Crime and Immorality

Dr Meg Warner seeks to find an answer to the question Does the Bible Really Say…that Sex Outside of Marriage is Wrong? by focusing on Deuteronomy 22. This post poses the question "why?"

In the previous post I discussed the four hermeneutical principles she describes as essential. They are not wrong but one-sided, designed to support this conclusion:

The combined effect of these four principles (there are others, but these will do for our purposes) is that it is not good enough (or safe enough) to take a single biblical verse, passage or story, and to maintain that it should be understood as authoritative for the conduct of our lives today. That does not mean that we cannot, or should not, attempt to take the Scriptures as a guide for living – we certainly should do so – but our approach needs to be comprehensive, critical and cautious if we are to avoid doing violence to the text and to one another.

The principles are not in fact robust enough to warrant this conclusion in its absolutist form. It is of course obvious to virtually everyone that one cannot simply take a verse, passage or story at random out of its biblical context and declare it binding on our conduct today. But this does not mean that there are no specific biblical verses that can be identified as "authoritative for the conduct of our lives today." Christ's summary of the law would seem an obvious example. 

I doubt that there are many who would disagree with the notion that "our approach needs to be comprehensive, critical and cautious" (even if they do not practise what they preach). The main problem therefore is the insinuation that her argument is only with people who rely on illegitimate proof-texting. Now I can well believe that Meg Warner has come across people whose use of Scripture was uncritical, insufficiently cautious and piecemeal proof-texting. But a Christian scholar seeking an honest answer to the question posed should arguably ignore such nonsense and engage with the arguments of those who seek their best to be comprehensive, critical and cautious.

It is not impossible that Warner has picked Deuteronomy 22 because someone used verses from this chapter as a proof-text to say that sex outside marriage is wrong. I myself do not remember having come across this before and her stated reason sounds different:

The foundation for biblical views on this subject is found in Deuteronomy 22’s collection of law (or ‘instruction’) about sexual conduct outside marriage, which sets out a series of examples of proscribed behaviour.

Unfortunately she does not tell us why she thinks Deuteronomy 22 is foundational in this sense. I want to suggest that it is not. The chapter concerns property laws and family laws rather than sexual behaviour more broadly. The critical point here is that the second half of the chapter considers just penalties for sexual crimes; it does not say anything about sexual immorality which was not criminal in ancient Israel. Warner is right to stress that we need to understand the cultural background to make sense of these laws. We would need to bear in mind such factors as (a) daughters customarily given in marriage at a young age, (b) the father's responsibility for and authority over the woman until marriage, (c) the legal nature of engagement, as well as cultural considerations which also relate to biology such as (d) inequalities between men and women with regard to forced intercourse and (e) the more serious consequences of loss of virginity for women than men not least in the light of the different ways in which paternity and maternity could be established in the ancient world. All of this then relates to the custom of marriage presents given by the bridegroom and his family to the bride's family (which in the light of the complaint in Genesis 31:15 may have been held by the bride's family for the bride). The law also seems to assume the practice of polygamy as the obligation to marriage in Deuteronomy 22:28-29 is not conditional on the offender being unmarried (although Exodus 22:16-17 suggests that the bride's family can veto it).

The obvious omission is prostitution. This involves illicit sexual intercourse (carrying opprobrium throughout the Bible) which carries no legal sanctions. Why? Because a prostitute is already on the margins of society and a man's relations to wider society are not fundamentally changed by intercourse with a prostitute. This means that we cannot go to the case law for a comprehensive answer to the question what constitutes sexual immorality. The law only concerns itself with certain forms of illicit sexual activity, namely those that disrupt society or profane Israel's holiness by ruining fundamental distinctions.

Does the Bible really say?

Echoing Genesis 3:1, a series of blog posts on ViaMedia.News asks "Does the Bible really say...?" and features most recently Dr Meg Warner, Biblical Scholar in Old Testament Studies and the Hebrew Bible, affiliated with both Kings College, London and the University of Exeter on Does the Bible Really Say…that Sex Outside of Marriage is Wrong?

