the unfaithful god of emergent village

In praise of an unfaithful God

This is just pathetic. When you have to go here, you may as well just fall on your own sword (metaphorically, of course).

If Hosea were written today, God should be the harlot, and Hosea the church, with God forever slipping out at night, undressing in the alleys and making holy love in hell to the beggars, infidels and outcasts. God is a street walker, with too heavy mascara and the smell of a thousand lovers on those divine lips, a clandestine whore who returns home at sunrise, sneaking back into bed without a shower but with a lingering wine-soaked kiss on the sleeping bride, their toes touching until morning, unashamed. And God whispers the divine confession, but only while Hosea slumbers.

God the Harlot invites us to be corrupted by love but is content to let the bride sleep, whispering reality only within the realm of deepest dreams. But God waits, hoping all things, for Hosea to be awakened from the myth of God’s monogamous love for the Church, the bride.

It's short, so by reading it yourself, you won't have wasted too much of your valuable time.

One can only imagine what this EV writer would do if he were to re-write the whole Old Testament. I can see him being ok with the whole David and Bathsheba thing, and maybe making her husband ok with it, too. Or maybe re-writing the rules about sex and marriage, making the prostitutes ok and the regular wives the outcasts. In the prophets, he would make all the statements about Israel's harlotries to be paeon of praise, not statements of condemnation and coming judgment. All the statements of God's faithfulness would be removed. Wisdom in Proverbs would be the harlot and not the good woman.

One good thing here, though, is that I get to reference Tim Stoner's book in a good way. That's that one I was a bit critical of a few posts earlier. But it's a good book, and I'm happy to say that he puts paid to his blasphemous emergent tale.

The marriage vow is a promise that ruthlessly puts to death every other rival. It puts a symbol of mutual ownership on the fingers of two people who now have covenanted to belong to each other, categorically, exclusively. Wedded love is a jealous love, and rightfully so, for the beloved's love is not to be shared. The heart of the beloved is to be capivated exclusively by her lover. This, all of us who have been in love, understand. This is how romantic love works.

This is also how the divine love affair works, too.
Timothy Stoner, The God Who Smokes, p 126