Claim. The parent-child relationship is structurally vertical — it is the mechanism by which the invisible God ‘bears fruit’ in the visible child, uniting the spiritual and physical hemispheres of the cosmos through love.
Elaboration. SMM frames the parent-child bond not as a sentimental tie but as a cosmological hinge. God is spiritual and invisible; human beings are physical and visible. For God to be known and to exercise dominion, He must ‘bear fruit through the visible child and then enter into the heart of the child to reveal His value as the visible God’ (Section 1. We Also Need Our Natural Parents Originally, when God as the Parent created Adam and Eve, He reaped the benefit of having children. At the same time, He enabled the children to ben- efit by having parents. God’s hope was to raise His children to perfection. Had this happened, it would be possible to say that God would have harvested both). Parents and children are described as ‘at relational poles’ — one in the spiritual hemisphere, one in the physical — and love is what unites them.
The payoff is that perfected human family life is what binds the cosmos. ‘Love conquers and unites the two worlds of parent and child.’ When this happens, parent and child stand as equals — ‘no one is behind or in front of the other.’ This is why those without parents or children are described as ‘pitiable’: they lack the structural means of conquering both worlds, and thus ‘cannot go to the Kingdom of Heaven.’
This is a strong claim that load-bears for later UC doctrine: it implies that childlessness or orphanhood is not merely a personal misfortune but an ontological gap in one’s capacity for cosmic restoration. The harshness of that consequence is worth flagging — it sets up the blessing sacrament and the four-position-foundation as the providential remedies. Critics (pastoral, evangelical) typically engage on whether the gospel offers other modes of inclusion for the single and childless.