"Then shall the sanctuary be cleansed"

On little horns and cosmic deconstruction

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(An eight-minute read.)

A number of months back, as I was making my way through James Turner’s, Without God, Without Creed: The Origins of Unbelief in America, something he wrote caught my attention and made me sit up in my chair.

The book, written nearly four decades ago, is a history of skepticism in America, detailing how American values paved the way for unbelief in unique ways.

What arrested my attention so poignantly was Turner’s claim that Enlightenment thinkers had an “obsession with the theodicy problem” like few thinkers before them.

The idea of “theodicy,” for those who aren’t familiar with the term, is basically the question of how a good God could create evil—or, at the very least, allow suffering to exist in the world. It’s essentially a “court case” brought against God, litigating him over questions of the existence of evil and suffering.

Basically, it wrestles with the age-old question: if God is good, why do evil and suffering exist?

Thinkers and philosophers have always wrestled with the theodicy question, of course, but it was in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, according to Turner, that theodicy reached a crescendo.

Whereas in previous generations, religious people were somewhat satisfied with chalking up suffering to God’s unknowable and unsearchable providence, enlightened thinkers were no longer content with such resignations.

“God,” Turner offers, now “had to be a humanitarian,” who, “above all had to be . . . benevolent: disinterestedly willing the happiness of all His creatures.”

Such concerns reached people from all walks of life and religious persuasions, causing them to reevaluate beliefs about God they’d inherited that no longer seemed to align with their moral and humanitarian sensibilities (Turner notes how the famous African American sociologist W. E. B Du Bois proposed that the nineteenth century was “the first century of human sympathy”).

Thus, for large swaths of American Christians, the idea of eternal hell, original sin, and predestination—among others—were out. Indeed, unlike previous centuries—when Reformed theology, with its insistence on God’s unquestioned sovereignty and control, held uncontested influence in America—any idea that seemed to contradict what a “moral agent” would do could no longer be tolerated when ascribed to God.

And any behavior or institution—like chattel slavery—which contradicted enlightened human sympathy was thrown out as well, as was as any “god” who would permit such behaviors.

Others went even further, of course, throwing out faith altogether.

Henry Adams, a member of the famed Adams family, thus wrote: “The idea that any personal deity could find pleasure or profit in torturing a poor woman, by accident, with a fiendish cruelty known to man only in perverted and insane temperaments, could not be held for a moment. For pure blasphemy, it made pure atheism a comfort.”

Similarly, John Stuart Mill, writing in 1865, boldly proclaimed, “I will call no being good who is not what I mean when I apply that epithet to my fellow creatures; and if such a creature can sentence me to Hell for not so calling him, to Hell I will go.”

For his part, Robert Ingersoll, who was the son of a Congregational preacher but became known as the “Great Agnostic,” brazenly declared in 1881 that he could not “worship a being” whose “cruelty is shoreless.”

Even Charles Darwin, in an episode that many aren’t familiar with, largely had theodicy in mind when he began to develop his theory of evolution.

Writing to his friend, Asa Gray, in 1860, Darwin, who had at one time prepared for Anglican ministry, apologetically admitted that he didn’t intend “to write atheistically” in pushing forward his scientific views, but that he couldn’t “see as plainly as others do, and as I should wish to do, evidence of design and beneficence on all sides of us.”

This was because, he admitted, “[t]here seems to me too much misery in the world.” Indeed, he continued, citing examples from nature, “I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the [parasitic wasp] with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars, or that the cat should play with mice.”

In short, the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries saw the character of God on trial like no previous era.

Due to numerous converging factors, enlightened thinkers were done with both the medieval god, who demanded exacting and blind devotion, and the Reformed God, whose ways couldn’t be questioned.

God, really for the first time, had to justify himself and have answers.

But such a development shouldn’t be terribly surprising as we look back from our twenty-first-century perch.

Because, after all, the Bible seemingly predicted such a turn.

Indeed, according to one interpretation of the book of Daniel, in the nineteenth century, the sanctuary had to be cleansed.

The “little horn”

This is precisely why I sat up in my chair when I read this account from James Turner, a Catholic historian at the University of Notre Dame.

Turner’s point, though fairly understated, suddenly brought new illumination to a passage in the Hebrew Bible that is one of the “calling cards” of my particular faith community.

Without getting bogged down in all the details and debates, the seventh and eighth chapters of Daniel talk about a power which arises and causes considerable destruction.

It’s known simply as the “little horn.”

Though small in stature, this little horn wreaks considerable havoc. It speaks “pompous words against the Most High,” persecutes the “saints of the Most High,” and seeks to “change times and law” (7:25).

