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Burning Question Part 1

torahlovesalvation2

torahlovesalvation2

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Real Person
Female
TLS has been encouraging me to post something on the forum to build relationships and utilize the knowledge and experiences of others to help me cope with the real possibility that I will live the poly life one day. This is difficult for me because I am an introvert, a very private person and this is obviously a sensitive subject. Frankly, I'm not sure how I feel or what to think some days, so knowing what to say or ask is already a challenge. Although I feel that God is the only one who can set things right in my heart and mind, I recognize that HE works through others as well. With that said, I would like to pose a burning question.

I know that poly is scipturally acceptable, but my burning question is what is God's divine purpose in it? I've heard several different reasons why people think the family structure of poly is a good thing, but to me the reasons given seemed more about finding the good out of a difficult situation rather than the true divine purpose of it. Some of the reasons I heard was having someone to help with the kids, the cooking, the housework and all the responsibilities that come from managing a home and family life. I come from an island culture where some families had a hired live-in helper to do these things. They didn't have to add another wife to get these things accomplished. I also heard that it builds character and strengthens your faith. I am a very analytical person, so my mind pondered this when I was headed home from the retreat. I really started seeking what answer made sense to me from God's perspective. I had a rather humbling thought. I feel that most women hold their husbands up on a pedestal as thier source of provision and happiness. After all, we were created for man and the patriarchal structure is that God is over man and the man is over the woman. Viewing the man as our headship causes us to see our husbands as the one responsible to fill every need, desire and happiness in our life. But God is a jealous God. Did he allow the design of poly to force women to realign their thinking as a reminder of who their one true source is? One man trying to satisfy the needs of multiple women will surely leave each wife regularly feeling less than satisfied and fulfilled, even more so than that of a monogamous relationship. The women in poly relationships would most certainly have to depend on God to find peace, joy and fulfillment. I cannot see the husband ever coming close to filling that when he has to divide his time amongst so many. But I ponder even still, could our infinite God not find another way to achieve this character and faith building other than a poly marriage? I mean no disrespect to those who are currently living in poly families. You have to be the strongest of individuals to endure the challenges you face every day. I am only hungry for the truth, but I feel the only answers I have gotten have to do with the logistics of a poly life, not the divine purpose of it. Although some of the reasons given may have been the right reasons for some, none of them settle it for me. In the end, the only thing I could come up with from a divine purpose standpoint was God's commandment to be fruitful and multiply being carried out more efficiently through a poly family.

So....what does the Kingdom of God stand to gain by having poly marriages verses monogamous marriages? What supernatural plan and greater purpose does it hold?

Maybe in the midst of me deepening my relationship with God, he will reveal this mystery to me. Until then, I would like to hear insightful perspectives from others if they are willing to share.
 
Oh neat! I like this one!

My understanding of poly is that just like man and women are a portrait of Christ and the Church; Poly is a picture of another truth: that Christ has sheep "not of this fold". My understanding is that Israel and the Church, while both belonging to Christ, are distinct from each other. (As it states, Israel is for our sakes our enemy because of the gospel, but beloved because of the patriarchs). And indeed there are many different folds that can belong to Christ even within the Church, although the Church is one. So that's the tippy top of the supernatural plan as I see it: That it portrays the truth of God's own 'polygamy'.

I wouldn't say poly holds 'greater purpose' than mono, as the line between them seems to be more important to us than to scripture. I would say I agree with Paul that unmarried celibacy utilized for the service of Christ has greater purpose than marriage, poly or not.

But once having crossed over to the 'married side', poly becomes 'responsible marriage'. Unmarried women and too-young widows that have a desire for men still should be wed, as their place in the Church seems to be in horrible limbo (IMO). Women should be silent in the Church and ask their husbands at home if they want to learn anything. What about women without husbands? There is not provision for them that i can see. I believe that points to them needing to either move back in with their father or get married. Poly ensures that women aren't left in limbo without a godly husband to ask questions of.

This is sort of rushed because dinner's ready and i gots to go. hopefully this addressed part of your question I have more but dinner
 
This is a great quesiton. And Slumberfreeze pretty much offered my poor answer.

Poly is no more honorable or useful than monogamy. But marriage itself is a metaphor. It testifies to God's desire for His bride, of which there are many. So polygyny is simply an accurate representation of that. To this monogamist it is no more complicated than that.
 
The most critical point to remember is that the Bible makes no distinction between polygyny and monogamy (as Slumber and Zec have pointed out). This is the heart of the matter.