Her "few essential principles of biblical reading and interpretation" offer a typical example of a sectarian approach to the Bible. (The nature of sectarianism is that an aspect of the truth is taken as the whole truth with consequent distortion of everything.) Here are the principles:

1.  The phrase ‘the Bible says’ is nonsensical.

It is claimed that this is so because the Bible is a library offering a variety of perspectives which are not always consistent and even in contradiction with each other. The church catholic recognises diversity and development within Scripture but it also acknowledges a fundamental harmony and coherence in the Bible, as one might expect of a book whose ultimate author is God. Denying the unity of Scripture goes hand in hand with denying that Scripture is God-breathed and truthful. The phrase 'the Bible says' is not always properly used but it is not nonsensical although it may be inconvenient for those who prefer to pick and choose which parts of Scripture to recognise as truthful.

2.  The Bible is not an ethical guide-book.

It is a common place that there are many different genres within the Bible, not all of which offer clear ethical guidance. It would be reductionist to consider the Bible merely "an ethical guide book" but from this it does not follow that the Bible cannot be considered a collection of writings that taken as a whole among other things offer ethical guidance. If the claim is merely, as maybe with the first and the third point, that one must not pluck a verse and absolutise it as a rule to be followed, fine - but this is hardly what serious theologians have been doing over the last two thousand years.

3.  Mind the Gap

It is obviously necessary to carefully consider how an instruction given within the Bible would have functioned within its original historical context and how this is to be translated into our context, taking into account not only our different historical circumstances but also, e.g., the difference between being the people of God BC and AD. So, yes, "mind the gap" but this is very different from "don't enter this carriage" as if our contemporary context renders any part of Scripture irrelevant. With regard to examples such as the one give, it is important that we say both "this is not to be implemented as law among us" (understanding the reasons why) and ask "what does this say about God and his agenda for his people" (reflecting on what this case law says about Christ and whether there is still a moral imperative for us, even if implemented very differently). 

4.  Cultural Borrowing

There is cultural borrowing in every communication. But there is subversive as well as affirmative ‘borrowing’ within the Bible and there may well be ‘assuming’ due to shared convictions as well as ‘assuming’ for the sake of argument. The specific marital rules within the Torah work from within a cultural context but they are given towards an ideal of marriage that is not simply borrowed or assumed. It would be methodologically problematic to identify as positive teaching only what is unique within the Bible (similar to identifying as genuine words of Jesus only those that no-one else could have said).

A word on the specific example: Warner observes that men and women are treated differently in Deuteronomy 22 and claims that the disparity "has to do with cultural ideas about men and women in biblical times." The ancient cultural background is indeed relevant here but so are biological realities about child-bearing. In our cultural context we take for granted that "having sex" and "having children" are two altogether separate things. Maybe this makes it difficult to appreciate that in a different cultural context the two were much more closely related. This is a serious shortcoming, given that Meg Warner thinks she has discerned what the Biblical laws were all about (protection from shame and financial loss) based on her reconstruction of the relevant background.

In addition, Warner's atomistic approach (reading a passage merely in the light of its presumed historical context rather than as part of the whole of canonical Scripture) fails to consider how Deuteronomy 22 relates to biblical teaching elsewhere on sexual union and sexual immorality and also fails to explore whether there is a development from Old to New Testament. (E.g., the case law takes the marital status of the woman into account when defining adultery but not of the man. Jesus, in contrast to both the OT and the Greco-Roman world, does not limit the definition of adultery to what a man does or wants to do with a married woman. The category of sexual immorality is of course considered broader than adultery in both testaments and in particular is not limited to acts punished under the law which makes it curious to take Deuteronomy 22 as "foundational" for the question at hand.)

 

The Ethics of Contraception

The Anglican position on the use of contraception changed dramatically in the twentieth century and, argues Dennis P. Hollinger, without much theological reflection. Much of the Protestant world followed suit, in contrast to the Roman Catholic Church which dug their heels in.

The December 2013 issue of JETS carries an essay by Dennis Hollinger which seeks to provide the theological rationale for the use of contraceptions and it is available as a pdf file here.

UPDATE: W. Ross Blackburn offers "Sex and Fullness: A Rejoinder to Dennis Hollinger on Contraception," in the March 2015 issue of JETS which is available as a pdf file here.