On the Use of Religious Symbols

 

On the Use of Religious Symbols

April 22, 2022

 

The Scripture quotations contained here are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A., and are used with permission. All rights reserved.

 

I, and a lot of other people. have insisted for a long time that the language of faith is symbolic and mythic not factual. The language of the Bible itself is, for the most part, symbolic and mythic not factual. Though it does contain some accurate historical facts (and some inaccurate ones), its primary intent is to give us symbols and stories that function like symbols that point beyond themselves to the mystery of God, enable us to enter into that mystery, and discern something about God’s will and nature. I recently came across a discussion of a symbol in the Gospel of Mark that I have long understood to have one particular meaning. In that discussion, the Bible scholar John Dominic Crossan tells us that the Gospel of Mark, in which the symbol first appears, gives a different meaning to that symbol. It seems likely that rather than giving his own reading of the symbol, Crossan is here giving us what he takes to be Mark’s intended meaning of the symbol, or at least that’s what he says. I will here call that meaning the Markan meaning. Considering both that interpretation and mine will be a good exercise in how to read and use biblical symbols and myths.

The symbol I’m talking about appears at Mark 15:37-38: “Then Jesus gave a loud cry and breathed his last. And the curtain of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom.” The symbol in question here is that torn curtain of the temple. To understand either my interpretation or what Crossan says is the Markan interpretation of that symbol, we have to start with an understanding of what that curtain of the temple was. The temple in Jerusalem in Jesus’ day was the center of the Jewish faith. It was constructed with a series of spaces most of which were called courts. The Court of the Gentiles was the first one you came to when you entered the temple. It was open to everyone. It is where vendors sold animals sufficient for sacrifice, animal sacrifice being the temple’s main activity. It is also where moneychangers changed unclean Roman money for clean temple money that people could give to the temple. I’ll have more to say about both of these activities below. There is then a progression of other courts deeper into the building. These included the Court of the Women, the Court of the Israelites, and the Court of the Priests. The Court of the Priests surrounded the most sacred part of the temple, which had only a small entrance on one side. It was a small space called the Holy of Holies. The curtain that is the object in the symbol we are considering hung across that small entrance. Only the high priest was allowed to enter the Holy of Holies, and he did it only on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. The Holy of Holies was where Jews believed God dwelt in the temple.

Mark says that the curtain of the temple was torn in two at the moment of Jesus’ death. He means the curtain that hung in the entrance to the Holy of Holies. We must understand Mark’s statement symbolically not literally. The tearing of the curtain when Jesus died is a symbol not an historical fact. It is a symbol with truly powerful significance. Yet, at least according to Crossan, Mark and I understand the meaning of the symbol differently. I will consider both interpretations, but I’ll give you my understanding of the symbol first. The curtain in question hung between the Holy of Holies and the Court of the Priests. The Court of the Priests wasn’t open to the general public, though we mustn’t let that detail derail our understanding of the symbol. No symbol is perfect. Anyone (except the high priest on Yom Kippur) would be stopped by that curtain. Not physically stopped but effectively stopped nonetheless. The curtain separated the people from God. God was in the Holy of Holies, the people weren’t.[1]

So what is the meaning of its being torn in two when Jesus died? For me (and for many other Christians who have considered the matter), it is that with Jesus’ death any and everything that we believe separates us from God has vanished. In Jesus’ death on the cross we see God Incarnate in Jesus Christ experiencing human suffering and death. God has entered fully into human life. God has taken every aspect of human life into Godself. In doing so God shows us that God truly, always and everywhere, is with us people as we experience human life. With us not apart of us. The Gospel of Matthew (which repeats Mark’s curtain symbol) calls Jesus Emanuel, which means “God with us.” Matthew 1:23, citing Isaiah 7:14. Jesus is very much one of us as he suffers and dies. He didn’t die as an atoning sacrifice for sin. (As we’ll see below, Jesus rejected the whole idea of sacrifice as what God wanted from us. Jesus died to show us in the most dramatic way possible that God is present with us and sanctifies every aspect of human life. For me and for many, that is the meaning of Mark’s symbol of the tearing of the temple curtain. After Jesus’ death nothing separates us from God. If we think anything does, we’re just flat wrong.