Imagine a society where interracial marriage was completely frowned upon, even illegal, and had been for centuries. Nobody would even think of doing it, it was considered completely disgusting. Then a few people started to consider doing it. Some white Christian men started marrying black women. They got kicked out of their churches and shunned. Scriptural proof-texts (regarding Israelites and Cananites) were used out of context against them, to "prove" that they were in deep sin. Their closest family had to deal with their heresy, and all the flow-on effects of them being shunned by society. They even had to deal with having strange-coloured nieces and nephews. The few couples doing it even had marital difficulties, triggered by persecution and various unexpected cultural issues, giving their close family even more of an impression that this must be "wrong". And one day, one of those close family members asks one of those men:

Given all these problems you're having, "What is God's divine purpose in interracial marriage" "What does the Kingdom of God stand to gain by having interracial marriages verses single race marriages? What supernatural plan and greater purpose does it hold?"

There are two ways he could answer:
1) Go through scripture and find examples of interracial marriage (e.g. Boaz & Ruth). Find parallels with salvation (Gentiles grafted in to Israel), get all super-spiritual about it, claim that there is some amazingly deep purpose to the marriage and it must be accepted for that reason. Spend hours debating these points at length. Try to answer the question of "ok, it is an illustration, but why do YOU have to do it?"...
Or
2) Say "There is no such thing as interracial marriage. There's just marriage. You only make a distinction for cultural reasons. So, what is God's purpose in marriage? That's His purpose in my marriage too."

I use a different illustration simply to step aside from the emotional baggage of polygyny for a moment. But the answer is identical. What is God's divine purpose in any marriage? That's the answer.
 
Bull's eye, FH.

From another angle, you could ask what is God's purpose in having more than one child, or more than one employee, or more than one teacher in a school, or more than one doctor in a hospital, or more than one anything. It's a quantitative difference, not a deep philosophical one.

You're asking great questions, TLS2. Keep it up!

Meanwhile, I'm wondering if there's a related question you could spend some time praying about and working out for yourself, which is, What would God's purpose be for TLS to establish a plural family in a hostile culture? Make it personal. What do you see God working out specifically in your and TLS's lives and how does plural family relate to that?
 
torahlovesalvation2 said:
I cannot see the husband ever coming close to filling that when he has to divide his time amongst so many. But I ponder even still, could our infinite God not find another way to achieve this character and faith building other than a poly marriage?
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I wanted to address this as well. In addition to the very constructive business of teaching the wife to 'share', poly also (I postulate) forces a man to broaden his understanding of leadership and develop his shepherding skill. I'm having a real problem finding it but I think there's a part in the book of five rings that says something to the effect of "If you are at a standstill in your martial arts, take up fishing or try something completely different, to learn lessons that you can then apply back to martial arts". The reason I bring that up is that a husband, in having to learn to deal with a whole other personality, will have to grow in wisdom and skill and empathy, which the first wife will benefit from as well.

theoretically.

And of course the Father has lots and lots of different ways to build faith and character but I believe they all suck, and the worse they suck the more character is built.
 
I use a different illustration simply to step aside from the emotional baggage of polygyny for a moment. But the answer is identical. What is God's divine purpose in any marriage? That's the answer.[/QUOTE]

Thank you FH. Your illustration definitely reels in my overthinking analytical mind and brings new perspective.
 
andrew said:
Meanwhile, I'm wondering if there's a related question you could spend some time praying about and working out for yourself, which is, What would God's purpose be for TLS to establish a plural family in a hostile culture? Make it personal. What do you see God working out specifically in your and TLS's lives and how does plural family relate to that?
Click to expand...

Thanks, Andrew. That is the real question, isn't it. Either I've been to blind to see that all along or I have been too afraid to ask. Thanks for the wise counsel.
 
Slumberfreeze said:
I wanted to address this as well. In addition to the very constructive business of teaching the wife to 'share', poly also (I postulate) forces a man to broaden his understanding of leadership and develop his shepherding skill.
Click to expand...

In the midst of wallowing in my own pity party at the retreat, I did come to realize from the testimonies of others that this is no cake walk for the man either. I realize that his challenges carry greater burden than that of the women. Which begs the question, what man in his right mind would want to take on a house full of emotional women, unless God has called him to do it. Yet again, I ponder the "why would he be called?" (rhetorically speaking) I do know that TLS has the kind of character, discipline and leadership skills to carry that call and he has fully embraced it. I on the other-hand, am a work in progress. :cool:
 
Because increase is a sign of God's favor. Because like God Himself we have an intense desire for brides and children. Because we crave responsibility and significance. Because we love status and the admiration of other men. Because we thrill to softness and warmth. Because we love to contrast our strength to women's compliance. Because if one is good then two is better. Because one of our primary purposes is to be as accurate reflections as we can of God and His character and there is nowhere better that we can do that than in marriage.
 
