It applies to marriage, but it doesn't apply to patriarchy.
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Why patriarchy implies polygyny?
- Thread starter MichaelZ
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Again, a specific monogamous marriage isn't necessarily non-patriarchal or an inferior kind of patriarchy per se. And a specific plural family may not be all that patriarchal, or may even be anti-patriarchal.
It is the belief that polygamy is impermissible that is anti-patriarchal, or at minimum a restraint or limitation of patriarchy. It's not the only such belief.
It is the belief that polygamy is impermissible that is anti-patriarchal, or at minimum a restraint or limitation of patriarchy. It's not the only such belief.
I actually meant to write patriarchy.
Explain how it doesn't. More than one is necessary to express patriarchy? How so?
Ive argued this same point in this thread, but "belief" and "permissibility" was not part of the O.P. IIRC.
Polygyny and patriarchy seemed to be inextricably linked from that book quote. That was the origin of the positions taken here, wasn't it?
Your epistemological argument for rationalizing monogamy exhibits a sort of Van Tillian apologetic employing Western grammar and linguistics(definitions & collective nouns) to arrive at a conclusion. (Very Western). The conclusion being that polygyny is possible, but not recommendable. It's a mere possibility amongst others - due to the "implications". Your conclusion is rather popular in the evangelical & RC church. Modern day Christians can conceive that polygyny was permissible in the bible, but no one would actually dare to try and live out the "implications" of such an array of relationships. It would simply be too sinful and too messy. Makes me wonder how the patriarchs & heroes of the OT "ran their households".(Very Eastern)
When I go to my work-place, there is a hierarchy. I can't eliminate it, it's beyond my purview. I am sure you encounter the same thing at your work-place. We are subordinate(s). Why can't marriage be that way too? Is it because it would be too sinful? Or messy? Oh how the patriarchs needed a messiah, and so do we.
Quartus, I like your post. It all focuses in on hierarchy, doesn't it?
Thank you. Yes I think it does. A major theme in the Bible is about God adding to his family and that's an awful lot of hierarchy.
The angels constitute the divine family in heaven, and on the earth, we are invited to leave Adam's (natural) family and be born again into God's (spiritual) family.
1Co 15:22 For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive
Mar 12:25 For when they shall rise from the dead, they neither marry, nor are given in marriage; but are as the angels which are in heaven.
Gen 1:1 In the beginning God...
and then when God sorts out the Fall (Gen 3:14-20), he divides the seed of the woman from the seed of the serpent and establishes enmity between the two seeds. In the figurative sense, I understand this is to be the distinction between those that stay in Adam's race and (in our age) those that accept the gospel.
Of course there is a lot of patriarchy before the fall as well as after it. Since Genesis starts with God, hierarchy at any subsequent stage is likely to be a foregone conclusion .
Since God created Adam in his likeness, it should come as no surprise if we find reflections of hierarchy when we consider our own natural families.
The angels constitute the divine family in heaven, and on the earth, we are invited to leave Adam's (natural) family and be born again into God's (spiritual) family.
1Co 15:22 For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive
Mar 12:25 For when they shall rise from the dead, they neither marry, nor are given in marriage; but are as the angels which are in heaven.
Gen 1:1 In the beginning God...
and then when God sorts out the Fall (Gen 3:14-20), he divides the seed of the woman from the seed of the serpent and establishes enmity between the two seeds. In the figurative sense, I understand this is to be the distinction between those that stay in Adam's race and (in our age) those that accept the gospel.
Of course there is a lot of patriarchy before the fall as well as after it. Since Genesis starts with God, hierarchy at any subsequent stage is likely to be a foregone conclusion .
Since God created Adam in his likeness, it should come as no surprise if we find reflections of hierarchy when we consider our own natural families.
Mojo, my opening sentence is overreaching and accusatory. Please forgive me.
No offense taken, but the reply seemed strange. I'm not arguing monogamy only, or the "messy details" of its implementation, regardless of the methods I used to arrive at my conclusion.
