One day when I was about twelve a friend of mine and I were out on our bicycles. We found ourselves going past his church, and he asked me if I would like to look in. The idea sent a small thrill through me, as though he had suggested that we buy some cigarettes or a pin-up calendar (there was no pornography in those days, at least none that you could buy over the counter).

I had been past this church innumerable times, but I had never been inside. The tall thin spire and the gray stone of the arches seemed to bespeak centuries of august tradition that lay quite outside the orbit of my own world.

When we got inside, the first thing that struck me was how dark it was. Religious light from the stained glass lay dimly on things, creating a kind of holy dusk. I felt I was in the precincts of great mysteries. We stood whispering in the aisle.

My friend had bowed in the direction of the altar as we came in. Clearly he was familiar with a protocol that was unknown to me. This presented an indefinable situation, since it was I, not he, who was the literate Christian believer, I thought: he was a mere churchgoer. It was I who knew the Scriptures and, hence, knew what altars really meant. It was I who knew the gospel and, hence, what pulpits were for. I was the one who could cite the texts about the Light of the World, which these candlesticks only suggested. And yet my world was devoid of any of this furniture, whereas, obviously he knew what to do amongst it all. I was embarrassed over having to appear ignorant on any point and tried to seem knowledgeable. It would have been inappropriate for me to be cast in the role of inquirer: this would have thrown a false light on things since if there were to be any question of my ever witnessing to him I would have had to maintain a slight edge when it came to knowing about these things.

My most vivid recollection from that visit was of a tiny prick of light from a lamp hanging near the altar. I did not know what it might be, but it lodged itself forever in the firmament of my memory, like Arcturus or some other infinitely remote star. I was filled with awe, and even something like rapture at how beautiful, how august, everything was.

How was I to account for the impression that all of this made on me? I would have been able to argue my friend down I think, if either of us had broached the topic of how his church differed from mine. But neither of us did. I had been too impressed.

That, perhaps, is not without significance. A twelve-year-old boy is impressionable. But what had I been impressed with?

Beauty, of course. But beyond that, what I had seen was an array of symbols. It seemed that all the things that I had read about in the holy Scriptures concerning the majesty of God the centrality of the Lord Jesus Christ, the mysteries of Creation and Redemption were suddenly on display here. Nothing in this backdrop was actually strange to me. I knew the Scripture from one end to the other and could have told my friend about the whole lineage of altars from Abel to the Apocalypse. This furniture recalled the huge drama of Redemption, which I knew and believed in the greatest possible detail. I could also have quoted texts from Hebrews to the effect that earthly altars were done away with at the cross. Did all these symbols—altar candles, cross, and perhaps even the sumptuous windows—lean too far towards idolatry? Certainly they had the effect of complicating and elaborating things. Could “the simplicity that is in Christ”9 somehow be lost in an array such as this?

My own church had an open Bible with gilded edges painted onto the plaster wall behind the pulpit. We were given pictures in Sunday school to color and take home. There was a small silver cross ornamenting the lid of the tray in which the thimble-like Communion glasses were arranged. I was, therefore, not a stranger to Christian symbolism. The men took off their hats in my church also: surely that was a symbolic act? And the pulpit stood at the center of focus in the front. I knew that this was more than an acoustic arrangement; it symbolized the centrality of the preached Word. At Christmas a manger scene was set up at the front of the church.

Obviously, then, we could never have argued, like Islam, that all recognizable symbols are inadmissible. My friend’s church had many symbols; we had some. Where the line might be drawn I did not know. When, years later, I worshiped with a group of Christians who strove for a nonsymbolic simplicity even greater than that sought by my childhood church, I noticed that here the table was placed in the center, with pews arranged around it, signifying the centrality of the Lord’s Supper for this group. It is difficult to eliminate symbolism.

Christian imagination differs over details, but all Christian imagination attaches importance to symbols. Whether it is a matter of lowering one’s voice in the building where the church meets, or of refusing to use make-up, or of wearing or not wearing a crucifix, or of kneeling, or bowing one’s head to say grace or bowing at the holy name, or folding one’s hands or crossing oneself, all Christian piety and worship is shot through with the symbolism of either gesture or objects or both. We see the unseen in the seen. The surface of things bespeaks what lies beneath. Our postures, our dress, our gestures, and the artifacts with which we surround ourselves—the Very way we bind and gild our Bibles—all cry out that we are creatures whose approach to the Most High, since it cannot be direct like the seraphim’s, must be set about and assisted with symbols.