We had a prophetic worship ministry in the '90s and made the mistake ;) of praying that God would use our lives as a sign to our generation as he did the biblical prophets. Had no idea what we were getting into....

There are other ways to get into this, though. As our culture continues to rush toward a terminal collapse (see, for example, this book), I believe God is calling more men to build strong stable families that will survive and possibly even thrive in the chaos. More and more of us are being called to "come out of her", and many are being led to start their own businesses or even homestead. As more of us men turn to self-employment and self-sufficiency, it seems natural to me (at this point, almost 20 years in) that God is calling more families to the plural life. It just works (particularly for family businesses and homesteads). When it's bad it's very bad, but when it's good it's very, very good.

This may be that Isaiah thing about seven women and one man, or it may not. Doesn't matter. Looks like a definite trend to me.
 
PS - I think Zec nailed it. There may be special purposes and callings at work in some of our lives, but it's a sign of our own cultural conditioning that we still see plural marriage as something special or weird that needs a special purpose. At a time when lots of men are "going their own way" (the MGTOW phenom) and eschewing marriage because most women are so self-centered (nothing personal, ladies - again, that's cultural conditioning), those of us who are still inclined to marry would find all the same motivations for taking a first wife to be applicable to a second or more. We'll know we're really figuring this out when we see plural marriage and monogamous marriages that are being lived according to biblical principles (and therefore scalable to plural families) as 'the new normal', and see mono marriages that are trapped in the mono paradigm as the marriages that make you wonder what the special purpose is for that.

Think about the way we think about celibacy. It's not the guy that wants to get married that has to explain himself, it's the guy who doesn't want to get married. Let's just move the bar over a notch....
 
torahlovesalvation2 said:
Which begs the question, what man in his right mind would want to take on a house full of emotional women, unless God has called him to do it.
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That is my question exactly. My low opinion of women is only rivaled by my low opinion of men. That men exist whom the Father can raise to meet this challenge is bewildering to me.
Or that women born into this century and culture can transform into the kind of women that can live and thrive in a poly marriage. They both seem like miracles to me.


torahlovesalvation2 said:
I on the other-hand, am a work in progress. :cool:
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Man, I hear you.
 
I have a slightly different take on this question.
I agree with many of the responses above, and see the significance of it all, but for me as a woman I can easily find another reason to live plural marriage.
We are to do unto others as we would have others do unto us. This gets complicated just a bit, if you remember that we have different places in what is called the patriarchal order. We need to treat those under us, the way we want those above us to treat us.
Then too, we are to love our neighbor as ourselves. The statistics show that there are around four million marriage age women in the states here that men do not exist for.
So I ask the question, if you were one of the many women out there, looking for a good and family oriented man, would you appreciate the chance to be the second wife of a proven husband and father?
When I think of all the women in the world that don't have what I do, I can only hope one of them would be a good fit for our family, and get to share in all I have been blessed with.
That's really all I have time to write at the moment, but I too think you are on the right track asking these kinds of questions.
I hope God grants you peace in your life and on this journey.
 
Joleneakamama said:
The statistics show that there are around four million marriage age women in the states here that men do not exist for.
So I ask the question, if you were one of the many women out there, looking for a good and family oriented man, would you appreciate the chance to be the second wife of a proven husband and father?
When I think of all the women in the world that don't have what I do, I can only hope one of them would be a good fit for our family, and get to share in all I have been blessed with.
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Excellent point. In fact, some good apologetic works start with this factoid about men outnumbering women (which gets worse as you get older and/or as you get churched, so older Christian women have a double hardship). For example, see Clyde Pilkington's The Great Omission. Another reason this ought to be more widely practiced and not so unicorn-ish....
 
TLS2, I appreciate what you say about the reasons falling short that people give for polygyny.

I suggest turning the question around: What is the world's purpose in monogamy? What does the kingdom of this world stand to gain by it?

Here's the answer as I understand it:

The Greeks and Romans invented Western civic government. That is, as opposed to tribal government, in which extended families govern themselves, answerable to their elders and the god or gods they serve. Civic government is all about empire and worldly power.

To make this worldly government work the Romans invented monogamy. Via monogamy the government replaces the tribal structure with its own, making every family essentially a de facto sub-unit of the empire. Western civilization continues to derive its power from this arrangement.

The West discourages the notion of clans (remember that word?) and is wary of "tribal" regions and peoples, disparaging them as backward and barbaric, because they maintain their power outside its system of control.

