Sunday, July 24, 2011

An Interesting Perspective On The Church of The Holy Sepulcher

"At the center of the old city [Jerusalem] stands the Church of The Holy Sepulcher, reputedly on the sight of the original Calvary and the original Garden if the Ressurection. It stands, but only because ugly steel scaffolding permanently supports the walls inside and out. This church is one of the dirtiest, most depressing buildings in all Christendom. It should be torn down and rebuilt. This is not possible, however, because the Church of The Holy Sepulcher belongs jointly to the Abyssinians, Armenians, Copts, Greeks, Syrians, and Roman Catholics, and their priests will hardly speak to oneanother, let alone cooperate in a joint enterprise of rebuilding. Each communion preserves its own seperate chapel, and conducts its own ceremonies; and to make the situation ludacrous, the keys of the church have been entrusted to a family of Muslims who in order to answer the call of Allah five times daily, have turned the entrance into a Muslim Mosque. Nowhere in the world can you find a more tragic symbol of the mutilation of Christ's body than the Church of The Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem."


~Arthur Leonard Griffith, God's Time and Ours (New York: Abingdon Press, 1964), 83.

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