None of us is a bare intellect. Our eyes see colors; our noses smell fragrances; our fingers feel textures.

The common stuff of our mortal life is girded with symbols: wedding rings, diplomas, medals, badges, handshakes, flags, uniforms birthday candles, Christmas wrappings, bridal gowns, school colors, roses, lilies, kisses, even table settings. All of these gestures, clothes, and artifacts say something. They convey meaning to us. If we reflect for a moment, we will find that words are very far from being the only bearers of meaning to us mortals. Everything we see, hear, taste, smell and touch cries out to us. Fiery red, dusty rose, indigo, periwinkle, salmon, avocado, toast, mushroom-we go to great trouble to choose colors for our walls, fabrics, and clothes. These things matter. They create an ambience. They determine the environment in which our ordinary lives move.

The very wish to escape this principle testifies to it The spareness of Puritan and Quaker decor and the subdued blues and grays and blacks of homespun cloth bespeak simplicity sobriety, and dignity. The smell of tarragon, gardenia, leaf smoke seaweed, or cologne smite us and rouse us. The smells of carbon monoxide, offal, decay, and bile also smite us and rouse us. We are obliged to respond. Textures—velvet, tweed horses noses, silky hair, creamy skin, stubbly chins, bread dough—we are creatures whose lives are set amongst textures. Some religions beckon us away from all of this. Some even abominate it all. It is illusion, they tell us. It is all sordid and doomed and worthless. These religions drive a wedge between us mortals and all that we know of life. They tell us to be spiritual, by which they mean that we must strive to become disembodied; ghosts; souls.

Historic Christianity, on the other hand, cries Benedicite! It calls out “Glory be to God for dappled things!” It lauds and extols the One who is the fountainhead of all shapes, colors textures, sounds, and smells. The Most High did not create a charade or a trap when He made all of this. The Creation rushes from His superabundant freedom and love and cries out in exultation to Him. No least thing is silent. The timid and beady eye of a fieldmouse, the fife of the winter wren, the bubbling of water falling over rocks or boiling in a kettle, roars of laughter from a room full of friends, the murmur of a loved one’s voice: what does it all say but “Hosanna!”

Ah, but those things are of the earth earthy, says the spiritual man. We must set our affections on things above, not on things on the earth. Here we have no continuing city. The world passeth away and the lust thereof. This will all be folded up as a garment. Since this is so, we must tailor our worship and piety accordingly. Textures and colors and smells have no place here. The locale of true spirituality is in the heart. It is enough that we hear the words of salvation and meditate on them in our hearts.

My own church encouraged a nonsymbolistic line of thought. We distrusted the symbolism of colors and shapes and gestures, at least when they were attached to worship, since this seemed to bring things very near to idolatry. We invoked the commandment forbidding graven images.

If, however, that commandment did indeed mean, flatly, that we mortals must not make anything with our hands that looks like anything in Creation, then we would have had to go through our own houses and throw out all the stuffed animals from the children’s beds, and all the pictures from the walls, and all of the Hummel figures and wood carvings from the bric-a-brac shelves. We would never have paid homage at the Lincoln or Jefferson Memorials, since these shrines were dominated by huge graven images. We would have had to adopt the rigorous Islamic approach to the matter.

It may be that there are Christian groups who attempt this. We ourselves made no pretense of anything so austere, however. If someone had asked us about the commandment forbidding graven images, and we had suddenly remembered all the stuffed and graven images in our own houses, and the Lincoln Memorial, we would perhaps have urged that it is religious statuary that is forbidden. In urging this, we would perhaps have come a step towards what the commandment actually seems to forbid, namely, the worshiping of anything man-made. That is how it is phrased; you are not to make images representing anything in heaven, earth, or hell, and proceed to worship them. Clearly, the divine Law does not place a blanket prohibition on the making of graven things, or even graven things for religious use. The very God who promulgated the Law then went on to order golden cherubim for His Ark and enormous cast bulls to hold the brazen sea in His Temple.

