The debate about marriage equality often centers, however discretely, on an appeal to the Bible. Unfortunately, such appeals often reflect a lack of biblical literacy on the part of those who use that complex collection of texts as an authority to enact modern social policy.
As academic biblical scholars, we wish to clarify that the biblical texts do not support the frequent claim that marriage between one man and one woman is the only type of marriage deemed acceptable by the Bible’s authors.
The fact that marriage is not defined as only that between one man and one woman is reflected in the entry on “marriage” in the authoritative Eerdmans Dictionary of the Bible (2000): “Marriage is one expression of kinship family patterns in which typically a man and at least one woman cohabitate publicly and permanently as a basic social unit” (p. 861).
Ho-hum. There’s polygamy in the Bible. NOT same-sex “marriage” though. Wonderful that modern biblical scholars can state the obvious. IIRC from my college and subsequent training, this discontinuity between the Christian teachings and biblical relationships was one of the rationalists reasons for inventing biblical criticism.
The writers complain about a ‘lack of biblical literacy’. They then display their own lack of plain literacy by writing discretely when they mean discreetly. [Discrete = going by individual units; discreet = doing something quietly, unobtrusively]. Difficult to trust experts who are poor in English grammar.
This made me laugh – 9 paragraphs in and phrased as a negative…
One doesn’t have to be a genius to notice that their obvious claim that the OT tells tales that include polygamy bears no augmentative relation to the conclusion “Keep your Scripture out of our ethics”.
Sophistry.
In high school, our brilliant minds noticed that, yes, the patriarchs had multiple wives and sexual affairs (never same-sex, of course). Our Sunday School teacher, however, pointed out that those affairs never ended well. In fact, a fair number didn’t begin well.
This Bible scholars seem to function at about a high school level, and frankly, we were smarter. Ok, we were lucky to have a good teacher.
Their thinking is also muddled by their failure to distinguish between two different senses of marriage in traditional culture: (1) the social institution with its customs and rules; and (2) the individual relationship between a man and a woman. Individual marriages cannot be polygamous in the sense that the social institution can be. In traditional polygamous cultures, a man with 100 wives would also have 100 individual marital relationships. In the post-modern West, of course, we’ve “progressed” beyond such narrow-mindedness; now you can even marry yourself.
I think it borders on the “illiterate” to refer to Eerdmans Dictionary of the Bible as “authoritative”.
And it’s been well-said in the past that the Bible makes a better case for polygamy than it does for boy-boy or girl-girl. But Matthew 19, for me, turns polygamy on its head.
Just because the Bible makes reference to A, B, C, D relations, it does not make E(never mentioned) ok. It does not even make A-D necessarily ok.
I pray the masses are smarter than to fall for these silly, circuitous attempts at argument; whose sole purpose is to find a way of justifying what isn’t even there.
Decide what you want to do, then find a Bible passage, or part of a Bible passage, that seems to say it is okay to do that. Cut and paste if necessary. “Judas went and hanged himself.” Jesus said, “Go and do thou likewise.”
Ah, proof-texting, the sport of the ignorant–and an equal-opportunity tool for the foolish.