Jesse Sharpe PhD thesis - Research@StAndrews:FullText ...

Herbert Discussing the Word 132
The three components of The Temple – ‘The Church Porch’, The Church, and ‘The
Church Militant’ – can be viewed in relation to the three parts of the Bible – the Law, the
Gospels, and the Acts and Epistles. The Christian understanding of these three
components allows for Jesus to be found throughout the Bible with 15 the Old Testament
prefiguring him, and the Acts and Epistles teaching believers how to live in light of his life
and death. This then is what we find in the three parts of The Temple: ‘The Church-porch’
acts as the Law, the Old Testament, and teaches the reader what it means to be a righteous
believer in seventeenth-century Britain. ‘The Church Militant’ shows the reader how the
Church is ever moving westward through history and anticipates how it will continue to
move into the future. But in both of these sections, the reader can only make sense of
them when they are placed in the proper context of The Church as the central focus of a
Christian’s life. It is in The Church, in a relationship with Christ, that the failures of the
ability to live righteously, as ‘The Church-porch’ demands, are agonised over. And it is in
‘The Church Militant’ that the reader is reminded that The Church, though personal and
introspective, is still tied to history and society. It cannot be divorced from space and time
because God’s redemption of humanity was obtained through his entering space and time
in the person of Jesus. As Mary Ellen Rickey points out, the title indisputably suggests the
place of worship of the Old Testament, while also implying the living temple of the
Pauline epistles. 16
A number of the poems in The Temple are about the relationship of the
two temples: the Covenant of Works of the Old Testament, with its observances centred
first in the Tabernacle and then in the Temple, is superseded by the Covenant of Grace of
the New Testament, with its substitution of the human heart as fountainhead of devotion. 17
Rickey further notes that with the ‘plentitude of variations on the theme, Herbert must
certainly have intentionally and designedly have chosen a title for his book that would
15 Alistair E. McGrath, Christian Theology, 4 th edn., (Oxford, 2007), p.126.
16 Mary Ellen Rickey, Utmost Art (Lexington, KY, 1966), pp. 4-5.
17 An example of this will be discussed when considering the poem ‘The Thanksgiving’.