But our view of what churches should look like did not stand or fall with the commandment. Even if we could have been satisfied that what is forbidden is strictly idol worship and not the whole world of whittling and casting and sculpting, we would have pressed home the idea that Christian worship has its locale in the heart. It concerns itself with the unseen. We do not need the vast height of ribbed, vaulting and the dim religious light of colored glass and the smoke of incense to rouse our spirits to worship God. Indeed, those things address the earthy man. We are told that we must worship God in spirit and in truth.

Yes, says Christianity. A clapboard chapel, a Harlem storefront, or a kitchen table may form the setting for true Christian worship, just as truly as the cathedral at Chartres may. God does not dwell in houses made with hands in any event. But to point this out is not quite to have established the clapboard chapel, the storefront, or the kitchen table as better or worse than the cathedral. It is merely to have pointed out something crucial to the gospel, namely, that no matters of taste, wealth geography, pedigree, or intelligence are laid down as prerequisites for any man’s approach to God. If someone is a child, an ignoramus, or a dunce, he may offer his adoration to the Most High just as acceptably as kings and philosophers may. Indeed, there is some reason to suppose that the child and the fool may have an easier time of it here, if we catch the drift of what Christ says.

There are matters of much greater moment at stake than merely how to build and furnish the church. All Christian groups, including Brethren, Quakers, and Mennonites, attach some dignity to the church building, and in so doing they evince from afar the same principle that is at work in Chartres. Insofar as we go to any pains at all to make the structure pleasing and to make its shape and atmosphere answer to the solemnity of what goes on inside we testify to the principle that the surface of things matters. Forms and colors matter. If we want simplicity, dignity, and quiet, then let us make the building answer to these unseen qualities in the very bricks, wood, and paint that we choose. If we want to cry out, Ad maiorem Dei gloriam! then let us make the building answer to this acclamation in the very stones, wood, and colors that we choose. No one will want to evoke the atmosphere of the vaudeville or the tavern in his place of worship. If his group comes into possession of an old welding shop or strip joint, there will surely be some redecorating.

We must press the matter further. Since Christian worship is a spiritual matter, should we not make every effort to minimize the external accoutrements so that no one will be fooled by mere “atmosphere” into supposing that his elevated feelings are worship when they are nothing but aesthetic impressionability?

The question touches on something crucial. Exalted feelings by no means guarantee that real worship is going on in the heart. Chances to fool oneself lie all about. The minute we see this, we also realize that these chances are as lively in a simple meeting hall or at a kitchen table as they are at Chartres. Familiar phrases in public prayers, familiar and consoling texts from Scripture, favorite tunes, and humble and good people are very good things, and who will not thank God for them or pretend that they do not warm his soul? They are good, but the euphoria that is experienced here is not quite synonymous with worship, any more than is the euphoria experienced by the aesthete who is transported by the strains of O Esca Viatorum sung by the boy choristers in the lofty dimness of King’s College Chapel in Cambridge.

We all know what powerful and good feelings may be aroused Twhen Christians meet together. A throng of apple-cheeked Germans singing Ein Feste Burg ist Unser Gott, or a throng of Welshmen singing Cwm Rhondda, or a throng of Baptists singing “Jesus Saves!” with trumpet trio and Hammond organ at the Sunday night service—these are thrilling occasions. We reach the last note and feel we may ascend into heaven itself. Smaller and quieter scenes may also affect us deeply: a group holding hands in a circle at a campfire, heads bowed, sharing simple and earnest prayers; two of us riding in a car, talking, like the two on the way to Emmaus, until our hearts burn within us because God is there; or a communion service where somehow all the hymns and prayers and homilies have worked together to form a flawless whole.

If worship is to be rigorously detached from all sentiment, and even from sentimentalism, then we will all have to conclude that it is inaccessible. Who of us can achieve a pristine state of spirit beyond the reach of “lesser” elements like good feelings, familiarity, solidarity, beauty, and warmth? Perhaps the seraphim can behold the white light of the Divine Glory directly. Ancient tradition says so. But we are not seraphim. That glory comes to us mortals through a dome of many-colored glass, which must include our emotions as well as virtues like charity and purity of heart.

