Why Do We Like Old Buildings?
Analyzing our attraction to the ancient
Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford. Photo by DAVID ILIFF. License: CC BY-SA 3.0
(A five-minute read)
At one point after I was—rather unexpectedly—accepted into the DPhil program at Oxford, I spent some time wrestling with whether I should actually even take up the offer. This was mostly due to the high cost of tuition, leaving me wondering if it was responsible stewardship of my (and other generous benefactors’) resources. After all, there are other much less expensive universities through which I could pursue doctoral research, so perhaps it would be a better use of resources to pursue those instead.
Obviously, after considerable wrestling, I ultimately determined to take up my offer and enroll—which is a decision I haven’t regretted thus far. After all, if you get accepted into one of the world’s greatest universities—if not the world’s greatest university—it seems like it would be a bit of academic malpractice to not enroll. And, honestly, it felt like God had providentially and rather unexpectedly opened the door, so I figured I ought to walk through it.
But it would be dishonest of me to deny a significant factor in my decision: the romantic and sentimental allure of studying at the world’s second oldest university (and oldest English-speaking university). The thought of doing my research while sitting in a library built in the seventeenth century, listening to an evensong service at a cathedral from the thirteenth century, roaming the grounds of a university that was established in 1096—these were going to be hard inducements to resist. The romantic in me would have a difficult time passing that up.
This acknowledgement led to a further question, though: why do we even like old buildings?[1] What draws us to ancient architecture? Why do we stand in the middle of the Parthenon in Athens, or the Colosseum in Rome, or the pyramids in Egypt, or St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, or at the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, or even on the cobblestone streets of Beacon Hill in Boston, and have our souls filled? What is it about these ancient sites that enliven us, leaving us enraptured and in worship (even if they are not even “holy” sites, per se)?
This question has been, to a great degree, a mystery to me as I’ve analyzed my motivations for studying at the world’s oldest English-speaking university, with teaching going back almost a full millennium.
A few weeks ago, another piece of the puzzle was added. As I was hanging out with a friend, we got to talking about faith deconstruction, and he shared with me something I’ve heard a number of others indicate lately: as they’ve been reconsidering their faith, they’ve surprisingly discovered that they’ve been drawn to more ancient expressions of church. They’ve felt the pull of old liturgies and a more “high church” experience, which is actually increasingly not all that uncommon. Christians who were raised in denominations—or non-denominations—that arose in the last few centuries (and many times even more recently), and especially ones whose worship services are more “contemporary,” have felt a certain pull to versions of church that are a lot more ancient, going back to the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries, or even much further.
To a large extent, the evangelicalism that arose in America in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was deliberately and intentionally non-traditional and non-ancient. It eschewed the “high church” practices of the European faith communities, be they Catholic, Lutheran, Episcopal, or Reformed. Gone were the stained-glass windows and cathedral ceilings. Gone was the rote repetition of creeds that had been recited in Christian worship since the fourth or fifth centuries. In that sense, Sidney E. Mead, considered by some to have been the “dean” of American church historians, has referred to it as the “historylessness” of American evangelicalism.
American evangelicalism, of course, maintained that it was going back to an even more ancient and primordial rendition of church—back to the New Testament church—but, for the most part, there was no direct and demonstrable line between the liturgical or architectural practices of the New Testament church and what many evangelical Christians, supposedly using the “Bible only,” do today. Evangelicals rejected gothic architecture and the Nicene Creed for nondescript warehouses and strobe lights.
Why is it, then, that there has been growing interest in ancient liturgies and church practices among twenty-first century Christians?
After wrestling with this question for a while, I’ve finally realized it’s the same reason we like old buildings: because by connecting with these things—these buildings, these practices—it’s the closest we feel to transcendence, to the eternal.
Think about it: the more ancient something is, the more transcendent and eternal it feels to us. In our finite and temporal minds and hearts, a nine-hundred-year-old cathedral, for example, stands a lot closer to eternity than a twenty-five-year-old movie theater that the non-denominational church down the street meets in.
Simply put, we assume that those things which have withstood the test of time bear the closest resemblance to that which is greater than ourselves and that which is lasting and permanent. They are not simply subjective and private; history has, in some senses, democratically voted them into the pantheon of the eternal. As G. K. Chesterton famously wrote: “Tradition is only democracy extended through time. It is trusting to a consensus of common human voices rather than to some isolated or arbitrary record. . . Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about.”
The reality is, our lives are continuously bombarded with the immanent, the relevant, the trendy, the transient. In this ever-changing world, much of life is ephemeral and fleeting. If we don’t have the latest iPhone or we haven’t watched the newest Netflix series, we’re out of touch and irrelevant (I just learned that the laughing-sobbing emoji is no longer “in,” according to Gen Zers). What’s more, much of religion in America, especially evangelical Christianity, has intentionally bought into this chase for relevance and a consumer-centered experience. The focus of worship has, to some degree, shifted from the transcendent and eternal God to the immanent and temporal desires of the individual worshipper(s).
This is not all bad, of course. After nearly two thousand years of a dead, impersonal, and overly-transcendent traditionalism, we were due for a correction. But I think the upshot of this is that it has left many people starving for a deeper rooting in that which has “staying power.” They have been left with very little that feels transcendent and eternal. And they thus want to experience a closer connection to and grounding in history—assuming it is, in some ways, a pipeline to the eternal.
So what’s the answer? Should we just blindly jump back into ancient expressions of religious faith? Maybe, maybe not. As someone who has been a bit of an iconoclast and anti-traditionalist myself, I think we should stay balanced. After all, one ditch is ascribing to tradition and ancient practices some level of normative and moral value. That is, when we elevate tradition to the level of a moral absolute—thinking, for example, that Christ requires us to wear certain traditional clothes to a worship service, or burn particular candles to honor God—we get into trouble.
There is nothing wrong with tradition, per se; there is however something fundamentally wrong when we take man-made traditions and cultural practices and infuse them with a supposed objective and God-derived value. And for all those who have grown tired of an overly-immanent expression of church within Christianity, there are others who have grown weary with the non-relational “high church” experience they’ve grown up with. (I have a Catholic neighbor, for example, who is exhausted by the transcendent nature of her church’s practices, and is attracted to the simplicity and immanence of my relationship-centered church.)
At the same time, the opposite can be true: we get into trouble when we constantly chase after the relevant and fleeting, implicitly maintaining that anything which hints of tradition is automatically wrong or passé. We need to recognize that people are longing for that which elicits feelings of transcendence, especially as they are overwhelmed with the constant barrage of the immanent in this materialistic and consumer-driven age. As the writer of Ecclesiastes reminds us: God has, indeed, “planted eternity in the human heart” (Ecclesiastes 3:11, NLT). To therefore feed the heart only with the temporal and fleeting is to starve it of that which it was created for.
The trick is to somehow pursue this tension together in community. We all have various needs and preferences, and differing experiences and baggage with either that which is too transcendent or too immanent, too traditional or too contemporary. We need to somehow live within and embrace this tension, where we recognize the significant need to connect to a transcendence outside of ourselves, while doing so in ways that are not wholly unintelligible or unrelatable. To the degree that either of these elements are absent in our lives and religious practices, our spirituality will suffer.
From a Christian perspective, this tension is, after all, what the incarnation is all about. For it is in the incarnation that we are confronted by this staggering and paradoxical reality: in Jesus we encounter “God [transcendence] with us [immanence]” (Matthew 1:23).
[1] Everyone, that is, except for my wife.
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 student at the University of Oxford (what they call a PhD), focusing on nineteenth-century American Christianity. You can follow him on Instagram, and listen to his podcast Mission Lab.