My bottom line is this: Patriarchy can be expressed in monogamy or polygyny. You must have one (monogamy) to have it, but you don't need the other (polygyny) to sustain it. I agree that prohibitions against it limit the expression of it, but it doesn't eliminate it.
How do we handle the self-employed handyman who schedules himself and makes his own rules? We could say that the government, or his customers are his hierarchy, but in the end, the success of his business is his alone. He doesn't need a staff of 6 to call himself a businessman.
The one child rule doesn't eliminate the institution of parenthood, it just simply limits its expressions.
Maybe it's our male pride, but we monogamists might be balking at the premise as a challenge to our manhood or patriarchal positions.
Im not sure my responses have contributed to the original premise by Mr. Shipley, but I think the whole topic is rather mercurial at this point anyway.
Our individualistic modern western mind misses the role of hierarchy in the scriptures and the gospel story. But it is quite integral to what happened in the scriptures and thereafter; with very deep affects we completely miss.
It is bad enough that many of the passages involving heirarchy have been blindly misinterpreted and others literally or practically writ out of the cannon.
It is bad enough that many of the passages involving heirarchy have been blindly misinterpreted and others literally or practically writ out of the cannon.
True, but that type of patriarchy isn't being proposed with the initial quote from Mr. Shipley, I believe.
I'm glad you mentioned modern western because western culture has a history of patriarchy.
Eastern/biblical patriarchy, though, is multigenerational and often successional (oldest male relative becomes patriarch of the family). Still, it doesn't need polygyny to sustain it.
No, it's not. I didn't say that, and neither did Tom.
What I said that you were asking about was:
In the first paragraph, I specifically disassociate de facto polygamy from de facto patriarchy. In the second paragraph, I state what the real issue is.
I was responding to your comparison of marriage and parenthood. Marriage and parenthood are descriptions of relational states. As you say it takes at least one marriage to be 'married' and it takes at least one child to be a 'parent', and you can grow your family from there as you please. Unless there's a law against that.
Patriarchy is a system of rule that applies to women and children alike in the home, and it applies to the relations between adult males in society. "The protector/provider is in charge; everybody else cooperates/submits/obeys/whatever." The spectrum there floats a bit in all healthy patriarchal relationships, depending on the context of the decision being made, but final authority rests with the protector-provider. Unless it doesn't.
Monogamous husbands can be solid patriarchs (that is, actually ru; plural husbands can be crappy patriarchs or anti-patriarchal (see paragraph 2, post 154731). Meanwhile, you don't even have to be married
to affirm the legitimacy of patriarchy (remember those words).Tom and I are using different words to say the same thing. I think. We'll look at that in a minute.
We're converging (we usually do eventually). I'm going to take one last look at the OP; see what you think.
With respect to everybody who contributed above, the people who tried to logic out Tom's statement all got it wrong. mystic corrected himself; I don't recall that anyone else did. I'm going to take a different approach and just try to read through Tom's statement one phrase at a time.Tom Shipley said:
"If polygamy (polygyny) is a logical affirmation of male headship..."
Well, is it? Does polygyny affirm male headship? [affirmation: confirmation of anything established; ratification; as, the affirmation of a law] In law, an affirmation is what you make when you testify in court but have religious reasons to not want to swear an oath. I hold it to be self-evident that polygyny confirms the male headship established by God, ratifies the law of God, and testifies to the truth of male headship. Anyone want to argue contra?
"...then the denial of the legitimacy of polygyny constitutes a denial of the legitimacy of patriarchy."
Tom never creates an equivalence between polygyny and patriarchy. For that matter, he never creates a logical equivalence or logical inference between the legitimacy of polygyny and the legitimacy of patriarchy (or the denials thereof). He says that a denial of the legitimacy of polygyny constitutes a denial of the legitimacy of patriarchy. [constitute: to cause to stand; to establish] [establish: to make stable or firm]. "An assault on the king's soldier's is the same as an assault on the king himself." It's not an assault on the king himself, but it's "the same as". "We hold these truths to be self-evident...." Not these truths are self-evident, but we "hold" (consider, believe) them to be. The difference is subtle but matters.