At the root of these questions, which first presented themselves to me as my friend and I stood whispering in the nave of that dim church, lies the Incarnation itself. For in that event, heaven came down to us. The Eternal Word became flesh. God became man. The spiritual became physical.

To say this is to repeat the obvious. All Christians agree on this. But not all Christian teaching encourages us to look into the matter. What might it mean?

Whatever else the great mystery of the Incarnation may mean, surely it suggests that the terrible and tragic rip in the fabric of Creation is being reknit. To see this, we must recall Eden.

In Eden the web of Creation was seamless. Man was in perfect harmony with his environment, placed there as a vassal to rule it and as a priest to bless God for it. There was no disjuncture anywhere—between man and woman, or between them and other living creatures either animal or angelic, or between man and himself. It is even possible to suppose that no such thing as “self-consciousness” existed, since to be conscious of oneself is already to have placed some distance between a man and his own identity, with a scrutinizing self set over against a self that simply lives life. Innocency would seem to imply some such state of affairs originally, and our loss of this pellucid and unflawed simplicity is part of our tragedy.

This vision of seamlessness would also oblige us to suppose that no disjuncture lay between one part of creation and another—between the physical world and the nonphysical, for example. All things existed in harmony, not in a blur or a confusion, but a continuum, like a musical scale or the spectrum of colors. Diamonds, soil, clams, eagles, men, angels, seraphim: here was the created order. Over against this stood only one other order, the Uncreated. The distance lay not between the “physical” and the “spiritual” so much as between the created and the Uncreated.

In the harmony of Eden, everything that we did constituted an unceasing oblation of praise to the Most High. We needed no liturgy there—no setting aside of a special hour when we might turn away from the jumble of our activities and compose ourselves and offer to God the sacrifice of praise. There was nothing but liturgy. “The work of the people,” which is what the word liturgy means, included our eating and drinking and resting and loving as well as our work, which we experienced not as drudgery but as freedom since we were perfectly suited to it and perfectly empowered to carry it out. Like the angels who praise God continuously no matter what errands they are on, we lived in the fullness of ceaseless adoration to God. Our activity was our oblation. Simply being human—having been made in the image of God—constituted our dignity, and we bore this dignity before seraphim and archangels as a unique testimony to God’s glory.

This was all torn apart at the Fall. We wrecked Creation by making a grab and saying, “This much of it shall be our own.” The fabric ripped. Now, instead of the sacred seamlessness in which every fiber of Creation was knit together in a pattern that blazoned the glory of God, we had a torn garment. The poor remnant we clutched in our fists was secular, in the most tragic sense of the word: that which is not acknowledged as God’s. It is a noncategory, of course, since nothing that exists belongs to anyone but God.

But evil is always illusion. It insists on the lie that we can have something for ourselves. This is the sole principle at work in hell. Lucifer chose to believe it; or, since it is unimaginable that he actually could have believed it, then we may say that he chose to pretend it might be. Very well, says Truth, you may pretend this. But the pretense will be, literally, your undoing. It will unmake you. You will have opted for something that is not, namely, a lie. Hell is built of lies.

In this sense we may be said to have introduced hell into our world at the Fall. For here we introduced the lie that we may have something of our own. Whatever the fruit that we snatched at may have been, it was not for us. We decided, however, that it should be ours nonetheless. This was a lie, and the result was division. The secular divided from the sacred: it is a complete falsehood, but we must live with it for the rest of our sad history.

The idea that there was a “secular” order of activity that would occupy us for most of our waking and sleeping hours, distinct from some fugitive “sacred” moments when we pray or worship, never came from God. It is a lie, and the disjunctures in life now testify to this.

Our work, formerly synonymous with our freedom and dignity, is now drudgery. It breaks our backs. Childbearing, presumably in some sense the crown of human experience—something that we, made in the image of God, would experience and that angels only could envy—is now marred with pain. Our bodies, the very statuary of God so to speak, are now torn from our spirits in the ultimate division called death, which yields in the place of the noble creature called man two pitiable horrors, a corpse and a ghost. When the physical is divided from the spiritual, there results the cacophony that brays and clashes in the abyss outside the harmony of the divine order. Division. Hell.