No so for Mark’s meaning of the symbol as interpreted by John Dominic Crossan. Crossan ties the meaning of the symbol of the temple curtain to Jesus’ prophetic action in the temple the day after he rode into Jerusalem on a donkey. About Jesus the first thing Jesus did in Jerusalem we read, “Then they came to Jerusalem. And he entered the temple and began to drive out those who were selling and those who were buying in the temple, and he overturned the tables of the moneychangers and the seats of those who sold doves.” Mark 11:15. Jesus’ action here is usually called “the cleansing of the temple.” Crossan and I agree that cleansing the temple is absolutely not what Jesus was doing. In driving out the sellers of doves and overturning the tables of the moneychangers, Jesus was not ridding the temple of anything that wasn’t properly there. He was doing something far more radical than that.

To see how radical what Jesus did actually was, we need to understand that the sellers of doves and the moneychangers against whom Jesus acted were not doing anything wrong as far as the temple was concerned. Rather, they were essential to its operation. The main type of worship in the temple was, as I have said, animal sacrifice. Torah law specifies the animal sacrifices the people were to offer to God, and the temple was the only place where animal sacrifice was permitted. The people could not, however, bring with them the animals there were going to give to be sacrificed. The animals to be sacrificed had to be healthy, essentially perfect animals. In the book of the prophet Malachi we read, “When you offer blind animals in sacrifice, is that not wrong? And when you offer those that are lame or sick, is that not wrong?” Malachi 1:8. See also Leviticus 3:1. The people who were selling doves or other animals in the Court of the Gentiles were selling animals that met the law’s requirement of purity. The temple could not operate the way it was meant to operate without the buying and selling of animals that took place there.

The same is true of the moneychangers. The only money in circulation in Roman occupied Judea was Roman money. All money was coins, and Roman coins had images of the Roman emperor on them. Sometimes they also had the words “Divii Filius,” “Son of the Divine One,” on them. These features of the coins made them ritually unclean under Torah law. The temple could not accept them. So there were moneychangers in the temple who changed the people’s unclean Roman money for clean temple money that the people could then give to the temple. As with the sellers of animals, the moneychangers were not defiling the temple. The temple couldn’t operate the way it was meant to operate without them.

So if Jesus wasn’t cleansing the temple when he disrupted the business of both the sellers of animals and the moneychangers, what was he doing? Crossan and I agree the he was symbolically overthrowing the temple with its practice of animal sacrifice as its primary function. He did nothing less than symbolically destroy the temple and the legalistic religious system, including the practice of sacrifice as worship, that it represented. He couldn’t destroy the temple physically. He couldn’t actually stop people from basing their faith on law and practicing animal sacrifice. He could destroy both the temple and the law symbolically. So that’s what he did. Crossan interprets Mark’s symbol of the torn curtain in the light of Jesus’ symbolic overthrow of the temple. Mark, Crossan says, meant his symbol to mean that God confirmed Jesus’ action in the temple by abandoning the temple, that is, by leaving the Holy of Holies, tearing the curtain in the process.

So which interpretation of the symbol of the torn curtain is correct? To answer that question we have first to consider the nature of symbolic truth. Symbolic truth is different from factual truth. If two alleged facts contradict each other, one (or perhaps both) of them must be false. Not so with symbolic truth. True symbols can express powerful truth, but it takes discernment to draw meaning out of them. It is perfectly legitimate for discernment of the symbol by different people to come to different meanings for the symbol. Were that not true, the Bible, which consists largely of symbols and stories that function like symbols, would be of interest only to scholars studying ancient history. It is the way different people in different times and places can draw different meanings from the Bible’s symbols that have kept the Bible alive and meaningful for so many people in so many different times and places.

Taking Crossan’s reading of Mark at face value, Mark and I discern different meanings in the symbol of the curtain of the temple being torn in two at the moment of Jesus’ death. Our different meanings make two different assumptions about what happens with this symbol. I assume that the symbol includes the symbolic presence of God in the Holy of Holies both before and after the curtain is torn in two. Mark’s interpretation assumes that God leaves the Holy of Holies and is not present there after the tearing of the curtain. Were we talking about facts here, one of our assumptions would have to be false.[2] But we’re not talking about facts. We’re talking about symbols, and the text that gives us the symbol doesn’t explicitly address the question of God’s presence in the Holy of Holies after the tearing of the curtain. It is perfectly legitimate for us to make either of those assumptions about the symbol in question. Yet it is difficult if not impossible for us to hold both of those assumptions at the same time. So what are we to do? Choose one interpretation over the other? Or perhaps look for another meaning we can legitimately draw from the symbol that works better for us? Actually, any one of those three options can be legitimate. I haven’t come up with a third meaning of the symbol of the torn curtain, but if you find another one that is true to symbol itself and works better for you, fine. All I’ll do here is explain why I prefer my interpretation of this symbol to the interpretation Crossan ascribes to Mark.

