Re: how about the Kingdom of Heaven?
Submitted by F.O.D. on April 26 2000 19:16:55
In reply to Re: how about the Kingdom of Heaven? submitted by Rex Infinity on April 26 2000 05:24:49
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Maybe I'm reading it wrong. To me these verses are about a city, not about a person. No, you're completely correct, of course. The whole passage is talking about God's relationship with his people. With Jerusalem in the immediate context, though I think it's reasonable to take the relationship to represent all Judah, and all his people in general, even. The passage takes the metaphor of Jerusalem as a girl further, by saying how she spurned the love God held out for her and became an adulteress sleeping with other men (ie God's people starting to worship other Gods). A very stern warning to be sure. But without going into the full theological significance of the passage as a whole, my intention was to see what can be learnt about human relationships by taking the metaphor of God as the girl's lover on its own merits. To be sure, I don't mean he has literally had a sexual relationship with anyone, woman, girl or otherwise - there's no sex in heaven! - but I used the phrase "God is paedophilic" to be deliberately provocative, in order to get people to think about what sexual relationships really are, and to see what can be learnt about human relationships from that passage, even though it is actually a metaphor for the celestial relationship between God and his people. So let's keep the metaphors the right way around and talk about the "Man-Who-Loved-A-Girl", rather than "God-Who-Loved-A-Girl". What can we learn from the metaphor on its own merits? We see a man, a grown man, who finds a child, a mere babe. He takes her in and cares for her. He loves her, clothes her, feeds her. He sees to it that her needs are met and that this child is able to grow into a fine young woman. He loves her. And one day he looks at her, and sees that she has become beautiful. "Become beautiful"?? I think he always thought she was beautiful. But something new has come about, now he looks at her with love, and sees that she looks back at him with love in her eyes. "With love in her eyes"?? But she always loved him, from her earliest memories. But something new has happened to the love between them. She is now ready to love him back with the depth of love that he has for her. She is ready to love him sexually. She is ready to become his bride. What age are we supposed to imagine this metaphorical bride? At what age was she ready for sexual love? At 25? 18? 14? Her age is not specified, and I think that is half the point I am trying to make. That there is no magical quality about the Age of Consent, about being 18 years old. Being 18 doesn't mean you're ready to enter into a sexual relationship, and neither does it mean that you are not ready. The individual person is ready when he or she is ready. The other half of the point I am making is that the Man loved that woman while she was yet a child. He loved her from the day he saw her, bloody-faced, wrapped in dirty rags. He loved her as a young girl skipping with the lambs in the field. And he loved her when he looked at her and saw that she was ready to return his love, as his bride. What I'm saying is that we do have a positive example (and an example metaphorically of God, no less), of a man who fell in love with a child, cared for that child, bought things for that child, and at the right time when the child was ready (which is to say, when the child had become mature, an adult), entered into a sexual relationship with the child (that is, with the young adult). I think the example of this metaphor deals well enough with the popular notion believed by our detractors and naysayers that any "paedophile" showing kindness to a beloved child is a manipulative molestor. If they're going to say that, then they have to say God himself is a manipulative molestor, metaphorically speaking, at least. The example tells me that it's OK to fall in love with a child and look after that child, and even to enter into a sexual covenant with the child-become-mature. This is not to say it's fine to enter into a sexual relationship before the child has reached that readiness, nor does it deal with the homosexual aspect of boy-man relationships, but I think our detractors should learn to keep a sense of perspective. I hope the metaphor used in this passage can help them do that. I hope they can learn to appreciate that the attitude we seek to show to a boy we love is the one attributed metaphorically to God in this example, one of seeking to care for the needs of the boy and bringing him to a point of maturity where he can love others fully as a man. F.O.D. |
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