Here's St. Augustine (many of y'all have already seen this): "For by a secret law of nature, things that stand chief love to be singular; but things that are subject are set under, not only one under one, but, if the system of nature or society allow, even several under one, not without becoming beauty. For neither hath one slave so several masters, in the way that several slaves have one master. Thus we read not that any of the holy women served two or more living husbands; but we read that many females served one husband, when the social state of the nation allowed it, and the purpose of the time persuaded it: for neither is it contrary to the nature of marriage. For several females can conceive from one man: but one female cannot from several men (such is the power of things principal) as many souls are rightly made subject to one God."
That discussion has been beat to death above: the one-to-many relationship of things "chief" and things "subject". Nobody questions the right of an employer to have zero, one, or many employees; on what ground is the right of a husband to have more than one wife questioned? Questioning that right is the problem Tom is addressing.
Augustine-speak: If the fact of having more than one slave is a logical confirmation or ratification of the law of slavery (the right to own people), then the denial of the legitimacy of having more than one slave firms up and stabilizes a denial of the legitimacy of slavery itself. "You can have one slave but no more than one slave" raises some serious questions about how the concept of the relationship is changing qualitatively as well as quantitatively, because the 'natural law' of one-to-many in a chief-subject relationship is being violated.
20th-century-speak, arguments seen above: If having more than one employee supports the authority of the owner to run his company the way he sees fit, then a denial of the legitimacy of having more than one employee brings into question the actual rights of the owner of the business to run and grow his business as he sees fit.
andrew-speak: If the idea of some men somewhere having more than one wife bothers you, then whatever you mean by the word "patriarchy", it's not the same as what I mean when I use that word, and I would argue that it's not what that word has meant historically to the people who used it.
And again, none of this is meant in any way to challenge or demean specific monogamous marriages. It's not 'monogamy' that is the issue. It's the 'denial of the legitimacy of polygyny' that is the issue.
And we can go around this mountain as many times as we have the stamina for, but ultimately, my contention will be that if we are trapped in an "is not, is too" loop, then it's because we mean different things when we use the word patriarchy. I'm with Tom: Full-blown patriarchy necessarily entails the acceptance of the legitimacy of polygyny; it is a logical consequence of the one-to-many potential of any chief-subject relationship. And the denial of the legitimacy of polygyny constitutes an indirect attack on patriarchy and biblical male headship.
Neither monogamy-in-fact nor celibacy constitutes an attack on headship per se, just the formal denial of the legitimacy (lawfulness) of the practice of polygyny. (Remember, in the context of Tom's book, "lawfulness" is a reference to biblical law (see title of book). He doesn't mean right, good, wise, culturally acceptable, legal in your state, or anything else other than "according to the law of God as recorded in the scriptures".)
If we are going to keep going around this circle, I would like someone who disagrees with me to help me understand your point. On what ground do you say that polygyny is illegitimate? Show me how you can do that without calling biblical headship into question.
Finally, anecdotally, I have to mention that for a lot of people, getting their heads around polygyny-in-theory has changed the way they look at headship in particular and the male/female relationship generally, and actually living in polygyny has radically changed the way they understand headship and the relationship (whether male or female). Just sayin....
Now that is a tease worthy of expansion in its own post.
@andrew. Nicely done. I appreciate how you pulled that together as I more or less agreed with that premise but couldn't quite put it together like that. For me, it solidified my thoughts into the recap below.
Full blown patriarchy necessarily entails the acceptance of the legitimacy of any right or responsibility of authority that is not restricted by the lawgiver that established patriarchy.
Of which, polygyny is but one aspect.
