3. The Temple of Christ's Body
INTRODUCI'ION
xxi be no lasting earthly tabernacle or city: 'We seek one (yet) to come'
(Heb 13:14); when 'the earthly house of this habitation be dissolved, we have a building of God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens' (2 Co 51). The text forms part of the closing image in De templo.
The idea that the Church has already, since the Incarnation and Passion of Christ, spiritually replaced the Tabernacle and Temple on earth but is itself incomplete, awaiting its future fulfilment in heaven whose eternal joys can only be glimpsed and desired by the faithful still on earth is a fundamental assumption underlying Bede's
De templo. This does not mean that the Jewish Temple is to be reviled; rather it is to be revered because, like the Tabernacle, it had been divinely ordained in its day as a shadow or prefiguring of the divine temple 'not made with hands' and therefore a proper spiritual interpretation of its features still has much to teach the present Church. As well as looking back at the material structure of a building in the past, Christian exegetes also looked at scriptural accounts of the heavenly sanctuary yet to be revealed. Discussion of the heavenly Jerusalem was shaped by knowledge of the earthly sanctuaries which were held to prefigure it. The heavenly Jerusalem is thus built foursquare, recalling the Holy of Holies in the Temple of Solomon (Rv 21:6; 3 K 6:20); it has twelve gates inscribed with the names of the twelve tribes of Israel, recalling the encampment of the twelve tribes around the Tabernacle in the desert (Rv 21:13; Nb
2:3-31; Ezk 48:30-35). The theophany of the Ark of the Covenant in the heavenly sanctuary and the vision of the glory of God filling the heavenly Temple of the new creation (Rv 11:19; 155'8) evokes the scenes of God taking possession of his Tabernacle in the desert
(Ex 40:34-35) and of his Temple in Jerusalem (3 K 8:10-11; Is 6:4).
All three sanctuaries the Mosaic Tabernacle, Solomon's Temple and the heavenly Jerusalem signify God's presence with his people.
Clearly there is no suggestion in the New Testament of a particular church building as the replacement of the Temple: how, then, was
God's presence among his new chosen people expressed?
3. The Temple of Christ's Body In John's gospel Jesus is challenged by the Jews to give some sign of the divine authority by which he had presumed to cleanse the Temple in Jerusalem of its traders and money-lenders. He replied: 'Destroy