Margaret Barker Interview – Part 7b (Temple in the Modern World)

Margaret Barker Interview – Part 7a (Location of the Temple)

“So we know that somebody thought it was you are seeing the face of the Lord. Yea. Very interesting, very interesting. So someone has been at work, changing the docs, and we know which way.”  --Margaret Barker

“I think Melchizedek was a theophany of Yahweh. The Jewish interpretation, certainly the next passage, … Yahweh is the great high priest, and he is the one, as you have in the temple, you know, the great high priest is Yahweh, and he is the priest to God Most High. So you’ve got a hierarchy of priests. And I think that is how Genesis 15 was interpreted. Where, in the Apocalypse of Abraham, Abraham sees, mostly clearly, Melchizedek, but he describes him as … the angel Yahweh, and he is dressed as a high priest, with his purple and his… turban thing, and yes, it’s all very very interesting… all the other earlier sources… Melchizedek is the priest of El Elyon, almost certainly Yahweh, part of the great angel hierarchy. I mean, the implications of that for Melchizedek priesthood, is just mind boggling, absolutely mind boggling… So there is a lot of work for people to do, waiting to be done. Oh dear, it would be nice if we didn’t need sleep. We’d get such a lot more done!”  --Margaret Barker

Margaret Barker Interview – Part 6 (Seeing the Face of God)

“A single parent is actually a contradiction in terms.  What you’ve actually got is an abandonment.  But you’re not allowed to say that.  Because it is usually the mum who is bringing up the child.”  --Margaret Barker

“The image of God.  That is what we were created in, isn’t it?  … That is the basis of human dignity.  And if you deny that image in yourself, you are denying the most precious thing.  If you say, I am no more than the skin and bones, … you’d have lost the most important thing of all.  … I don’t know if you have this in America, but in magazines you have all this ‘Let’s give you a new image!’ You know, and you have your hair dyed and plastic surgery, and all the rest of it.  You don’t need a new image!  You know, we’ve got the greatest image already, but most people don’t know that.  You are the image of God… and that defines your rights and your responsibilities.”  --Margaret Barker

Margaret Barker Interview – Part 5 (Social Implications)

“…is it profitable, is it viable, is this a business proposition? When business propositions have got us into a bit of a mess. There’s got to be other ways of discourse. And the awful thing is, because religion has been so sidelined in so many areas now, people no longer have that vocabulary to talk with. And so if you have an environment problem, you can talk about it in terms of economics because people have got that vocabulary, those words, or politics, because people have got those words. If you talk about it in terms of responsibility or religion, people don’t know the words, and if people don’t know the words, you’ve got nothing to talk with. And so this discourse, this element of discourse, this dimension, is completely missing, because people don’t know that the ideas are there.” --Margaret Barker

“If there are no moral restraints upon the use of knowledge, well, look what we’ve got. And the interesting thing is that this is sold to the world as enlightenment and liberation. Ha!” --Margaret Barker

Margaret Barker Interview – Part 4 (Environmentalism and the Temple)

“I’ll be interested to see how the public reacts to it, because, the Christmas story is something that’s got a lot of emotional capital tied up in it.  I think if I were to write radical book about Obadiah, no one would worry as much.  But when you’re doing a Christmas story people [...], oh hands off, [...] don’t touch.  But I hope I have set it in its real historical and cultural sensing, so that people can glimpse maybe what the authors were really writing…” --Margaret Barker

Margaret Barker Interview – Part 3b (Christmas)

“It’s a lovely early [Christmas] icon, because it shows the three wise men coming, dressed as three high priests.” --Margaret Barker

“Those three gifts, gold, frankincense, and myrrh, the old tradition was, that Adam, the original high priest, the angels had given him those three gifts as souvenirs to remind him of the paradise that he had been expelled from, the paradise was code for the temple.  So gold, frankincense, and myrrh were symbols of the temple that had been lost, and the three wise men were bringing those symbols to the new Adam, talking about building the new temple.  I mean it’s all there.” --Margaret Barker

Margaret Barker Interview – Part 3a (Christmas)

From MargaretBarker.com:

Margaret Barker and others are setting up a Temple Studies Group, to convene one-day symposia on temple themes. These are open to anyone interested in Temple Studies. The first, Melchizedek in Scripture, Liturgy and Tradition, will be held on Saturday 8 November 2008, 10am-4pm, in Oxford.  Speakers so far are Crispin Fletcher Louis, Robert Hayward, Laurence Hemming, Margaret Barker.  Details of venue and cost to be announced here soon.

