If you’re new here, you may want to sign up for email alerts or subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for reading!Last Friday I was able to attend the symposium entitled “Temples and Ritual in Antiquity,” sponsored by The Students of the Ancient Near East (SANE) and the Religious Studies Center at Brigham Young [...]
As most people know, it is a tradition in many parts of the world to bake up a birthday cake for a friend or family member celebrating a birthday. Typically this cake is decorated nicely and topped with birthday candles, one for every year of the celebrant’s life. When the time comes to eat the [...]
The account of the garden of Eden in Genesis is a very interesting story indeed. We learn much about the experiences of our first parents and their interactions with God. It was a very intimate relationship, one in which God walked and talked with Adam and Eve in the garden (Gen. 3:8).
When Adam was first [...]
Someone recently asked me the following:
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:
One of our readers, Dr. Kathy Larsen, pointed out a scripture yesterday that intrigued me. It is Leviticus 21:10:
And he that is the high priest among his brethren, upon whose head the anointing oil was poured, and that is consecrated to put on the garments, shall not uncover his head, nor rend his clothes;
There [...]
Some of our critics have been quick to contend that our modern temples and practices have no relationship whatever to the temples of ancient Israel. This is a quick judgment indeed. If one is willing to open their eyes that they may hear, and their ears that they may see, then many marvelous [...]
(Continued from Part 1)
To continue our discussion on whether God may dwell in temples on earth, and whether there exists a need for further temples after Christ, we might look again to the Bible to see if God dwelled in those sacred edifices which He commanded to be built in ancient times.
The first example that [...]
A respectful evangelical protestant reader of TempleStudy.com has asked this question:
Paul tells us in the sermon at Mars Hill that the Lord does not “dwell in houses built by hands” (Acts 17:24-25, Stephen echoes this in ch 7 of the same book) but rather that the Holy Spirit of God dwells in us; that is, [...]
The other article that impressed me from the latest Journal of Book of Mormon Studies, 16/2 (2007), was Donald W. Parry’s “Service and Temple in King Benjamin’s Speech.” Why did it impress me? Because it related subjects in the Book of Mormon to the temple, something that we haven’t seen a lot of [...]
I used to ask myself that question, and I believe that many others probably still do. We believe that our current temple ordinances as revealed by the prophet Joseph Smith are as old as the human race, and were first revealed to Adam, the Ancient of Days. So why don’t we read more [...]
One of the criticisms leveled at the LDS (Mormon) practice of temple worship is the seemingly dissimilar forms of the ordinances when compared with those found practiced by ancient Israelites in the Bible. It is true that the forms of the ordinances and sacrifices are different, but their meaning and symbolism remain the same. [...]
A reader emailed me last night and introduced me to the work of Dr. Andrei Orlov, a professor at Marquette University, who has done much work on Enoch pseudepigraphal material. As I was perusing some of his research I came upon one of the excerpts from his book The Enoch-Metatron Tradition that interested me. [...]
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