The Changing Theology of the Eschatological Temple in Christianity

Recently I found an older book that I’m very much enjoying in Post-Apostolic studies.

John Chrysostom and the Jews by Robert L. Wilken talks about the life of the golden-mouthed pastor during his time in Antioch and his confrontations with the Jewish population. One of the more interesting claims by Wilken is the fact that Chrysostom saw the influence of Jews in the city as a pervasive threat.

Upon the arrival of Julian the Apostate in Christian history, the threat of his rebuilding the temple in Jerusalem threatened the theological equilibrium that occupied the world of Antiochian Christians; namely, that the destruction of the temple, which was predicted by Christ, was a direct result of the punishment orchestrated by God on the Jews who killed Christ. On page 130, he writes, “In the Christian mind, the attempt to rebuild the temple in Jerusalem was a profound attack on the truth of Christianity.”

It started me thinking about the reality of prophecy and contemporary Christians, where the keepers of the covenant tend to be the ones of Evangelical Fundamentalists who subscribe to dispensational theology.

While the majority of Christians do not work a literal third temple into their eschatologies, the dispensationalists who have made interpreting the mysterious apocalyptic literature of the New Testament a cottage industry (Jack van Impe, Hal Lindsay, John Hagee, or Tim LaHaye) have an entire narrative to go along with it. The past in which the rebuilding of the Temple was considered an act that could disprove the reality of the Christian witness was re-appropriated as an important plotline of the eschatological story. Now, the rebuilding of the Temple is seen as an act of spiritual defiance and apotheosis, not to disprove the Christian witness, but one that moves the action towards its final culminating act: the confrontation between Satan and God. In this temple, dispensationalists believe the anti-Christ sets himself up as God.

This engagement with 2 Thessalonians 2:4 is often melded as an appendage of the Revelation narrative. Since this epistle is spurious and considered one of the latest, it is interesting that the idea of God’s temple still gains traction, since its writing comes after the destruction of the second temple. Unlike the temple’s destruction claimed by Jesus, which is often accused of vaticinium ex eventu (or prophecy after the fact) since the temple was thought to have been destroyed before the writing of the gospel, 2 Thessalonians actually avoids this problem. So we are left to wonder, what this temple might be. Of course, because the identity of this mysterious temple is unresolved, it remains open season for biblical interpreters.

It’s always quite illuminating, but with every religion the theological outline though so unalterably God’s holy and unchanging revelation, shifts and changes based upon new information, new social situations, new conditions, and new attitudes.