• FourPacketsOfPeanuts@lemmy.world
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    2 days ago

    Matthew 20:30

    “At resurrection people will neither marry nor be given in marriage; they will be like the angels in heaven.”

    I think that’s where the sentiment comes from. It’s explicit in Mormonism (I think). In mainstream Christianity the saved don’t become angels, they become like angels.

    • jerkface@lemmy.ca
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      2 days ago

      … they become like angels.

      In the sense that they no longer have sexual or romantic urges, would be my reading of that passage. Angels have no belly buttons!

      • FourPacketsOfPeanuts@lemmy.world
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        2 days ago

        Yes that’s the context - Jesus saying no one will be married in heaven. Either angels are asexual or they’re all male. The latter is a little more likely given all angels in the bible are presented as male. Which if that’s the case has weird implications for what female Christians become when they’re resurrected. Some weird male equivalent? So now we’re “all like the angels”?

          • FourPacketsOfPeanuts@lemmy.world
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            6 hours ago

            Ha that was my thought too. Joking aside, it’s actually one of the weirder anti-gay arguments from the new testament, that the reason Jesus is saying “obviously” there’s no marriage in heaven is that everyone is like the angels, who are all male. So Jesus was appealing to the “absurdity” of male-male marriage.

            Not the strongest argument but definitely one of the weirder ones I’ve heard…

            • angrystego@lemmy.world
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              2 hours ago

              Wow, haven’t heard that one yet, yeah, that’s pretty weird. What would even angels be male for? Oh, I’m thinking too much, this is not meant to be logical, right? Thanks for showing me another bizzare corner of religious thoughts.

              • FourPacketsOfPeanuts@lemmy.world
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                51 minutes ago

                There is some logic to it… or so the thinking goes:

                In the bible maleness is a God thing before it’s a human thing. It’s not that God chooses to be male, it’s the other way round, what we call male conveys something fundamental to the reality of God that has existed for all time and independent of everything else. When God makes the first human, he’s male, because he’s in God’s image (not that God invented maleness to create Adam, instead God’s imprinting something of his eternal self onto his creation, and we call that eternal quality “male”). Likewise when the Word becomes flesh, he’s male.

                Stands to reason that all the other heavenly creations of God (his messengers, “angels”, including the “angel of the lord” which always appears as a man) are all what we’d call male. But this isn’t in a procreation sense, that’s something that was given to Adam. Rather the idea is that there’s something fundamentally “ideal” about the pure essence of masculinity in ancient Jewish thought.