First, the Markan interpretation of the symbol seems to me to have limited usefulness for us today. It says that it isn’t just Jesus who rejects the temple’s version of the Jewish faith. It says that God rejects that version of the faith too. The idea that God rejected the temple’s version of the Jewish faith was radical and important in the early 70s of the first century CE when Mark was written. It is significantly less radical and important to us. The Jerusalem temple hasn’t existed since the year 70 CE when the Romans destroyed it. Judaism has long since transformed itself from a temple and sacrifice centered faith led by priests into a scripture based faith led by rabbis. That Jesus rejected the temple and the law based religion it embodies suggests at least that that sort of faith never was an option for Christians. That interpretation of the symbol surely was more important in the first century CE than it is today. The biggest issue in early Christianity was precisely whether one had to follow the Torah law to be a Christian. Whether or not we Christians have to follow Torah law just isn’t an issue for us, a fact that significantly reduces the value of this interpretation of symbol for us.

Moreover, this Markan interpretation of the symbol of the torn curtain has a distinctly anti-Jewish tone to it. It says that when Jesus died God abandoned what was at the time the center of Jewish faith. That Mark was anti-Jewish in the first century CE probably wasn’t terribly significant. The very few Christians  of the first century world were utterly powerless and unable to inflict any sort of harm at all on the much more numerous Jews. Not so today. Today Christianity is the largest religion in the world; and while Judaism remains a faith of world importance, there are today far fewer Jews than Christians. Add to that fact the reality that Christianity has a history nearly two millennia long of virulent, often violent anti-Judaism. There is a direct line historically from the anti-Judaism of the New Testament to the gas chambers and crematoria of Auschwitz and other Nazi death camps. Today we Christians must live down and atone for our history of murderous violence toward the Jews. It is utterly inappropriate for us today to take the anti-Judaism of the New Testament as God’s own truth. It isn’t. It never was. The anti-Jewish tone of the Markan interpretation of the symbol of the torn curtain that Crossan gives us is in itself sufficient reason to reject it.

Does the interpretation of the symbol that I advocate here work better for us Christians today? Recall that the function of the temple curtain was to mark off the only entrance to the Holy of Holies. It marked the nearest to the symbolic presence of God in the temple most people could ever reach. Only the chief priest could enter it, and he did so only once a year. The curtain functioned to separate the people from God. So what does it mean that the curtain was torn in two at the moment of Jesus’ death? It means, symbolically and powerfully, that anything that we think separates us from God is destroyed through the life and death of Jesus. Whatever it was, or is, that we think separates us from God is gone. There never actually was anything separating us from God, for symbols do not mean that God somehow changed with the advent of the symbol. The symbol reveals something that was always true. Yet, as I’ll discuss further below, we humans are so amazingly creative in coming up with things that we think separate at least some people from God. The most important, indeed salvific, meaning of Jesus Christ is that God stands always in total solidarity with every human being there ever was, is, or ever will be. The symbol of the torn temple curtain works perfectly with that understanding of the significance of Jesus Christ.

So what do we learn about how to interpret the symbols of faith? We learn that we must first of all understand a symbol in the historical-cultural context in which it was first created. We ask: What would the people of that time and place have understood the symbol to mean? To get to any kind of legitimate  answer to that question we must consider the cultural, linguistic, and religious knowledge and understandings the person creating the symbol could assume people to have. All of these things help us first of all to understand the symbol in its original context. They may also give us information that is important for our finding a meaning in the symbol for us. For example, how many of you have just ignored that little bit of the story of Jesus’ death because it didn’t mean much to you? That’s what I did with this symbol for decades. I trust that my explanation of what that curtain was helps you as much as it once helped me to understand the symbol of the torn curtain. That explanation comes from the symbol’s original context, and we cannot understand the symbol without it.

Once we have gained an understanding of the symbol’s original context we can consider what the symbol can mean for us. One step in that process is to consider whether some change between the symbol’s original context and our context makes some possible meaning for the symbol unacceptably harmful in ours. The anti-Jewish implications of Mark's meaning for the curtain symbol that we discussed above is a good example of how that can happen.

Then, after we have taken those preliminary steps, and only then, we can consider what the symbol can mean for us. I and others read the symbol of the torn curtain as meaning that upon Jesus’ death everything that we think stands between all people, or even just some people, and God is gone. Is that important to us? If it is, how is it important? I am certain that the symbol of the torn curtain is powerfully important to us. Religions, including Christianity, seem to see as one of their main tasks the erection of barriers between the people and God. In Christianity, those barriers appear in two basic forms. One is institutional, the other dogmatic.

