgy and identity:
Wherein Fr. Z rants
January 10, 2019
Let me begin with several hooks upon which we can hang some useful ideas as we look down the line at an article from Regis Nichols at Crisis.
First, in April 2017, a preface Benedict XVI wrote for the Russian translation of the volume of his Opera Omnia concerning liturgy was released. In the preface, Benedict argues that,
- As a Church, we have placed other things before the worship of God.
- Hence, we are undergoing a crisis which is subverting the Church. - He wrote that “a true renewal of the liturgy is a fundamental condition for the renewal of the Church.”
In 1998, in his autobiography
Milestones, he wrote,
“I am convinced that the crisis in the Church that we are experiencing today is to a large extent due to the disintegration of the liturgy.”
This has been his position for a long time. It has been my position since my earliest experiences of traditional liturgy and my earliest talks with Joseph Ratzinger about it.
What happened?
- First, the mandates of the Second Vatican Council were by far outstripped by ideologically motivated experts who had as their goal not just renewal of the liturgy, but changes to the fabric of the Church.
- The liturgists of the Consilium, who managed to bring Paul VI’s power into their ploys, constructed rites on desk tops, massively changing what the Council Fathers said should not be changed unless there was a true good for the Catholic people and unless those changes came organically from what went before.
- The result was an artificial rather than organic construct, suddenly imposed from on high on people who had never desired what they got.
- In the aftermath, our Catholic identity was badly shaken.
- Along with the abandonment of other aspects of Catholic life, such as fasting, etc., our compasses were smashed.
- Statistics regarding vocations, schools, Mass attendance, etc., indicate the bad fruits.
This is one of the reasons why Benedict issued what will be seen in years to come as one of the most important gifts of his pontificate:
Summorum Pontificum.
- This juridical act makes it possible for all Latin Church priests to use both the older, traditional liturgical forms together with the newer, post-Conciliar forms.
- It was his desire that side-by-side celebrations of the two forms would jump start, as it were, the organic development of our sacred liturgical worship, serving as a corrective to abuses while recovering much of what was lost, but which remains sacred, great and beneficial.
In the decade following
Summorum Pontificum, from 2007-2017, the number of places where the traditional forms are celebrated in these USA shot from about 50 to over 500. This indicates something of the fruits of the document.
- Moreover, the knock-on effect on celebrations of the Novus Ordo is surely taking place as priests who learn the traditional form come to a deeper understanding of who they are – as priests – at the altar.
- This leaves an impression on congregations, who then begin to participate in the transforming rites in a new way.
Of course all of this has the liberal iconoclasts and the nearly papalotrous camp followers running scared.
I have come to view them much as the vendors and hawkers who set up their tables in the Temple’s Court of the Gentiles. They write strings of scare pieces about neo-traditionalism, purposely lying about why people seek traditional forms, attributing to them all manner of mischief.
Next, if we get our liturgical worship of God wrong, then everything else we do will fail. We build on sand.
- Put another way, familiar to long-time readers here, everything we undertake in the Church must begin with liturgical worship and must be brought back to liturgical worship.
If the virtue of justice governs what is due to human persons, since God is a qualitatively different Person, a different virtue governs what we owe to God: religion.
The primary way in which we individually and collectively fulfill the virtue of religion is through our sacred liturgical worship.
- If we screw up on the virtue of religion and our sacred worship, then all our other relationships will be out of harmony.
- We have to get our worship right. This is so intimate to who we are as Catholics that I constantly say: We Are Our Rites.
- And because we have an individual and collective vocation not just within the Church (ad intra) but to the world around us (ad extra), we might say even
“Save The Liturgy – Save The World”.
But if we don’t know who we are, what we believe, how to act on it and have thin to no strong supports and sources in our sacred worship of God, then we will be ineffective across the board. Why should the world pay any attention to us if we don’t know who we are?
The virtue of religion can be sinned against by idolatry, superstitions, sacrilege, and blasphemy.
- We creatures must recognize who God is and act accordingly both inwardly and outwardly.
- When this at last becomes habitual for us, then we have the virtue of religion.
- A virtue is a habit. One good act does not make us virtuous.
