Hey everyone, last night my wife @Mbhs and I spent an hour explaining to a pastor friend of ours the position we've come to in affirming Polygyny. We had been looking for a trustworthy person who was distant enough from our circles as to not jeopardize our standing within our community by outing ourselves. I asked him if he would be willing to discuss a controversial topic that was very taboo in the church, taking the necessary time to cover all of the scriptural ground and arguments, and he gladly agreed. Before we began the conversation I typed up a short introduction to the topic, intending to set us up for agreement up until the point of revealing our affirmative stance on the issue. Here it is:
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God has, progressively through His Word, at different times and places, been pleased to reveal to us Himself and His will throughout the course of History. We hold to God's Word alone, defined by the Reformers as Sola scriptura, as the sole rule of faith and practice for the Christian life. We also hold to the concept of Semper Reformanda, or always reforming, where we see God's word convict and confront our misconceptions of Him and our misdeeds against Him.
God, in His creative will and purpose, made men and women differently, giving them distinct purposes and roles in this life to fulfil His design for them. Both are called to being fruitful and multiplying, the work of subduing the Earth, and making disciples. In a marriage covenant, men are to lead, care for, protect, and provide, and women to are to come alongside their husbands and help fulfil his calling, including the vital and God given role of childbearing and raising children in the home. God blessed men and women in their tasks and gave them the creative mandate of filling and subduing the Earth through work and procreation. Thus He established and blessed the first marriage, consectracted as perfect and holy before God.
Sin and death have broken the world and affected these creative purposes, even to the foundations, and thus the breakdown of the marriage relationship has occurred. God in His mercy, throughout History has affirmed His love, care for, and purpose for men and women as exampled in His Law and through His Son Jesus, despite the effects of sin as exampled in the breakdown of the marriage relationship.
We all approach Scripture through our own presuppositions and biases, leaning into our cultures, traditions, and history as lenses which we use to judge our beliefs of what God's Word teaches. In times of uncertainty we tend to look to our leaders and teachers to confirm what we believe before opening ourselves up to being challenged in those beliefs. It is this bias that we believe to be long held in the Christian church, establishing a law that neither God nor Christ commanded, and in so doing we have set up commandments and doctrines of men that have become enforced dogmas and legalisms leading to, as RC Sproul calls it, the tyranny of the weaker brother. Simply put, where God does not make law, neither are Christians allowed to do so.
In an ever increasingly secular and progressive culture, the church is finding itself to be more and more under scrutiny from those who seek to coopt and corrupt it. We the church have begun to face the onslaught of godlessness which has one purpose - to neutralize the church's witness by rendering it unable to give good answers to hard questions that it is faced with. We as the church have had to weather the storm of homosexuality now for at least two decades, and many churches have capitulated on the biblical view in order to appease the predominant culture. This fact plays heavily into the subject at hand tonight, as we believe that very issue puts the church into a hypocritical double standard by having died on a hill it should not have. We as the church cannot afford to get this issue wrong.
We see from God's Word, from Genesis to Revelation, the constant display of God's Holiness. We can hardly read a page of Scripture without being confronted by just how Holy God is, and we never see God's holiness compromised by any of His words or actions. Indeed, God is greatly concerned about His holiness being displayed by Himself and His people, both in the nation of Israel in the Old Testament, and His church in the New. When God's people failed at representing His Holiness, they were called out and condemned in the scrictest of terms, without exception and sparing no explicitness in the acts of unrighteousness committed. God is Holy, and He expects nothing less from His people, though He is gracious and longsuffering with us when we constantly fail to meet it.
In our research on this issue we have taken in every argument for and against this subject by men who we in every other area have great respect for and view as a theological authority. What we have found in their arguments, in light of an honest and as minimally biased an assement of Scripture as we could make, is a woefully inconsistent, illogical, indefensible, and even inchoerent denouncement of thier position. Again, we must be willing to change our minds where God's Word confronts our beliefs, no matter how deeply held they are.
We therefore affirm as acceptable and normative for Christians to practice, according to Christian liberty and within the bounds of the conviction of the Holy Spirit, a woman's right to engage in a marriage covenant with a man already married to another woman in a separate and distinct marriage covenant, if it is found to be acceptable to all parties involved. We do not hold to this as being the ideal state of marriage, but rather as an acceptable practice to provide women a Godly means of fulfilling their creative mandate in a world where sin has limited their access to Godly husbands, as evidenced by the discrepancy in the ratio of men and women in society, and more imporantly, within the church, throughout history, as precedenced in the Mosaic Law and not changed in the teachings of Christ.
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He listened and nodded through most of it. After I finished he smiled and asked me to keep talking, which I did for most of the hour we talked. After I finished, he said that he had never really looked into the subject, and though he instinctually disagreed with my conclusions, he was going to spend some time talking to the elders of his church to understand his and my position better, according to scripture. We will be continuing soon, and I expect he will hear me out until we reach an impasse or one of us is forced to change their position. Though I cannot imagine at this point being convinced that I've come to the wrong conclusion, I am still willing to be challenged given the nature of the subject, the implications, and the fact that it will continue to hone my arguments.