The Incarnation reverses all of this. Our salvation from that abyss and division comes to us in the figure of God-made-man. Spirit and flesh are knit once more into perfect integrity. The heresies have tried to make the Incarnation an illusion—God’s merely “coming upon” the man, or tenanting there briefly. False religions perpetuate the great divide between flesh and spirit, rather than between good and evil where Christianity says it lies.

Even Christian piety itself has had a difficult time fending off the error. Using Saint Paul’s language about flesh and spirit, this piety has often spoken as though to be holy (“spiritual”) is to be more or less disembodied. Since that is obviously not possible, we will do our best to keep spiritual things distinct from physical things. There will be “the spiritual life” and “the ordinary life.” There will be sacred activities and secular activities. When we are praying, we are closer to the center of things than when we are washing dishes, changing diapers, driving in a traffic jam, or sitting in a committee meeting: thus would run this piety.

This is to misread Saint Paul. He never meant his word spiritual to mean disembodied. To be spiritual for Saint Paul was to have brought everything back to God where it belongs and where it was in Eden. It is to have had one’s life knit back together so that it is no longer secular and divided, but whole It is to have become one with Christ in whom dwells all the fullness of God bodily. Christ is the great icon and paradigm of this wholeness. In Him we see the fullness of God in bodily form and we are called to that wholeness, not to disembodied angelic life. The Christian religion, far from driving a wedge between them, knits the spiritual and the physical back together.

“The flesh,” as Saint Paul used the term, refers, ironically not to our bodies but to fallen human nature. The “carnal” spirit is the one that devours things for itself and refuses to make them an oblation to God. The carnal spirit is cruel egocentric avaricious, gluttonous, and lecherous, and as such is fevered, restless, and divided. The spiritual man, on the other hand, is alone the man who both knows what flesh is for and can enter into its amplitude. The lecher, for example, supposes that he knows more about love than the virgin or the continent man. He knows nothing. Only the virgin and the faithful spouse know what love is about. The glutton supposes that he knows the pleasures of food, but the true knowledge of food is unavailable to his dribbling and surfeited jowls. The difference between the carnal man and the spiritual man is not physical They may look alike and weigh the same. The difference lies rather, between one’s being divided, snatching and grabbing at things, even nonphysical things like fame and power, or being whole and receiving all things as Adam was meant to receive them, in order to offer them as an oblation to their Giver.

Insofar as Christian piety strives to detach itself from physical life and all the forms and colors of life, it goes astray. It is the demand for things that Christ sets us free from, not things themselves. It is slavery and striving that cease when He comes with His freedom. The spiritual man will not diminish his proper intake of food in order to make himself more spiritual, except for the specific and temporary purpose of fasting. It is gluttony that he will avoid, realizing that gluttony is bondage. The spiritual man will not love the music of Mozart or the taste of wine less because he is a Christian, but music and wine will not exist for him as things he demands. In his freedom he will have learned to receive them as they are given and to make them an oblation of thanksgiving.

The Incarnation, then transfigures the whole fabric of life for us and delivers it back to us and us back to it in the seamlessness that we lost at our exile from Eden. Once again we may stand in our proper relation to things, as lords over them and not as their slaves. Once more we stand in our true Adam-like dignity because of the Second Adam and may begin to learn anew the solemn office for which we were created, namely, to bless God and to lead the whole Creation in that blessing. Our flesh, having been worn by the Most High Himself, is the most noble mantle of all. The Manichaeans and Buddhists and Platonists on the one hand, who belittle this flesh, and the gluttons and lechers and egoists on the other, who are slaves to it, are still living in division. Only in the Incarnation may we find the knitting back together of the fabric into its true integrity.

If our religion draws us away from the plain fabric of life, and if it encourages in us the notion that Monday through Saturday are mostly secular, and if it crimps our freedom to join hilariously in all that is good in life, then, be we Bible-believing to the core, something is askew. If piety suggests to a musician that to play his violin or his trumpet in a church service is somehow more Christian than to play it in Carnegie Hall then it is heresy. If it makes him timorous about being a creature of flesh and blood and pinches him into hesitancy about everything then it has done him a disservice. If by its practice it implies that colors and symbols and gestures and ceremonies and smells are inappropriate for the house of the Lord and must be kept outside, for “secular” and domestic celebrations like birthdays, parades, weddings, and Christmas banquets, then it has driven a wedge between his deepest human yearnings and the God who made them.

