This post was inspired by a speaker at yesterday’s (Sunday’s) sacrament meeting in Dundee, Scotland (and also by this discussion on Bryce Haymond’s blog).  The speaker (I didn’t get his name) began talking about what a spiritual experience it was to be called as a temple worker in the Preston, England Temple.  When their training as temple workers began, the temple president informed them that this was no ordinary work, that they were “angels in training.” When he said that, it really struck a chord with me because of some things I’ve been studying recently.

This inspired speaker went on to quote from Doctrine and Covenants 132:19 in relation to what it is that we are doing and learning in the temple.  I quote, in part, from this passage here:

And again, verily I say unto you, if a man marry a wife by my word, which is my law, and by the new and everlasting covenant…it shall be said unto them—-Ye shall come forth in the first resurrection…and shall inherit thrones, kingdoms, principalities, and powers, dominions, all heights and depths…it shall be done unto them in all things whatsoever my servant hath put upon them, in time, and through all eternity; and shall be of full force when they are out of the world; and they shall pass by the angels, and the gods, which are set there, to their exaltation and glory in all things, as hath been sealed upon their heads, which glory shall be a fulness and a continuation of the seeds forever and ever.

It is promised that the rituals that we perform and the covenants made in the temple will one day, if we prove faithful, be fully realized.  The promise that we “shall inherit thrones, kingdoms, principalities, and powers, dominions, all heights and depths” will be fulfilled when we are exalted to our Father’s kingdom and truly and literally declared to be kings and queens in that kingdom.

In Psalm 8 (v. 4-5), we are reminded that God made man (or Adam) “a little lower than the gods (elohim in Hebrew), and hast crowned him with glory and honour.” This is man’s purpose and destiny — to walk and to rule among the angels — the elohim. We are of the same “species.” This is what we are taught in the temple.

Last night I was watching the LDS Church-produced video on temples, “Between Heaven and Earth” and had my thinking on this subject further reinforced by a line by the late Truman Madsen. He noted that when we make covenants with God in the temple, we do so as if it were “in the presence of angelic hosts.” And we are explicitly told this, that the things we are doing are witnessed by angels. I believe that not only are we to be conscious of angelic and godly witnesses, but that the services we are performing are done in the company of angels, as if we were angels in heaven serving together with them.  Of course, for now we are only mortals, but as our Sunday speaker described, in the temple we are angels “in training.”

(At the dedication of the Kirtland Temple, the services were conducted, according to the accounts, very literally in the presence of angels)

Now the interesting link between these thoughts (and I could expand on them much more) and the study of ancient Israelite religion is that there is now a growing body of evidence that Israelite priests serving in temple were seen as angels — or at least the earthly equivalent of angels.  We know from the writings of ancient Jewish authors such as Aristeas, ben Sira, Philo, and Josephus that the high priest in his priestly robes was seen as something supernatural — he wore on his head a crown inscribed with the Divine Name YHWH, which some scholars take to mean that the high priest represented Yahweh/Jehovah in the temple rituals.  If the chief priest was Yahweh, then the subordinate priests were the angels.  This is an easily accepted conclusion when we take into account the fact that the temple was meant to be a replica of the heavenly temple where God’s throne is and where the angels perform rituals before his Face.

In his book, The Jewish Temple: A Non-Biblical Sourcebook (London: Routledge, 1996), C.T.R. Hayward picks up on this idea:

…[T]he angels, who praise God’s Name and do the will of God whose kingship is so bound up with His Name…What they do in heaven, as we have seen, is ideally to be replicated on earth. The high priest, bearing the Divine Name on his forehead, recalls the angel who went before Israel [the angel of Yahweh]…[I]n the Temple Service…God’s Name indicates above all His presence with Israel; and where God is present as king, He must of necessity have attendant ministers. The angels will not be strangers, then, to the earthly Temple, which is an open door to heaven for its earthly ministers…the spectacle offered by the Service being definitely other-worldly¹.

This theme is well-established in the research of Margaret Barker as well. I share an excerpt here from her recent Temple Themes in Christian Worship (for reviews of this book, see here, and my own reviews starting here):

Yahweh was represented in the temple by the high priest, who wore the four letters of the Name on his forehead…In about 300 BCE, a Greek writer described the high priest as an angel whom his people worshipped…The prophet Malachi, who cannot be dated, but seems to address the situation in the fifth century BCE, described priests as angels of the LORD…(Mal. 2:7). Philo, the exact contemporary of Jesus, thought of the high priest as an angel. When he read Leviticus 16:17, which describes Aaron going into the holy of holies alone, ‘no man in the tent of meeting’, he understood it to mean that the high priest was not a man when he was in the holy place: he was an angel (Philo, On Dreams II.189, 231)².

It is apparent that this was the mindset of the Jewish sect that lived at Qumran. The liturgical text found there known as The Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice (which Barker prefers to call “the Songs of the Sabbath Ascents”), seems to take for granted this view of priests as angels (and vice versa).  Crispin Fletcher-Louis describes this text as a “conductor’s score” for a cultic drama, a “ritualised heavenly ascent”³. He theorizes that what appears to be represented in these texts is a ritual in which human priests ascend to heaven and then become, or are considered to be, the angelic priesthood serving in the heavenly temple. A detailed description of the contents of the heavenly sanctuary, including the throne of God, is provided.  On the view that the Songs are referring to “angelized” humans instead of simply angelic ministers, Fletcher-Louis notes:

From the outset the Songs presume the corporate transformation of the human participants in the liturgy such that language which has hitherto been thought to describe suprahuman angels must now be taken to refer to angelized and divinized sectarians.

Summarizing, the priests who used this liturgy/ritual at Qumran apparently saw themselves as angels participating with the angels in heaven in their temple services.  In the Songs, as can be inferred from other Qumran texts, the human participants in these rituals are considered to be “exalted” and are even called “gods” (elim or elohim).

Those who are familiar with the theology of the LDS Temple will find these ancient perspectives very familiar and helpful in understanding what we are doing and how we are to imagine ourselves in our temple worship.  What we do now is a drama, an instruction, a “practice” perhaps, reflecting a heavenly and eternal reality.  And this is not only for Latter-day Saints, but is the ancient traditional Christian perspective that has been preserved in many Christian traditions.  The liturgy we perform, the hymns we sing, the worship we give, is done “in the company of angels.”

1. C.T.R. Hayward, The Jewish Temple, 12-13
2. Margaret Barker, Temple Themes, 76-77
3. see his “Heavenly Ascent and Incarnational Presence:A Revisionist Reading of the Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice“