The Temple in Your Parish
How Every Orthodox Church on Earth Is Built From a Blueprint God Delivered Around 1500 BC - And Why That Should Wreck You a Little
You’re trying to assemble an IKEA bookshelf.
You have the instructions. You have the little paper bag of dowels and the plastic cam-lock fasteners. You have that weird L-shaped Allen wrench that is somehow always the exact tool required and is also somehow always going to be lost by next Tuesday. You have Piece A and Piece B and Piece 47-C, which you were told was “not needed for most configurations” but which is apparently critical for this one.
You are going to follow those instructions exactly, because if you don’t, if you put the back panel on backwards, or skip the step about pre-drilling the little cam holes, or tighten the bolts out of order, the whole thing is going to wobble. Or lean. Or not fit together properly and you’ll just end up having to take it all apart and put it back together properly.
You will obey the instructions. Meticulously. For a bookshelf.
Have you ever wondered why we spend 3 hours following the blueprint for a piece of Swedish particle board to the exact millimeter, but the minute someone suggests that God’s instructions for how to build His house might actually matter we collectively shrug and go “well, it’s the thought that counts” and throw up a pole barn with some folding chairs and a projector screen?
Because…. (and this isn’t going to make me popular):
God actually did give instructions for how to build His house. Very specific instructions. He dictated the dimensions. He specified the materials. He designed the furniture. He designed the decorations, images and visuals, he prescribed the vestments of the priests down to the color of the thread and the arrangement of the pomegranates on the hem. (Yes, pomegranates. Fruit embroidery. On the priest’s robe. We’ll get there.) He did this on Mount Sinai, to Moses, in a conversation that covers roughly seven chapters of the Book of Exodus. And when He was done giving the instructions, he said this:
“See that thou make all things according to the pattern shown to thee on the mount.”
Read that again. Pattern. Not suggestion. Not general concept. Not “vibe.” Pattern. The Greek Septuagint uses typos - the word from which we get “type” and “typology.” God gave Moses a type, a pattern, a blueprint. And Moses was to make things according to that pattern.
And here is the question this entire article exists to answer:
What if somebody actually did?
What if, after the resurrection, after the tearing of the veil, after Pentecost and the sending out of the Apostles - somebody took God’s blueprint, held it up against the new reality of the risen Christ, and built Him a house on purpose? What if that house is still being built today, in every country on earth, by people who learned how to build it from people who learned how to build it from people who learned how to build it from the Apostles themselves?
What if the blueprint never went away?
Giddy up and let’s Ggggggoooooooooooooo.
Architecture Is Theology
In the first article of this series, I established a principle that is going to do a lot of the heavy lifting for this whole project: lex orandi, lex credendi. The law of prayer is the law of belief. How a church worships is how a church actually believes.
There is a sister principle, but I don’t think it has a Latin phrase and I’m not going to just make one up, because I don’t have to. The Fathers have already said it. Repeatedly. At length. For centuries. To paraphrase it basically boils down to is this:
What you build to worship in is what you believe about worship.
Eusebius of Caesarea, around 315 AD - just after the persecution of Diocletian ended and Christians could finally build publicly again - delivered a dedicatory oration at the consecration of the rebuilt basilica at Tyre. The oration is preserved in full in Book 10 of his Church History (read it here.) He calls the bishop Paulinus “a new Beseleel, the architect of a divine tabernacle, or Solomon, king of a new and much better Jerusalem, or also a new Zerubabel, who added a much greater glory than the former to the temple of God.” Eusebius is not treating the Christian basilica as something new. He is treating it as the direct lineal descendant of the Tabernacle that Moses built, the Temple that Solomon built, and the Second Temple that Zerubbabel built. The fourth-century Christian church is, in Eusebius’s own mouth, the continuation of that same architectural tradition - fulfilled, transfigured, but unmistakably the same lineage.