The evangelicalism of my childhood church taught me true doctrine about the Incarnation. It taught me about Creation and about Eden and about the Fall. But somehow it never at least in its piety, put Humpty-Dumpty back together again For evangelicals, there seemed to be “the world,” which meant almost everything that makes up human life, and there was “the spiritual life.” One tried to steer the right course. The responsibilities and routines that make up most of life, as well as the music and the colors that gild life, were legitimate certainly but somehow we were left with tensions and uncertainties Should one go into “Christian” work or secular work? It was a false question and presented an even more false answer, since it permuted us to look for an answer by weighing religious organizations against secular ones, supposing that the one offered Christian work to us while the other offered only secular work. A whole array of pickets had been thrown up between us and civilization’s lovely diversions such as ballet, theater cinema, and wine, and each point had its rationale, certainly But the net effect was to plant in our imaginations the notion that spirituality was more a matter of excision than of transfiguration.

Undoubtedly the place where evangelical vision may most readily be observed at a glance is in its church buildings.

As I stood with my friend in his church that day, I was on familiar ground insofar as I recognized what the various appointments alluded to; the cross, the altar, the candles, and so forth. But I was on very strange ground insofar as these things were actually represented here in the visible world of my bodily experience. “Christian truth” should be kept unbodied, I believed. It was for my heart, not my eyes.

There is one sense in which this is true, and the Reformation has a lively sense of how prone we all are to magic and idolatry. We mortals would much rather bob at the cross than embrace its truth in our hearts. To light candles is much easier for us than to be consumed with the self-giving fire of charity so effectively symbolized by those candles. We lavish respect on the altar at the front of the church and neglect the sacrifice of a pure heart. Evangelicalism presses home these observations, quite rightly.

But it is one thing to see dangers; it is another to be true to the Faith in all of its amplitude. By avoiding the dangers of magic and idolatry on the one hand, evangelicalism runs itself very near the shoals of Manichaeanism on the other—the view, that is, that pits the spiritual against the physical. Its bare, spare churches, devoid of most Christian symbolism (except, oddly, some candles, or perhaps a modest cross in some of its churches), bespeak its correct attempt to keep the locale of faith where it must ultimately be, in the heart of man. But by denying to the whole realm of Christian life and practice the principle that it allows in all the other realms of life, namely, the principle of symbolism and ceremony and imagery, it has, despite its loyalty to orthodox doctrine, managed to give a semi-Manichaean hue to the Faith.

If someone had asked me why we disallowed crosses on the one hand but at the same time permitted wedding rings, which are, after all, solid objects in the physical world whose sole function is to represent and embody something that exists in a much more profound realm, I am not sure what answer I would have given. I had heard it said, especially with respect to the crucifix, that we worshiped a risen Christ, not a dead one. This eventually came to sound facile to me, since no Christian can pretend that the Cross does not stand forever as focal for Christian vision; to pit the Resurrection against it is flippant. Furthermore, the same people who said this had little objection to manger scenes; they would have jibbed, however, if someone had asked them if they worshiped a Christ who was still an infant.

The discussion ought not to become a quarrel. The eye that sees the dangers of idolatry is a true one. But to correct a flood, one does not want a drought. Because human beings are idolators one does not attempt to protect the gospel with four bare walls. It is false to pit the visible world of solid objects against faith. We never do this in other realms of our experience. Indeed, we cannot, since we are physical creatures and not angels.

It is in the physical world that the intangible meets us. A kiss seals a courtship. The sexual act seals a marriage. A ring betokens the marriage. A diploma crowns years of schooling. A doctoral robe bespeaks intellectual achievement. A uniform and stripes announce a recruit’s training. A crown girds the brow that rules England. This symbolism bespeaks the sort of creature we are. To excise all of this from piety and worship is to suggest that the gospel beckons us away from our humanity into a disembodied realm. It is to turn the Incarnation into a mere doctrine.