I'll let you all know how things progress, but I figured this might be helpful or encouraging to some of you.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
God has, progressively through His Word, at different times and places, been pleased to reveal to us Himself and His will throughout the course of History. We hold to God's Word alone, defined by the Reformers as Sola scriptura, as the sole rule of faith and practice for the Christian life. We also hold to the concept of Semper Reformanda, or always reforming, where we see God's word convict and confront our misconceptions of Him and our misdeeds against Him.
God, in His creative will and purpose, made men and women differently, giving them distinct purposes and roles in this life to fulfil His design for them. Both are called to being fruitful and multiplying, the work of subduing the Earth, and making disciples. In a marriage covenant, men are to lead, care for, protect, and provide, and women to are to come alongside their husbands and help fulfil his calling, including the vital and God given role of childbearing and raising children in the home. God blessed men and women in their tasks and gave them the creative mandate of filling and subduing the Earth through work and procreation. Thus He established and blessed the first marriage, consectracted as perfect and holy before God.
Sin and death have broken the world and affected these creative purposes, even to the foundations, and thus the breakdown of the marriage relationship has occurred. God in His mercy, throughout History has affirmed His love, care for, and purpose for men and women as exampled in His Law and through His Son Jesus, despite the effects of sin as exampled in the breakdown of the marriage relationship.
We all approach Scripture through our own presuppositions and biases, leaning into our cultures, traditions, and history as lenses which we use to judge our beliefs of what God's Word teaches. In times of uncertainty we tend to look to our leaders and teachers to confirm what we believe before opening ourselves up to being challenged in those beliefs. It is this bias that we believe to be long held in the Christian church, establishing a law that neither God nor Christ commanded, and in so doing we have set up commandments and doctrines of men that have become enforced dogmas and legalisms leading to, as RC Sproul calls it, the tyranny of the weaker brother. Simply put, where God does not make law, neither are Christians allowed to do so.
In an ever increasingly secular and progressive culture, the church is finding itself to be more and more under scrutiny from those who seek to coopt and corrupt it. We the church have begun to face the onslaught of godlessness which has one purpose - to neutralize the church's witness by rendering it unable to give good answers to hard questions that it is faced with. We as the church have had to weather the storm of homosexuality now for at least two decades, and many churches have capitulated on the biblical view in order to appease the predominant culture. This fact plays heavily into the subject at hand tonight, as we believe that very issue puts the church into a hypocritical double standard by having died on a hill it should not have. We as the church cannot afford to get this issue wrong.
We see from God's Word, from Genesis to Revelation, the constant display of God's Holiness. We can hardly read a page of Scripture without being confronted by just how Holy God is, and we never see God's holiness compromised by any of His words or actions. Indeed, God is greatly concerned about His holiness being displayed by Himself and His people, both in the nation of Israel in the Old Testament, and His church in the New. When God's people failed at representing His Holiness, they were called out and condemned in the scrictest of terms, without exception and sparing no explicitness in the acts of unrighteousness committed. God is Holy, and He expects nothing less from His people, though He is gracious and longsuffering with us when we constantly fail to meet it.
In our research on this issue we have taken in every argument for and against this subject by men who we in every other area have great respect for and view as a theological authority. What we have found in their arguments, in light of an honest and as minimally biased an assement of Scripture as we could make, is a woefully inconsistent, illogical, indefensible, and even inchoerent denouncement of thier position. Again, we must be willing to change our minds where God's Word confronts our beliefs, no matter how deeply held they are.
We therefore affirm as acceptable and normative for Christians to practice, according to Christian liberty and within the bounds of the conviction of the Holy Spirit, a woman's right to engage in a marriage covenant with a man already married to another woman in a separate and distinct marriage covenant, if it is found to be acceptable to all parties involved. We do not hold to this as being the ideal state of marriage, but rather as an acceptable practice to provide women a Godly means of fulfilling their creative mandate in a world where sin has limited their access to Godly husbands, as evidenced by the discrepancy in the ratio of men and women in society, and more imporantly, within the church, throughout history, as precedenced in the Mosaic Law and not changed in the teachings of Christ.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
He listened and nodded through most of it. After I finished he smiled and asked me to keep talking, which I did for most of the hour we talked. After I finished, he said that he had never really looked into the subject, and though he instinctually disagreed with my conclusions, he was going to spend some time talking to the elders of his church to understand his and my position better, according to scripture. We will be continuing soon, and I expect he will hear me out until we reach an impasse or one of us is forced to change their position. Though I cannot imagine at this point being convinced that I've come to the wrong conclusion, I am still willing to be challenged given the nature of the subject, the implications, and the fact that it will continue to hone my arguments.
I'll let you all know how things progress, but I figured this might be helpful or encouraging to some of you.