And Eusebius is not inventing this interpretation at Tyre. He is reporting it. He is giving voice to a theology of sacred architecture that the Church had already cultivated for generations before him.1
Three centuries later, St. Maximus the Confessor writes a work called the Mystagogia, literally “the teaching of the mysteries.” In which he lays out, in systematic theological detail, what the various parts of a church building mean. The nave is the world of the faithful. The sanctuary is the kingdom of heaven. The screen that divides them is the threshold between the two ages. The whole building, taken together, is an image of the cosmos, of the human person, and of the Kingdom of God. This is not metaphor. This is not syntactic sugar. This is theology rendered in stone and wood and screen and lamp, and Maximus spells it out explicitly because, for him, the building teaches. The building forms the faithful who stand in it. It is a catechesis2 you can walk into.
A century after Maximus, St. Germanus of Constantinople - the Ecumenical Patriarch who defended the veneration of icons against the iconoclast emperors - begins his commentary On the Divine Liturgy with this:
“The Church is the temple of God, a sacred space, a house of prayer, the convocation of people, the Body of Christ... She is heaven on earth, where the transcendent God dwells as if in his own home and passes through.”
Heaven on earth. Where the transcendent God dwells as if in his own home. That is not hyperbole, and it’s not a quaint eighth-century turn of phrase. That is the working definition of what an Orthodox church building is, preserved and prayed in Orthodox parishes to this day. Germanus’s commentary became the somewhat official explanation of the Divine Liturgy in the Byzantine world for the next six hundred years. What he says about the church building is what the Church said. It is what the Church continues to say.
So when I tell you that sacred architecture is not decoration - that it is not optional, that it is not “whatever works for your community,” that it is theology made of stone and wood and glass and paint - I am not giving you my personal opinion. I am reporting what Eusebius reported, what Maximus systematized, and what Germanus prayed. For the Fathers, sacred architecture is doctrine you can walk into. It is belief with a roof on it.
This is not a uniquely Christian idea. Every religious tradition on earth has understood this. The Greeks built temples to specific gods in specific shapes for specific reasons. The Egyptians laid out their tombs according to cosmic principles. The Muslims built the Dome of the Rock on the exact spot where they believe Muhammad ascended to heaven. The Buddhists orient their stupas to the cardinal directions. Everyone knows that what you build to worship in matters.
Everyone, apparently, except modern Western Christianity - which, unmoored from the tradition of the roman catholic church, decided that it didn’t really matter. The specific shape of the building became an afterthought. That one could worship God in a gothic cathedral, a converted warehouse, a storefront, a strip mall, or (I am not making this up) a repurposed Hooters in Johnson City, Tennessee.3 That sacred space is a concept, not a place. That God will meet you anywhere, so why bother with anywhere in particular?
I want to push back on that, because God Himself, on Mount Sinai, in front of Moses, did not say “build me a worship experience that reflects your local cultural context.” He said make all things according to the pattern shown to thee on the mount.
He had a pattern. He gave it to us. Let’s look at what it was.
The Blueprint God Delivered
Open your Bible to Exodus chapter 25.
What you are about to read is one of the most detailed construction specification documents in the ancient world. It runs from Exodus 25 through Exodus 31, with a repeat-performance in Exodus 35 through 40. (God dictates the plans. Then Moses repeats them back. Then they get built. Seven full chapters of detailed architectural instructions, delivered twice.) This is not casual. This is the most serious thing in the entire Torah besides the Ten Commandments themselves, and in fact, the Ten Commandments get stored inside the edifice these chapters describe.
This is the Tabernacle, the portable sanctuary that Israel carried through the wilderness for forty years. Later, under Solomon, the Tabernacle’s design was executed in stone and gold as the permanent Temple in Jerusalem. The Temple was destroyed, rebuilt after the Exile, and then magnificently expanded by Herod the Great just before the birth of Christ. It is this Herodian Temple, structurally identical in its essentials to the Tabernacle blueprint, that Jesus walked into, that He drove the money-changers out of, that His disciples admired for its massive stones. And it is this Temple whose veil tore in two at the moment of His death.
The shape of the Tabernacle, the First Temple, and the Herodian Temple was the same. The materials changed. The scale changed. The essentials did not. Because God gave the pattern once, and that pattern was the pattern.
Here is what the pattern looks like.
Three zones. Concentric. Each one holier than the last.
Zone One: The Outer Court. The largest area, also know as a preparation area, the one any worshiping Israelite could enter. In the Tabernacle, it was the open-air courtyard surrounded by a curtained wall. In the Temple, it became the Court of the Women and the Court of Israel. Later, under Herod, an outer Court of the Gentiles was added - but the original design was just “the court where the people stood.” This is where a great altar stood - the altar of burnt offering, where animal sacrifices were made. This is the place of preparation. The place where purification happened. The place where the worshiper came with his offering.