Full blown patriarchy necessarily entails the acceptance of the legitimacy of any right or responsibility of authority that is not restricted by the lawgiver that established patriarchy.
Of which, polygyny is but one aspect.
Certainly has, even, in my case, as a celibate single.
Let me see if I can take this. The problem I have with the logical argument is that it doesn't directly address the possibility of a Higher Authority denying the legitimacy of polygamy. I'll start with the employer/employee metaphor. If you are the owner of a store, neither your employees, nor other store owners have a right to tell you how many employees you can have. But if your store is part of a franchise, the franchise-owner may well have the authority to regulate the number of your employees. He may make a restriction that each store owner is only allowed one employee -- despite the natural affiliation of one head to many subjects that Augustine points out.
I am thinking of this in the way that someone who agrees with male headship, but hasn't agreed with polygyny would think. Such a person may likely be under the impression that God had outlawed polygyny, similar to an employee-protection act. There are similar scriptural limits that protect women (for example, providing food, clothing, and marital duty), so it isn't out of the realm of possibility to think that God had outlawed polygyny for a similar reason (especially if one is confused about the definition of adultery). From that standpoint, in order for this logical argument to work, it would have to make the claim that it is logically impossible for God to both permit male headship while also delegitimizing polygyny (i.e. that it would be akin to creating a boulder too heavy for God to move).
Seemingly putting a logical limit on God like that, simply to prove one's point, would be a huge turn off for anyone who is searching out this issue, and while I realize Shipley wasn't doing that, that's still the way it comes off. It would have been a better-framed argument, IMO, if it made the claim that male headship implies that man's own head -- God -- is the only one who has the authority to deny the legitimacy of polygyny (the rest of the book demonstrates that he never does that). To be fair, I went back and checked the passage, and a few paragraphs earlier, he does point out that God doesn't prohibit polygyny, but at this early point in the book, its still an unproven assertion that anyone not yet persuaded of would still need to be convinced of.
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Backatcha. Great one-sentence summary of the whole point. More below in my response to Shibboleth.
I think we are on the brink of full convergence here.
A lot of ink has been spilled (? maybe 'keys have been pressed'?...) within a framing of the question whether Tom is 'right' or 'wrong' in his assertion in the OP, an assertion that is itself three sentences out of a 288-page book (I looked it up). And MichaelZ unfortunately and unintentionally framed the question for us with that one word "logic", as in "Can anyone explain more clearly to the logic of this:". Not his 'fault', I just see that as how this whole mess got started.
Several folks picked up on the word "logic" and proceeded to line out their understanding of the formal logic of the assertion, with the conclusion being, "yeah, I'll explain the logic to you: Tom is wrong!". Some of us picked up more on the phrase "explain more clearly", and took more of a "this is what he meant by that" approach.
My problem with the all of the formal logical analyses above is that Tom was not using the grammar of formal logic, and wasn't presenting any of the simple logical inferences that are claimed for him later. A more general problem is that we are pulling three sentences out of a 288-page book without respect for the context from which that short passage was pulled. I think we should all own up on that one.
I highlighted "directly" above to say this: Those three sentences don't directly but do indirectly address that issue, and the book as a whole clearly addresses the issue. It is the issue of the book.
Now we could have a separate conversation about the purpose and style of Tom's book. I don't think anybody who has read it would argue that it's the kind of thing you give someone who's oppositional because you think it will "convince them that they're wrong". You give it to someone who has had that first glimmer of understanding penetrate their cultural conditioning, so they can start to go over relevant biblical passages with a new perspective and get their new thinking in order.
But I think Shibboleth's argument points the way to an understanding we can all agree on (and ultimately answer MichaelZ's question satisfactorily to all of us). Try this on for size:
If your ideas about headship and patriarchy are grounded in the bible alone, sola scriptura, then your idea of what patriarchy is and how it works are based on God's law, and where in God's law does He prohibit polygamy?
