Embracing Sexuality: Authority and Experience in the Catholic Church by Joseph A. Selling

Author:Joseph A. Selling [Selling, Joseph A.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781138704787
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2019-11-11T00:00:00+00:00

But ... Theology and Metaphor

An objection could be levelled at my argument in that I have failed to appreciate the metaphorical nature of both the homoerotic tradition of devotion and the construction of Jesus' body. If I am guilty of that charge then so are all those theologians, including the present pope, who fail to appreciate the metaphorical nature of the nuptial tradition. Along with Sallie McFague and others, I want to emphasise the metaphorical nature of theological language which "always contains the whisper, 'it is and it is not' like this".32 It is the latter part of that whisper that is so often inaudible or only heard around certain metaphors. So I would want to resist a heterosexist reading of the tradition that emphasises the metaphorical nature of the homoerotic material but not the heterosexual nuptial. As McFague points out, "thinking metaphorically means spotting a thread of similarity between two dissimilar objects, events, or whatever".33 The fact that within the Christian tradition some have seen a thread of similarity between homoerotic desire and the desire of the soul for God suggests a valorisation of homoerotic desire which has been erased from the body of Christ's consciousness and which it might be helpful to recall in our attempts to wrestle with difficult issues surrounding sexuality. I would also want to resist the gulf that modernity opened up between heaven and earth, the literal and the metaphorical, the mysterious and the historical, the physical and the spiritual, at a time when contemporary western culture is rejecting such dualism in favour of a much more mysterious, stranger and "thicker" understanding of reality that enables the mysteries at the heart of the Christian, Christological tradition to be heard once again and applied to issues that our culture wrestles with but cannot grasp, such as the nature of the body and sexuality.

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