[Author’s Name]
[Institution’s Name]
Essay on The Church in Jerusalem and the Message of Hebrews
The true home of the Christian--according to the medieval conception--is the heavenly Jerusalem. Not that he must despise the terrestrial Jerusalem, but the true terrestrial Jerusalem which is "united to the one in heaven" is wherever the perfect Christian life is lived. We recognize in this letter the voice of the same abbot of Clairvaux who refused the offer, in 1131, by the Crusader king of Jerusalem, Baldwin II, of the site of St. Samuel (also known as Mountjoy or Mons Gaudii) northwest of Jerusalem, and who encouraged the Premonstratensians to establish themselves there instead of the Cistercians. Yet the same Bernard also preached the Second Crusade and helped to establish the new order of the Knights Templars. Here we have, in a nutshell, the late medieval version of what is a fundamental Christian ambiguity or, stated otherwise, dialectics.
Indeed, for many centuries Christianity had been caught between the horns of the dilemma of the heavenly versus the earthly Jerusalem. The New Testament itself exhibits a marked tendency toward what might be called a "deterritorialization" of the concept of holiness, and a consequent dissolution of spatially localized notions. It is not the Temple and its Holy of Holies that is the center, but Christ; it is not the Holy City or Holy Land that constitute the "area" of holiness, but the new community, the body of Christ.
Yet for later generations of Christians, the land in general and Jerusalem in particular was the scene on which the most uniquely momentous events of history had been enacted. The mystery of the incarnation and redemption had taken place here. The divine act of salvation, in spite of its universal--and according to some early fathers, cosmic--significance, here had its local habitation and incarnate manifestation. The nativity and the events preceding it, Christ's childhood and manhood, his ministry and preaching.....
