Budde: I’m not disagreeing with that, either, except that I think it is very dangerous to take our understanding of marriage and fidelity in relationships and try to imagine that even what Jesus was saying when he spoke the words that you quoted earlier because understandings of marriage in that time and that eras is very different from how people may experience marriage today. And to imagine that Jesus was speaking to the kind of realities that we are addressing now in same-gender, lifelong, committed relationships is just a huge distortion of the Palestinian world view that he was addressing.
He was addressing property issues. He was addressing men treating women like property and disposing of them at will and calling for a more egalitarian and respectful way that — and loving way — that men and women were to deal with one another. This is a time when women were treated like chattel and to have that idea of marriage held up to the standard that God calls us to now is, I think, is trying to take any view of order which was true in the Biblical era and make that standard for us now. It flies in the face of everything we know about now about how the Holy Spirit moves and works with us over time.
Harmon: This is exactly the kind of argument I think we need to have, by the way. The difficult here is the context that becomes the trump card, notice in her remarks, is the modern context. And so the Biblical context in the ancient world gets derated and we somehow suddenly know better how the Holy Spirit works in this modern era.
What’s so crucial to point out is there is such a thing as the history of the Holy Spirit and the Holy Spirit works through the church, especially the church globally and the church historically through time. And the church historically through time that has always understood that this kind of behavior is out of bounds and marriage is the context and what’s the height of the arrogance is that you impose this new understanding on the shoulders of the all the Christians we now understand, all the Christians around the world who haven’t been persuaded by these arguments.
[blockquote]I think it is very dangerous to take our understanding of marriage and fidelity in relationships and try to imagine that even what Jesus was saying when he spoke the words that you quoted earlier because understandings of marriage in that time and that eras is very different from how people may experience marriage today.[/blockquote]
It is undoubtedly true that the 1st century Palestinian Jew’s understanding of marriage was different from ours. Their understanding wasn’t about being sexually attracted to someone, falling in love and getting married. However, it was understood that sexual intimacy was a part of being married and was “inappropriate” outside of marriage. The general Greek word is “porneia”–sexual immorality.
[blockquote]He was addressing property issues. He was addressing men treating women like property and disposing of them at will and calling for a more egalitarian and respectful way that — and loving way — that men and women were to deal with one another. This is a time when women were treated like chattel and to have that idea of marriage held up to the standard that God calls us to now is, I think, is trying to take any view of order which was true in the Biblical era and make that standard for us now.[/blockquote]
I question the “facts” being asserted here for two reasons.
First, marriage today–in spite of being romanticized and eroticized–is about property. Otherwise, why do we see couples developing pre-nuptial agreements prior to getting married? Even the gay/lesbian crowd mention justice regarding property for gay/lesbian couples. Our laws generally assure that if a surviving spouse has a privileged claim to the couples’ assets, whereas an unmarried couple owning property in common do not have similar privilege under law, and the deceased partner’s family may be able to gain control of the deceased’s assets. And there are similar differences in divorce and the breakup of unmarried individuals. Or to put it another way, Buddie is reading some modern notions of American upper socio-economic class (and probably middle class) life back into 1st century Palestine–the very thing traditionalists are being accused of.
And yes, Jesus is addressing [b]divorce[/b]. He is not directly addressing the covenant of marriage, but rather what happens when that covenant is dissolved by means other than the death of one of the individuals. Even here, the issue isn’t connected with property [i]per se[/i]. It is true that the divorced man would retain the “property” (except for the woman’s dowry!). It is also true that he could pretty much go on economically. It is also true that he probably could negotiate a marriage with some young girl’s family, just as widowers could. It is also true that the same things would not have been true of the divorced woman and that she might well have been forced into prostitution in order to survive. Even if not that extreme (remember that she might have been able to go on independently living on her dowry or to move back in with her family), there was the “justice” issue that it was far easier for the husband to divorce his wife for any of a number of reasons that for the wife to divorce her husband; and life after divorce would be far easier for the man than for the woman.
Secondly much of the characterization of ancient marriage is simply wrong. Having some interest in ancient history I have some idea of how this normally worked. Most marriages were arranged by the parents of the boy and the girl–usually at a very young age and perhaps years before any actual marriage took place and before the children reached adolescence. But it didn’t treat the girl as “chattel”–unless, of course, one says that the boy was treated as “chattel” too. For some there were doubtless “property issues”–namely insuring that there was a clear line of inheritance. There were also issues of family alliances. But probably in the majority of cases, property wouldn’t have been a significant issue for the simpler reason that peasants wouldn’t have had significant property to inherit. Or to put it the other way again, Buddie is reading some modern notions of American upper socio-economic class (and probably middle class) life back into 1st century Palestine—the very thing traditionalists are being accused of.
I listened to it and found it a little depressing. Rev. Dr. Harmon did a fine job. Rev. Russell was more courteous than in a prior interview format I had seen a couple of years ago. The interviewer was, I thought, quite fair and did not show bias. However, the religion reporter was so terribly biased it simply seemed a bit of a two against one pile-on (three, if you count the bp-candidate who called in).