What’s more, this little horn grows up “to the host of heaven,” casting not only the “place” of God’s “sanctuary” and “truth down to the ground,” but he “opposes” the “daily sacrifices” and “trample[s]” the “sanctuary underfoot” (8:10-13).

Obviously, it’s a very disturbing scene to Daniel, and he’s quite alarmed by what he witnesses.

But just as he’s pondering everything, an unnamed angel, essentially reading his mind, asks the question for him: “How long will the vision be, concerning the daily sacrifices and the transgression of desolation, the giving of both the sanctuary and the host to be trampled underfoot?” (8:13).

In other words: how long will this little horn enjoy uncontested and unmitigated rule? How long will it be allowed to wield destruction and malign God and his people?

The answer: “For two thousand three hundred days; then shall the sanctuary be cleansed” (8:14).

Obviously, this all seems very cryptic and confusing—and perhaps irrelevant.

But I want to make this proposal—doing so with an open hand: I may be wrong about this, but it seems to me that what Daniel witnessed, and the “cleansing” of the sanctuary the angel spoke of, pointed forward to the rise of theodicy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries whereby the truth about God would be clarified once and for all.

This is obviously a big claim—and one that I’m not going to painstakingly explain through this medium (I realize, of course, that this passage in Daniel has been interpreted myriad ways).

But what I detect going on in Daniel’s vision is the rise of a religious power that distorted the truth about God’s character (“truth” was cast “down to the ground”)—and the “cleansing” of the sanctuary was the answer to these distortions.

Indeed, the word “cleansed” in this verse has various meanings, which has been the point of considerable contention among scholars who have paid much attention to the verse. It seems to have a wide range of meanings—from “justified” to “declared righteous” to “vindicated” to “restored.”

But the bottom line with these ride range of meanings is that God and his sanctuary—his character and ways of operating in the universe—were to be put back in the right, justified, vindicated, and cleansed from the charges of malignant forces.

It thus isn’t surprising that in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—right around the time this vision seemed to point to (elsewhere in Daniel, he’s told that the vision “refers to the time of the end” [8:17] and that he should actually “seal up the vision,” [8:26] because he himself was not even supposed to understand it)—the world was placing God under greater scrutiny than ever before.

God was, in many ways, on trial, especially after being maligned through the actions, over many centuries, of religiopolitical powers that made him look bad.

It thus doesn’t seem to be a coincidence to me that in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries critical truths about God’s character were being restored and false ones were being discarded to a dizzying degree.

Out was the god who sovereignly controlled everything that happened in the universe. Out was the god who predestined some to eternal damnation, and tortured them forever for simply doing what they were predestined to do. Out was the god who demanded meticulous rituals and specific prayers as penance in order to be the recipient of his favor. Out was the god who would tolerate enslavement on a mass scale.

Out was the god, in short, who wasn’t truly love.

And in was the God of love—who rules and acts and operates only ever out of self-sacrificing, other-centered, freedom-honoring love.

The bottom line

I know I’ve covered a lot of ground here, leaving many questions. I certainly don’t have it all figured out.

But the bottom line, for me, is that we do seem to be in the midst of this giant “cleansing” of sorts, where God’s character is being reconsidered like never before.

In some senses, ever since the nineteenth century, we’re witnessing the greatest “deconstruction” process in the history of the universe—which, I think, is a welcomed development (and what God has been working toward for ages).

People are thus rejecting the old “answers” about God in droves, no longer satisfied with the way he was portrayed by Daniel’s “little horn” (and all religious systems that don’t place love at the center of God’s character).

Just as significantly, many are rightfully rejecting religious systems and institutions that refuse to participate in this “cleansing” of the sanctuary.

And this is not only true of a theological cleansing, but, just as importantly, moral cleansing.

People long for the truth of God to be restored and cleansed—whether conscious of it or not—but also long for religious systems and institutions to be cleansed.

Truly, restored truths about God’s character must be embodied in the lives of God’s followers—or those “truths” are rendered unbelievable (which is why, in a passage that seems to intersect with Daniel’s prophecy, Leviticus explains that during this time God’s people must also be “cleansed”).

Indeed, as my friend Ty Gibson has said: “Love is the defining characteristic that gives credibility to the church of God. . . What we say is only as believable as what we do.”

So let’s step into that great cleansing.

Let’s embrace the cosmic deconstruction.

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Shawn is a pastor in Maine, whose life, ministry, and writing focus on incarnational expressions of faith. The author of four books and a columnist for Adventist Review, he is also a DPhil (PhD) candidate at the University of Oxford, focusing on nineteenth-century American Christianity. You can follow him on Instagram, and listen to his podcast Mission Lab.