It’s been one of the hardest starts of a semester for me, because of sickness and things related. Instead of not posting today, I thought I’d copy a reply I wrote to an email yesterday. This was a response to a respected individual who I know only minimally from correspondence. He had suggested that dispensationalists had taken “clearly figurative descriptions” about Ezekiel’s temple in a “dishonest” hermeneutic. My reply, in part:
…as for how you interpret that temple, it is a very important point. I’ve read that passage (quite boring) many, many times, and I require it of my students whenever I get the chance. It’s one of the most detailed blueprints we have from the ancient world, and hermeneutically speaking only, there’s nothing symbolic about it at all. It reads like Leviticus, which no one claims is symbolic. There is clear symbolism in chapter 37 (dry bones) but the temple itself is described in very ordinary language and with precise human measurements. A guy I knew, an Israeli who speaks Hebrew from birth, had a fascination with it and did a number of architectural plans of it. He certainly didn’t find what the article you referred to found; he had some detailed stuff and it all made sense.
The bigger issue is of context – you have to read all of Ezekiel. The book is very literal. Ezekiel describes the people’s sins in the temple and God’s judgment of it as a result. The punishment was going to be devastating, and then it was. But without missing a breath, Ezekiel goes on to say that God is going to restore. A temple was destroyed, a temple will be rebuilt. The tribes were removed, they will be restored. The land was ruined, it would be revitalized. God’s Spirit departed, it would return. Everyone sitting there by the Chebar River that day believed that when Ezekiel said that God was going to tear down the temple, that he meant the actual building standing in Jerusalem. And when Ezekiel said that God would build a new one, well, they understood that in the same literal way. I think God’s “insurance” against a spiritualizing hermeneutic was the extensive details and measurements that he gave of this temple. Maybe there are some problems with it, but that’s not so surprising given our difficulties in understanding ancient language and culture (and we have plenty of problems with the descriptions of Solomon’s temple, which all agree was an actual building).
But the problem is on a very different order once you say that there was not nor will be such a temple (or tribes or land or city). In fact, I told my students this morning this: if the temple that Ezekiel describes is not a real building, then I will walk away from the faith. Because it means that God’s words are not true and that God cannot be trusted. If this temple is symbolic, even though there is no symbolic language used, then perhaps the resurrection too only happened symbolically. Perhaps prophecies of Jesus’ return are only symbolic. You know of course that many people believe this. I know that the Bible has lots of symbols and metaphors. These must be understood properly. But though I hear many charges to this effect, I don’t read any serious scholars who take symbols “literally” (that is, apart from the symbolic value), but I know many serious scholars who say the dishonest hermeneutic is the one that makes something a symbol only because it doesn’t fit into a pre-designed theological system. Personally I don’t care about eschatology and timelines or even temples. But I care with every fiber of my being about hermeneutics, because without an honest hermeneutic, the Bible becomes whatever we want to make it and not what God intended it to be.
**End of message** He replied to various things in my email, but to nothing said above. I think that the bottom line is that only external factors lead one to reject many prophecies in the Old Testament as literal.
