God knows I'm no theologian

But a recent conversation I had about the nature of love versus the nature of infatuation made me think about how the way people have conceptualized their relationships with God has changed over time. In this conversation about love versus infatuation, I argued that infatuation is when someone will willingly do anything for someone -- subjugate her own will to that of another, happily and be fulfilled in the subjugation. Love, on the other hand, is when someone will willingly not do something she'd very much like to for the sake of the person she loves. To put a finer point on the distinction, in the infatuation case, one's own will is completely aligned with that of another so that is no difference between fulfilling one's own desires and obeying the will of another person. In the love case, there's a recognition of two distinct agendas, and a very real sense of self-sacrifice. I further argued that at some stages of life, especially when one is young, infatuation is the only possible romantic relationship, whereas later, as one matures, love becomes possible.

Then I thought, this is kind of the case with some people's relationship with the Judeo-Christian God, from a time when Abraham would kill his own son, to a time now of progressive Protestantism when departures from God's will are forgiven entirely, indeed entirely accepted. Of course, this parallelism implies a nonexistent moral judgment on my part of these different relationships with God. I just thought it was akin to Hegel's ideas about the evolution of the collective human spirit, since he saw God as the manifestation of that collective, and here I've just drawn a parallel between the maturing of a person allowing infatuation to become love with the rise of progressive Protestantism allowing pure sacrifice to God to become tolerance for freedom. There's a linear, normative narrative beast hiding somewhere at the back of my head, and it's making me see and say the darndest things.