- If being prudent or temperate or just, etc., is hard for us, then we don’t yet have the virtue.
Circling back to Ratzinger, and his thesis about genuine and artificial worship, he once said in an address in 1985 at a music conference, that
artificiality in worship brings false, human productions into play, which, given the description of religion, above, smacks of, opens the way to, idolatry and sacrilege. He also said:
It has become evident that the primacy of the group derives from an understanding of the Church as institution based upon a concept of freedom which is incompatible with the idea and the reality of the institutional.
Indeed, this idea of freedom is no longer capable of grasping the dimension of the mysterium in the reality of the Church. Freedom is conceived in terms of autonomy and emancipation, and takes concrete shape in the idea of creativity, which against this background is the exact opposite of that objectivity and positiveness which belong to the essence of the Church’s liturgy. The group is truly free only when it discovers itself a new each time.
We also found that liturgy worthy of the name is the radical antithesis of all this.
- Genuine liturgy is opposed to an historical arbitrariness which knows no development and hence is ultimately vacuous.
- Genuine liturgy is also opposed to an unrepeatability, which is also exclusivity and the loss of communication without regard for any groupings.
- Genuine liturgy is not opposed to the technical, but to the artificial, in which man creates a counter-world for himself and loses sight of, indeed, loses up feeling for, God’s creation.
The antitheses are evident, as is the incipient clarification of the inner justification for group thinking as an autonomistically conceived idea of freedom.
BTW… “autonomy”, for Ratzinger, across the years of his writing is nearly almost a negative.
Take note of his point about being closed in, not truly free, a group discovering itself. This is why he argued for
ad orientem worship which opens outward rather than creating a closed circle. That’s another issue.
This brings me to the piece by Regis Nichols in
Crisis. He writes about The Desecration of God’s Temple in three different modes.
Nichols uses the images of the desecration of the ancient Temple in Jerusalem for how the Church today is being desecrated. First, in 167 BC by Antiochus Epiphanes, which prompted the Maccabean Revolt. Next, the violation of the Court of the Gentiles, which was dramatically cleared by the Lord. Also, as Peter describes, we are the living stones that build the new temple. Nichols plays that out:
Jesus’s table-turning reaction caused a momentary stir, but his stinging reproach, “My house will be called a house of prayer,” propagates out to the present generation.
In the Church age, God’s house is made up of believers who are, in the words of Peter, “like living stones, being built into a spiritual house to be a holy priesthood, offering spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.”
As the temple of the living God, the Christian church is not a commercial enterprise, but it is vulnerable to commercial pressures. For instance, in the face of stagnant or declining membership, how do churches respond?
- Do they up the “wow factor” of worship with foot-tapping praise music and “relevant” sermons perfunctorily linked to biblical texts, or does it remain faithful to traditional forms of worship?
- Do they back off or water down the historic Christian teachings, or do they proclaim them boldly and unapologetically?
- Do they host more bingo nights and youth events featuring pizza, Coke, and movies, or do they invest in a structured, life-long process of catechesis to create a transformative community of Christ-like Christians?
A church obsessed with Wall Street indicators — bodies, bucks, and buildings — and Madison Avenue strategies — increased relevance and entertainment value — is a church that has filled its sacred spaces with marketplace kitsch. And like the temple court that Jesus happened upon 2000 years ago, it may be full of activity and people, but a divine eyesore bereft of true worship and worshippers.
Remember what Ratzinger said, above?
Groups closed in and rediscovering themselves… and only themselves. That’s not true freedom and what they bring into the sanctuary is idolatry.
In another work,
Spirit of the Liturgy, when Ratzinger talks about how people are imbued with immanentism,
he describes how the Jews made the Golden Calf, not because they really thought it was a god, but because it was easier.
Speaking of easier, Nichols ends with a sobering quote from Richard Niebuhr, which I cannot help but connect to the logorrhea of Faggioli and a recent ridiculous offering at Fishwrap by a CTU teacher.
This suggests that another gospel (an abomination) has found its way into our sanctuaries — one that, in the words of Protestant theologian Richard Niebuhr, famously tells of “a God without wrath who brings men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross.”
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 11/01/2019 05:30]