The Incarnation took all that properly belongs to our humanity and delivered it back to us, redeemed. All of our inclinations and appetites and capacities and yearnings and proclivities are purified and gathered up and glorified by Christ. He did not come to thin out human life; He came to set it free. All the dancing and feasting and processing and singing and building and sculpting and baking and merrymaking that belong to us, and that were stolen away into the service of false gods, are returned to us in the gospel.

The worship of God, surely, should be the place where men, angels, and devils may see human flesh once more set free into all that it was created to be. To restrict that worship to sitting in pews and listening to words spoken is to narrow things down in a manner strange to the gospel. We are creatures who are made to bow, not just spiritually (angels can do that) but with kneebones and neck muscles. We are creatures who cry out to surge in great procession, ad altare Dei, not just in our hearts (disembodied spirits can do that) but with our feet, singing great hymns with our tongues, our nostrils full of the smoke of incense.

Is it objected that this is too physical, too low down on the scale for the gospel? Noses indeed! If the objection carries the day, then we must jettison the stable and the manger, and the winepots at Cana, and the tired feet anointed with nard, and the splinters of the cross, not to say the womb of the mother who bore God when He came to us. Too physical? What do we celebrate in our worship? It is Buddhism and Platonism and Manichaeanism that tell us to disavow our flesh and expunge everything but thoughts. The gospel brings back all of our faculties with a rush.

It was evangelicalism that taught me to love Christ and to defend the doctrine of the Incarnation. It was also evangelicalism that taught me that the locale of true religion is in a man’s heart and not on this mountain or that. Insofar as the simple forms of its worship stood out in protest against mere sumptuousness it was truly Protestant.

But is protest enough? Can the heart of man feed on protest? Is it enough for our piety to say that because an idolator bows we will refuse to do so? On this accounting, prayer itself would have to go, since idolators pray. It is like saying that since gluttons eat too much food, we will eat none. What is needed is someone who will show what the right use of food looks like.

Is it enough to keep pressing home the truth that God dwells not in temples made with hands and that therefore the church building is nothing? Where is the doctrine, then, of the Incarnation and of Redemption? It was not simply our souls that were rescued from hell: the whole Creation was redeemed including space and time. Evangelicalism believes this and teaches it, as Saint Paul did in Romans 8, and as Saint John did in Revelation. If it is true, then may not the church building itself stand in our history and in our experience as itself a pledge and token, like a wedding ring, of this Redemption? In Christ all of life is returned to its proper center. All human work is hallowed once more. But most people do not see this. Gas stations and hotels and restaurants and office buildings are not defeated to God. But Christianity says that they should be All work should be offered to God. Let us hallow at least this one place as a “sacred space,” as we hallow the hour of worship as “sacred time.”

Only symbols, of course. But who will think lightly of his wedding ring and say it is nothing? Who will take a kiss lightly? It is “only” a physical pledge of something deeper more mysterious, and more substantial, namely, love. But in that small physical act the great mystery is somehow bespoken. Of course, God does not live in the church building if by that we mean that He needs it for shelter and for a place to lay His head He lives in heaven, we say. He makes His dwelling in the paths of the sea. He has also told us that His dwelling is in the heart of man. No one can teach otherwise.

These things, which are true, must somehow be focused and brought to a point in a symbol for us mortals. In prayer we focus and bring to a point the petitions and praises that are always going up from our innermost beings. In the singing of hymns we articulate what is formless and semiconscious the rest of the time. In the hour of worship we focus and bring to a point what should be true always of our hearts, namely, that God is adored there. Likewise, with the church building we set aside space and enclose it with walls and a roof, which shall be for us the token of what should be true of all spaces. Like the lamb that the ancient Jew brought from his flock, this space stands for all space as that lamb stood for the whole flock. The principle of focusing and bringing to a point did not disappear with the New Covenant. We mortals are still the same sort of creature. We cannot live with abstractions. We cannot nourish ourselves on generalities. The Incarnation attests to this.

The religion that attempts to drive a wedge between the whole realm of Faith and the actual textures of physical life is a religion that has perhaps perhaps not granted to the Incarnation the full extent of the mysteries that attach to it and flow from it, and that make our mortal life fruitful once more.