The Sacred Center in Biblical Theology

Alice C. Linsley

The sacred center is the place where the Sun rests at the peak of the day (noon). This is why the Sun is shown at the top center of many cross-like images such as the Agadez Cross and the Ankh.

Agadez Cross

The sacred center is temporal, that is, halfway between east and west as measured by the Sun’s movement to high noon, and spatial, that is, halfway between Heaven and Earth as on the top of a mountain. This is the place of encounter between God and Man, the place of both judgment and redemption.
High noon is also a time of being exposed to the heat. This “hot encounter” with God speaks of divine judgment. In the morning, the cool of the day, an encounter with God speaks of communion or fellowship. This seems a strange way to speak of ethics, but in the ancient world such metaphorical constructs were common. Both cool and hot encounters with God are found in the book of Genesis. In the garden, God came to commune “in the cool of the day” (Gen. 3:8), but in the destruction of Sodom, He came “in the heat of the day” (Gen. 18:1). In the cool encounter, God comes to the tree at the center, as the Sun that rises over the land from east to west. (The Church Fathers believed that Tree in the midst of the garden is Cross.) In the story of the destruction of Sodom, God moves in an eastward direction from the hill country above Sodom. Here we find one of the fascinating reversals of Scripture. Such reversals help us to locate, in a metaphysical sense, the sacred center.

Confirmation of this cosmological view of the sacred center marked by the Sun comes from study of the Inadan metalworkers. They craft the Agadez cross and speak a secret language called tnt, which is symbolized by the "sign of TNT" which looks like this:

This is not an image of a goddess, as some suppose.  It is a symbol of the cosmology of Abraham's people. It designates the temporal center with the sun resting at noon (midway between east and west) and the spatial center with the sun resting on top of a mountain. 

When it comes to the sacred center, gender reversals are also to be noted. Cornelius a Lapide recognized this in his 17th century Commentaria in Scripturam Sacram. Here he noted that the interplay of gender in Hebrew: the masculine being used in place of the feminine and vice-versa, occurs when there is some mystery, anomaly or singularity. Lapide wrote that the Bible contains “frequent exchange of gender in Hebrew: the masculine being used in place of the feminine and vice-versa, especially when there is present some cause or mystery.” Gender reversals, as with directional reversals, informs us about where the sacred center might be.

The individual is also perceived as having a sacred center. This notion of the inner shrine as the sacred center where God may dwell is evident in Hierakonpolis as early as 3200 B.C., when personal piety entailed facing the rising sun, thereby inviting the Deity to dwell in the person. The Pharaoh was called “son of Re,” whose emblem was the Sun. Egyptian texts never mention an earthly "father of the king". Kingship was a manifestation of the solar deity’s overshadowing of noble women. So both Jesus' kingship and sonship are by Mary from God the Father.