Where is God’s temple today?

(This is the third in a series of critiques of Rachel Held Evans’s “A Year of Biblical Womanhood.” If you missed earlier posts, click on the links below.)

1. A year of biblical womanhood—or not

2. What did Jesus do for women?

For one year, Rachel Held Evans is trying to follow “as literally as possible” all Old Testament and New Testament laws about women. For example, she stayed in a tent, sat on a stadium cushion, and did not attend church while she was having her menstrual period (see here). She calls this “biblical womanhood.” She is seriously confused.

This post looks at another element in her confusion: God’s temple today.

I’ve mentioned in previous posts that Evans is acting as if there is still a temple building open for business in Jerusalem. By not going to church during her menstrual period, she is acting as if the Mosaic rules and regulations are in force today. As if God’s special presence in the Holy of Holies is off limits behind temple walls and courts, up many flights of steps, and behind curtains. Moreover, Evans is treating her particular church building as if that were the bygone Jerusalem temple.

Hasn’t Evans ever read that her very body is the temple of the Holy Spirit (1 Corinthians 6:19)? Doesn’t that fact make her whole exercise in piety, um, ridiculous?

Yes.

In A.D. 70 the Romans destroyed the building in Jerusalem, but God still has a temple here on earth. His temple is us. Everyone who believes in Christ is a living stone in God’s spiritual temple (1 Peter 2:5), “built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus being the cornerstone, in whom the whole structure, being joined together, grows into a holy temple in the Lord. In him you also are being built together into a dwelling place for God by the Spirit” (Ephesians 2:20–22 ESV).

Not only has Jesus “broken down in his flesh the dividing wall of hostility by abolishing the law of commandments and ordinances” (Ephesians 2: 14-15 ESV). But also we carry the special presence of God with us everywhere we go. As Abraham Kuyper said, “… there is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry: ‘Mine!’”

So what good does it do Evans to stay away from church?

Well, she hopes it will make us think all gender distinctives in the Bible are just as ridiculous and passé as the menstrual laws of the books of Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. In my next posts I’ll start to deal with her real agenda—egalitarianism.