Reformed and Ritual? Space: Home and Belonging

How can the Church’s embrace of space within the biblical ritual world amount to a commitment to the visible gathered Church which proclaims the truth of belonging and home to a world struggling with a loss of place and with homesickness? How can the Church’s proclamation of the gospel meet neighbors who struggle with a kind of spiritual nostalgia echoing from the cavernous regions of our deep, though suppressed, knowledge of what we were made for? Do the Scriptures show a great interest in sacred space because God wants His prodigals to come--and to enjoy--home? Leviticus, we have suggested, is a window to reality, a door through which we come, by faith, to recognize and inhabit the real world as commended to faith in Holy Scripture. This world can be considered in terms of its ritual ordering, an ordering in which three fundamental elements of reality are distinguishable yet closely linked to one another: time, space, and vocation.

In our last episode, we talked through some aspects of time in this world and what it would look like to live "with the grain" of ordered reality along the lines of time. And so today we pick up the topic of space and ask the same question: what might it look like to live faithfully "with the grain" of ordered reality in terms of space? The Levitical world certainly displays a concern about our spatial lives. At the heart of the good news of our forgiveness and acceptance before God in Jesus Christ is the Levitical concern for space in relation to purity and defilement. 

To discuss this and more, Dr. Mark A. Garcia, President and Fellow in Scripture and Theology at Greystone Theological Institute, is again joined by the Rev. Jesse Crutchley, pastor at Severn Run Evangelical Presbyterian Church (PCA) and member of Greystone’s Presidential Ministerial Council.

For more on ritual ontology and theology, Dr. Garcia’s course on Theological Anthropology is available this Fall for credit, and his multiple lectures on this topic are available now for all Greystone Members. Become a member today for unlimited access to the growing Greystone Connect library.