Zone Two: The Holy Place. You entered through a curtain. This was the interior of the sanctuary proper. Only priests could enter. Inside were three furnishings, and you will want to remember all three of them, because they are all going to come back:
The Menorah - the seven-branched golden lampstand, which burned perpetually from evening until morning. (Exodus 25:31-40)
The Table of Showbread - on which twelve loaves of bread were placed fresh every Sabbath, one for each tribe of Israel (Exodus 25:23-30)
The Altar of Incense - which stood directly before the veil, and on which incense was burned (Exodus 30:1-10) The Altar of Incense was a stationary piece of furniture, a small golden altar that stood directly in front of the veil, inside the Holy Place. Morning and evening, the priest burned the prescribed incense on it. Once a year, on Yom Kippur, the High Priest carried coals from this altar into the Holy of Holies in a portable censer (machtah in Hebrew.)
Perpetual light. Continually renewed offering bread. Regular incense. Continually offered in perpetual liturgical patterns. The Holy Place was not a place where stuff happened occasionally or casually. It was a place where the fundamental furniture of worship was always active according to prescribed patterns of worship.
Zone Three: The Holy of Holies. The innermost chamber. The place where God Himself dwelt, between the cherubim on the Mercy Seat of the Ark of the Covenant.
Only one person on earth could enter the Holy of Holies.
The High Priest.
And he could only enter on one day of the year.
Yom Kippur. The Day of Atonement.
And before the Holy of Holies hung the most important piece of fabric in the ancient world.
The Veil.
The Veil
Exodus 26:31-33 (read it):
The veil was made of blue, purple, and scarlet threads, woven with fine twisted linen. It was embroidered with cherubim - the angelic guardians of God’s presence. It hung on four pillars of acacia wood overlaid with gold, set in four silver sockets. It separated the Holy Place from the Holy of Holies. It was, according to Josephus (the Jewish historian writing at the end of the first century AD, and you can read him yourself here), approximately sixty feet tall in the Herodian Temple. Sixty feet. Sixty feet of embroidered linen separating the holy from the most holy.
Amazing, God’s instructions for His house included a sixty-foot wall of fabric, hand-embroidered with angels, woven with blue and purple and scarlet threads, hanging between the worshiper and the presence of God.
The veil did a very specific theological job. It said: you cannot come in here. Not because God is cruel. Not because God doesn’t want you. But because you are not yet ready, and until you are, approaching Him directly will kill you. The Law of Moses records the story of Uzzah, who touched the Ark of the Covenant to steady it when the oxen stumbled, and dropped dead on the spot (2 Samuel 6:6-7). God is not safe. The veil was a mercy. The veil was the thing that let you stand near without being consumed.
And the High Priest, once a year, on Yom Kippur, passed through the veil with the blood of the sacrifice, and sprinkled it on the Mercy Seat, and thereby atoned for the sins of the entire nation.
One priest. One day. One passage through the veil.
Until Good Friday.
On the ninth hour, at the moment Christ died on the Cross, three separate Gospel writers - Matthew, Mark, and Luke - record the same event: the veil of the Temple was torn in two from the top to the bottom (Matthew 27:51, Mark 15:38, Luke 23:45)4 From the top. Which is to say, from God’s side down. Not from man reaching up, but from God reaching down, and ripping the fabric in half.
Most of my Protestant readers know that this happened. Most of them have been told what it means. Most of them have been told wrong.
The standard Protestant reading is that the tearing of the veil abolished the Temple. That the veil tearing means sacred space is over. That we no longer need altars, priests, incense, vestments, or any of the rest of it, because Christ is the only priest we need and He already did the one sacrifice that mattered. There is a partial truth here. Christ is the only High Priest. His sacrifice is the one that matters. But the conclusion - therefore, we don’t do any of the rest of it - does not follow. Certainly this is not what the earliest Christians understood, the ones who lived while the Temple was still standing, the ones who saw the tearing happen - they didn’t draw that conclusion.
They did something else instead.
And the question is: what?