The Roman Catholic Church is the best example of an institutional barrier to God. Many enlightened Catholics today, including the Catholic teachers at the seminary I attended, have moved away from this doctrine.[3] However, the doctrine “extra Ecclesiam nulla salus,” which means outside the church (the Roman Catholic Church of course) there is no salvation, remains an official dogma of the Catholic Church. That doctrine really does say that in order to be saved you have to be Roman Catholic. The entire, massive institutional structure of the Roman Catholic Church stands between the people and God. The Church makes it a barrier between God and people like me who, despite the Catholic Church’s wonderful spiritual traditions and practices, cannot accept some aspects of that Church and therefore are not Catholics.

The dogmatic barrier that Christians put between the people and God has to do with right belief. Sadly, most Christian churches put “right belief” between the people and God. The Christian hang up on right belief goes back to the very beginnings of the faith. The earliest Christian documents we have are the authentic letters of Paul. Those letters are mostly about right belief. The most common issue in them is whether or not one had to comply with Jewish Torah law in order to be Christian. That issue was all about what you believed God wanted from God’s people. Did God want Torah legalism or the freedom of faith? By the fourth century CE Christianity had become fractured over issues of right belief concerning Jesus Christ. The Roman Emperor Constantine wanted to use the Christian churches of the time to help him reunify the divided Roman Empire. Problem was, Christians were so split up into different factions that he really couldn’t do that. So he called a convocation of Christian bishops in an effort to get them to reconcile their differences and get unified. This convocation came to be known as the First Ecumenical Council. It didn’t work. Christianity never came together the way Constantine wanted it to. The important point for us is that the divisions within the faith had mostly to do with right belief, wrong belief being seen as a barrier between the person with the wrong belief and God.

Fast forward more than one thousand years from the First Ecumenical Council, and we come to the Protestant Reformation. Martin Luther believed differently about God, the church, and salvation than did the Roman Catholic Church of his day and the Roman Catholic Church was essentially the only Christian church there was in western Europe at the time. Luther’s objections to the Catholic Church led eventually to the creation of a new kind of Christianity. It’s called Protestantism. The differences between Protestantism and Roman Catholicism are in part about ecclesial structure, but mostly they’re about differences in belief.

Fast forward another 375 years or so, and you find today’s conservative Evangelical Christians. A little bit more recently you find the first true Christian Fundamentalists. Conservative Evangelical and Fundamentalist Christians all insist that salvation depends on right beliefs, especially beliefs about Jesus Christ. They, along with some other Christians, make right belief a barrier between the people and God. Believe the right things, they say, and you have access to God and God’s salvation. Believe the wrong things, and you don’t.

The notion that one must have the right beliefs about Jesus in order to be right with God is deeply engrained in many Christians. The symbol of the torn curtain in the temple, however, says no to belief as a barrier between God and the people as strongly as it says no to any other barrier between God and the people. God may or may not care about what God’s people think as opposed to how they act. Either way, the symbol we’re considering tells us that neither wrong belief nor wrong action separates us from God. There simply is no prerequisite to benefitting from God’s grace. That’s what the symbol of the torn temple curtain means to me today. I hope it means that to you too.

I also hope that this rather lengthy exercise in how to handle religious symbols has been helpful to you. Symbol and myth (that is, stories that act like symbols) are the language of faith. We can pretend that the Bible and other sources of our faith give us indisputable facts. A great many Christians today somehow manage to cling to the belief that they do. They don’t, and the belief that they do is ultimately unsustainable. We must learn how to use symbols and stories that act like symbols if we are to understand our faith at all. I wish you God’s help and good success as you learn how to use them.

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[1] We must understand the claim that God was in the Holy of Holies as being a symbol not an historical fact every bit as much as Mark’s tearing of the curtain was a symbol not an historical fact. In our consideration here we are dealing only with symbolic meaning, not that symbolic meaning isn’t far more powerful than mere factual meaning. It is.

[2] They could both be false if you don’t accept the symbol of God’s presence in the Holy of Holies in the first place.

[3] While I was a student at the Seattle University School of Theology and Ministry, Josef Ratzinger, not yet Pope Benedict XIV, wrote, and Pope John Paul II issued, a statement reaffirming the exclusivity doctrine I discuss here. One of my professors, a Catholic priest and a brilliant theologian and teacher, said well, let’s just put that away in a drawer and leave it there. It doesn’t say anything new. Seattle University is a Jesuit university. At the university’s School of Theology and Ministry (sadly soon no longer to exist) the Catholic staff and students fully accepted Protestant students and teachers from many different denominations. My time at STM was one of the best times of my life.