Typology

THERE WAS ALWAYS a difficulty for those interested in churches in that there was no mention of church buildings in the New Testament, and that all references to building, building up or edifying, referred metaphorically to Churches in the sense of people or tropologically (morally) to individual Church members. ¹ In the Acts of the Apostles, it was twice stated that God did not live in temples made with hands. ² This sort of theology drove Christians who were building churches to the Old Testament, and in particular to the accounts of the Jewish Tabernacle and Temple. There was thus, from early in the history of church building, a recognition of a relationship between the Temple and Tabernacle and the Christian church. In popular theology, there could be quite a muddle: in the late fourteenth-century The Knight of the Tour Landry, we are told that ‘swete Ihesu Cryst entred or went in a chirche, which at that tyme was called the Temple.’ ³ In more learned circles, the Tabernacle and Temple were thought of as types, so that the Christian church was the antitype – the fulfilment, as it were, of the prophecy implicit in the accounts of the Old Testament types. The earthly Tabernacle was made, according to the Epistle to the Hebrews, ⁴ as a copy and shadow of the heavenly. This is implied, as we have seen, when Moses, about to erect the tent, is instructed by God: ‘See to it that you make everything according to the pattern shown you on the mountain.’