To My Latter-day Saint Friends:
A Letter from an Eastern Orthodox Christian
You already love temples.
You already believe that God has an eternal plan for His family, that marriage and kinship are eternal blessings, that heaven is not a disembodied harp concert but a great patriarchal household gathered around and even in the throne of the Father (Revelation 3:21).
You already sense that the veil is thin and that sacred space, sacred clothing, sacred washings and anointings, and sacred covenants belong to the very structure of reality.
We Orthodox feel and experience the same way.
In fact, when many Latter-day Saints first walk into an Orthodox church and see the iconostasis (our “veil”), smell the incense, hear the chanting of psalms, and watch priests in vestments emerge from behind the doors carrying the Gospel and then the Eucharistic gifts, they instinctively whisper, “This feels like the temple.”
That instinct is not an accident.
1. Temple Theology: The Common Ground shared by the works of Margaret Barker
In the last thirty years, a British Methodist biblical scholar named Margaret Barker has revolutionized the study of the First (Jewish) Temple. In books such as *The Great High Priest*, *Temple Theology*, *The Mother of the Lord*, and *The Gate of Heaven*, she has shown that the religion of Solomon’s Temple was far richer, far more “Christian-looking,” than the later rabbinic Judaism that replaced it after the Babylonian exile.
She demonstrates that the First Temple taught:
– A divine Father and a divine Son (the Lord and the Angel of the Lord)
– The importance of the Mother of the Lord and King (the Gebirah)
– An anointed High Priest who is also a royal Son of God
– A sacred tree of life in the Holy of Holies
– Ritual washings, anointings, and the bestowal of a new name
– A cosmic link between heaven and earth manifested in the tabernacle and temple.
> Article: Why Mormons Love Margaret Barker
Both Latter-day Saints and Eastern Orthodox Christians immediately recognized something important in Barker’s work. LDS scholars such as LeGrande Davies and Hugh Nibley began citing her in the 1990s. Orthodox theologians such as Fr. John Behr, Metropolitan Kallistos Ware, and Fr. Patrick Reardon welcomed her as a witness to the apostolic faith that had never been lost in Orthodoxy. She herself has lectured at Brigham Young University and at Orthodox conferences in England and Finland.
The temple is not a 19th-century invention. It is the original setting of the worship of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
2. God’s Eternal Family Plan
We Orthodox also believe that God is eternally Father, that He begets the Son before all ages, that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father, and that human beings are called to become “partakers of the divine nature” (2 Peter 1:4) by grace—what we call theosis or deification.
We baptize for adoption into the royal priesthood.
We anoint with holy chrism to receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.
We crown brides and grooms as king and queen of a domestic church, praying that their marriage will be “an image of the union of Christ and the Church” unto the ages of ages.
In short, we believe that the entire purpose of creation is for the Father to have an ever-expanding family of sons and daughters who truly share His life.
3. The Crucial Difference: Continuity with the Apostles
Here is where the paths diverge.
You have sincerely believed in a magnificent vision of the temple, of eternal families, of a cosmos filled with divine beings. But that vision was delivered through an admittedly flawed man in 1830, accompanied by new scriptures (the Book of Mormon and the Book of Abraham) whose historical and archaeological claims have proven impossible to reconcile with the evidence we now possess.
We Orthodox do not need new scriptures or new archaeological sites.
We have simply never lost the old ones.
The temple theology that Margaret Barker recovered is still enacted every Sunday in the Divine Liturgy. The vestments, the incense, the veil, the anointing, the marriage crowns, the prayers for the departed, the sealing through baptismal adoption into Christ—these are not 19th-century restorations. They are the unbroken inheritance of the apostles.
When St. John Chrysostom wrote his liturgy in the 4th century – still used in the Orthodox Church most Sundays – , he was already describing a worship that looked exactly like what you experience in the temple endowment. When St. Basil the Great spoke of the “great and dread mystery” celebrated behind the veil, he was speaking of the same Presence you seek.
An Invitation
You do not have to abandon your love for the temple or your conviction that God wants an eternal family.
You simply have to step back into the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church that has never lost these things.
The Orthodox Church is the fulfilled and fulfilling form of everything you have been seeking.
It is the original Christianity of Peter and Paul, of James and John, of the Seven Ecumenical Councils, of the martyrs and the desert fathers.
It is the faith that produced the icons you love, the family-centered spirituality you cherish, and the temple worship that makes your heart burn within you.
Come and see.
The veil is still there.
The incense is still rising.
The angels are still serving with us, and the saints are waiting to embrace you as brothers and sisters who have finally come home.
In Christ, the Eternal High Priest of the true Temple,
An Eastern Orthodox Christian