Margaret Barker Interview – Part 2 (Temple Studies)

An interesting side-note by Dr. Hamblin about this conversation:

We ate at the "Eagle and Child" pub in Oxford, where the Inklings (C S Lewis, Tolkein, etc.) used to meet.

William Hamblin Video Interview with Margaret Barker – Part 1

Perhaps you can explain how a person who finds the [temple experience] to be … troubling should express those feelings.

This was my reply, with additional edits: 

I think that would depend on if they are a member of the Church or not.  I also think it goes beyond how they should express the feelings, to what should they do about them.

If not a member, I'm not sure why something that we do in the sacred seclusion and confines of our temples should disturb such a person at all since they don't participate in it, and it in no way affects their way of life or beliefs. I would submit that someone like this doesn’t really know the temple even if they think they do, since they do not have first-hand experience, and so it is difficult for them to rightly discern.  The sacred things of the temple, when purloined from that holy environment, lose their godly nature and divine sanction. This is why we refrain from speaking of their details outside of that sacred space.  In a profane context, the temple doesn’t make sense.  If this truly disturbs someone, a careful inventory of how they react generally to external factors outside their control in their life might be in order.  There are a great many things that other people do in private that have no bearing whatsoever on the way I live my life.

If they are a member of the Church, then I believe further learning of the extensive history of temples and temple worship since the beginning of time is great counsel, since similar worship practices, rituals, ceremonies and liturgies have been practiced by mankind since their creation.  A reading list of books on the temple would help familiarize them with the language of symbolism, ritual, formal worship, the covenant-making process, parallels among early Christians and other ancient civilizations, religious mysticism, and the meaning behind the temple ordinances.  Professor Andrew Skinner’s latest book Temple Worship is an excellent first recourse.

Even with this understanding, a member’s first experiences in the temple may still be peculiar to them in some regard.  I think this is natural, and may be by design.  The Lord's ways are not our ways (Isa. 55:8-9" onclick="javascript:pageTracker._trackPageview('/outbound/comment/scriptures.lds.org');" href="http://scriptures.lds.org/en/isa/55/8-9#8">Isa. 55:8-9). The things of God and His temples are not even remotely aligned with the ways of the world, because they are a reflection of heaven, and are always found starkly in contrast with all mundane trivialities. This could potentially strike new temple attendees as odd or different. But such ceremonies have always stood out in distinctiveness from the rest of man’s affairs, even in one of the earliest sacred structures, Moses’ Tabernacle.  How would the rest of the world have viewed that form of Israelite worship?  The earliest Christian initiations were likewise extraordinary, and for a divine purpose. Edward Yarnold, a research lecturer at Oxford University, has written about the early Christian ordinances thus:

'The awe-inspiring rites' – the words recur several times in these pages. Without being unfaithful to the Greek, I might have called this book 'The Spine-chilling Rites of Initiation.' It takes the form of a collection of sermons, all preached about the second half of the fourth century, explaining the sacraments of baptism, confirmation, and Holy Communion by which a Christian became a full member of the Church. The ceremonies took place at night some of them in the dark, after weeks of intense preparation; they were wrapped in secrecy, and the candidate knew little about them until just before, or even after, he had received them. Everything was calculated to inspire religious awe, to make these rites the occasion of a profound and life-long conversion.

Prayerful and scriptural introspection and study would be valuable to any temple-going Latter-day Saint to consider in order to gain personal testimony that the temple is the House of the Lord. Discussion with a bishop, teacher, friend, or family member about such feelings might also help. Generally, the more one knows the ways of the Lord, the more the temple fits perfectly into His model of the eternities and the more one recognizes the profound blessing it is to worship and serve in His temple.

I testify that the temple is the Lord’s House, His presence dwells there, His angels abide there, He has revealed the ordinances in our day, and such revelation is evidence of the divine calling of the Prophet Joseph Smith.  The atonement of Jesus Christ is epitomized in the teachings and ritual experience of the temple, and one can grow nearer to God, our Heavenly Father, by serving and sacrificing personal will there, just as Christ did, in the House of the Lord.

Is the Temple Troubling?