According to
some critics, 1 Kgs 8:27 (cf. 2 Chron 6:18) contradicts LDS theology:
But will God indeed dwell on the earth?
Behold, heaven and the heaven of heaven cannot contain you; how much less this
house I have built! (ESV)
Firstly, in the Trinitarian Christology of our critics, Jesus remains embodied; such is part-and-parcel of the Christology of Chalcedon in AD 451, so such an argument against LDS Christology would also come back to bite them vis-à-vis his Trinitarian Christology (for more on this, see Lynn Wilder vs. Latter-day Saint (and Biblical) Theology on Divine Embodiment). Furthermore, the word “contain” in Hebrew does not refer to the temple not having space to contain God (the sense that God’s size is so immense it cannot contain him [how to make sense of that in light of (often absolute) divine simplicity and “spirit” being immaterial in “mainstream” theology is a wonder to behold . . . ]) but to the power of Yahweh—the Hebrew term is כול and carries the meaning of “restrain”; an analogy would be how a paper bag cannot “contain” a grenade and its power once the pin is pulled.
Interestingly,
taking an absolutist view of 1 Kgs 8:27, one could have to conclude that Jesus
contradicted the Old Testament in Matt 23:21:
And whoso shall swear by the temple, swearth
by it, and by him that dwelleth therein.
Here, Jesus
teaches that the Father dwells in the temple, using the verb κατοικέω, the same
verb used in the LXX of 1 Kgs 8:27 about God "dwelling" with men upon
the earth.
As John
Nolland wrote in the NIGTC commentary wrote:
23:21 If mention of the altar inevitably
involves the gifts on the altar, mention of the sanctuary should inevitably
involve God, since the sanctuary exists to be his dwelling place (See, e.g.,
Ps. 18:6; Hab. 2:20; 11QTemple (11Q19) 29:7–10). A development here that
strictly parallelled that in v. 20 would have spoken not of God but of the gold
that beautified the sanctuary. But the intention in vv. 20–23 is to raise the
stakes: cultic sanctity is important in the Matthean frame, but relating to God
is much more important. Given the significance of the sanctuary, to swear by it
is to swear by God himself. (John Nolland, The
Gospel of Matthew: A Commentary on the Greek Text [New International Greek
Testament Commentary; Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2005), 936–937.
Here are the
Old Testament texts referenced by Nolland (taken from The Lexham English Septuagint):
In the sun he has placed his tent. And he, as
a bridegroom going out from his bridal chamber, will rejoice exceedingly, as a
giant to run its course. (18:6 [Heb 17:6])
But the Lord is in his holy temple; let all
the earth do reverence before his face. (Hab 2:20)
11Q19 29:7-10 from Qumran reads thusly:
7 I shall accept them. They shall be for me a
people and I will be for them for ever; and I shall dwell 8 with them for ever and always. I shall
sanctify my [te]mple with my glory, for I shall make my glory reside 9 over it until the day of creation, when I
shall create my temple, 10 establishing
it for myself for all days, according to the covenant which I made with Jacob
at Bethel. (The Dead Sea Scrolls Study
Edition, eds. Florentino García Martínez and Eibert J.C. Tigchelaar
[Leiden: Brill, 1997], 1251)
These texts
from the Old Testament and Qumran all affirm that God dwells in the Temple, so
clearly the anti-Mormon interpretation of 1 Kgs 8:27 is eisegesis, not
exegesis.