If you cannot demonstrate that God Himself has prohibited polygamy, then where are you getting your ideas about patriarchy from? Church traditions? Matriarchal culture? Magazines and groups that refer to themselves as patriarchs?
That may seem really basic, and maybe I just needed to get that out of my head so I could look at it to say this:
It seems to me that the real dispute on this thread has been between those who are thinking more in ingroup terms and those who are thinking more in outgroup terms. I think we all agree that if a person believes there should be a law against a man's having more than one wife, then that person has a functional misunderstanding of what the bible teaches about marriage and male headship, or patriarchy. And I think we all agree that if a person believes there should be a law against a man's having more than one wife, then telling that person they just don't understand God, or marriage, or the bible, or anything that sounds like any of that is probably not the best way to 'win friends and influence people'. In fact, giving such a person Tom's book is a pretty dicey move—it might be the big breakthrough in understanding that person needs, or it might put them off the topic altogether.
MichaelZ is not that kind of person, hence the attempts by some above to 'explain more clearly' what Tom meant in that passage. But I would cheerfully acknowledge that Tom's argument is not the place to start with people we have in mind that think they are living biblically in their monogamous marriages (or even are living biblically within the context of their monogamous marriages), but are still subject to the religious conditioning and programming that tells them that polygamy is wrong because God says so. That's a delicate deprogramming task that escalates "speaking the truth in love" to "speaking the truth in small, easily digestible doses in the context of truckloads of love".
On the other hand (last point), I have found that Tom's argument can be pretty useful dealing with non-religious, irreligious, anti-religious folks. Something along the lines of "I live my life according to what I see as prohibited and permissible according to will of God as recorded in the bible, and so whatever your cultural concept of The Patriarchy is, it's no concern of mine". Something like that, anyway; gotta run soon. My point is that people who are sincerely trying to live according to the light they have should hear a different presentation than those who have simply rejected the authority of the bible. Still speaking the truth in love, but it's a different underlying truth that each group needs to hear.
Nice summary, and nice post overall!
I do fully admit that, when reading a book like that, I evaluate it, at least in part, in terms of its value as apologia.
At any rate, my only nitpick is this:
But he does use the vocabulary of formal logic, extensively throughout that chapter (implication, inference, assertion, contradiction, universal principle, entails, validity, fallacy, inductive/deductive reasoning, etc...). The whole passage is clearly meant to be an appeal to logos. In a previous paragraph he even explicitly says "This is logic 101." In that particular paragraph, he correctly demonstrates that the typical "Edenic Ideal" argument is a logical fallacy of generalizing from a single example to a universal principle. It was only the later section where I think the logical argument was poorly made...
And now I fear we're going "around the mountain" again so I'll close with this: the fact that several people in this thread had issues with the same particular three sentences, for the same reason, at the very least, indicates that that section could have been better written. But FWIW, I didn't let it spoil the rest of the book for me (at least not as much as his antagonistic stance towards antinomians, but that's a whole nother discussion...).
Fair enough. Tom argues from a platform of being very sure he's right, which works with some people and not so much with others. It's the difference between bringing along a sympathetic audience ("I think I understand what he meant") and antagonizing an unsympathetic audience ("aha, I caught him over-reaching"). Are we trying to 'win' an argument or achieve an understanding?
At the risk of setting us off on another course around the mountain, I wonder how many people who had a problem with the three sentences would have had the problem if they had read the whole book and developed an understanding of the kind of argument Tom was making and the kind of audience he was making it to, to be able to "explain more clearly" to MichaelZ what Tom's reasoning was. But I'm not arguing that the section couldn't have been better written, so we're still friends, right?
At the risk of setting us off on another course around the mountain,
I wonder how many people who had a problem with the three sentences would have had the problem if they had read the whole book and developed an understanding of the kind of argument Tom was making and the kind of audience he was making it to, to be able to "explain more clearly" to MichaelZ what Tom's reasoning was. But I'm not arguing that the section couldn't have been better written, so we're still friends, right?