A 2013 article in the Economist, on why gay-marriage advocates shouldn't bash on polygamy, had some interesting things to say about monogamy as a mechanism of state power:
One of the assumptions that gay marriage calls into question, for many conservatives, is: why pairs, then? If not man-woman, then why not man-woman-woman, and so forth? Again, the response of gay-marriage proponents is generally ridicule. I don't think this is a ridiculous question. "Why can't you marry your dog, then?" is a ridiculous question; marriage, in our society, is between consenting adult persons. ... But "why only two?" isn't a ridiculous question. ... Why shouldn't it be legal for more than two consenting adults to marry each other?

There are, obviously, a whole lot of societies in the world where polygamy is legal and normal. In fact the anthropological record suggests that the overwhelming majority of human societies have allowed men to have more than one wife simultaneously. I don't want to be taken to be making a creepy dirty-old-man argument in favour of polygamy. But the reflexive belief that polygamous marriages must be evil and oppressive even in societies where they are traditional is basically an expression of cultural prejudice. I would never want to be in a polygamous marriage myself, because I've grown up in the West and it seems freaky and inegalitarian to me; but for people who grew up in Yemen, or in Swaziland, or in Vietnam before the 1950s, that is not necessarily the case. Women in polygamous societies may decide to become a rich man's second wife rather than a poor man's only wife, and do not necessarily feel oppressed by that choice. Their children usually turn out well-adjusted. To take the typical paradigm-upender, if you imagine a Sudanese man with two wives (and children by each of them) who wins the Green Card lottery and is told he has to divorce one of his wives before coming to America, you have to wonder whose interests the government thinks it is defending.

And yet modernisation in almost every country seems to entail a shift from polygamy to monogamy. This is actually something of a puzzle, according to [the authors of a recent paper]. How does a society make a shift in norms that greatly disadvantages its most powerful members? Their argument is that in the case of Europe, the dynamic that led pagan, polygamous Germanic tribes to shift to monogamy and Christianity was competition between proto-states at the group level. ... Monogamous European societies outperformed polygamous societies economically and on the battlefield... So monogamous Christian societies defeated and converted polygamous heathen ones, and monogamy gradually spread.

Now this argument may well be wrong. But any other plausible explanation is likely to be similar in that it explains the transition in terms of enhancing the economic welfare and institutional reach of monogamous cultures and states. Monogamy thrives in the service of power. Having grown up in a monogamous society, we respond instinctively to its myths: the brilliant state-building legend of Romeo and Juliet, "one girl, one boy" (to quote the Leonard Bernstein version), the might of the sovereign ("the Prince expressly hath forbidden bandying in Verona streets!") decreeing that marriage as a tool of clan alliance or rivalry will make way for marriage as a pairing of two autonomous individuals in a romantic attachment, answerable to no one but the law. This is the way the state will recognise sexual bonding, because this is the codification of sexual bonding that makes for the strongest state. We absorb these norms, we learn to embrace them, we thrill to them from the age when we watch our first Disney film. Today, gay men and women want to have their sexual bonding embraced within the same norms, to achieve equality, and that's their right. But my guess is that the real answer to the conservative question "why not more than two people, then?" is that we will stick to pairs because marriage is a creature of the state and pairs are the form that makes the state strongest. Nobody, though, gays or conservatives, finds this way of thinking about the issue very appealing, so it probably won't get much play.
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This sentence from the above really says it: "Monogamy thrives in the service of power."

The Romans invented monogamy as part of their program to subdue every tribe they encountered, and Westernized peoples have carried the system forward and built upon it ever since. Kind of a Borg thing, if you will.

We, as people coming at polygamy from within monogamist cultures, tend to focus our reasoning solely on what goes on between individuals and within our homes. That makes sense since that's where we're working things out; there are limits to how much we can openly ally with one another, from clans on down to individuals. But it also shows how much we internalize and take personally what really originates at the national and worldwide level.

So, yeah, we can easily talk about polygyny in terms of personal growth and household management without reflecting on how the larger system instills and enforces egalitarianism for its own ends. "The fish doesn't know the sea," as my mother says. By reasoning solely from our perspective within the monogamist system, we don't really get past thinking of polygyny as an add-on. You don't ask how monogamy has benefited or harmed your tribe if monogamy has made sure you don't identify with a tribe.

I've sometimes felt that this all can seem too slippery and abstruse. But if the answer were easy to come by, we wouldn't even be having this discussion, right? Fortunately this view — that monogamy is an invention that serves the purposes of worldly power — does work when applied to some of the questions we persistently face. For instance:
  • It shines a light on the real source of the notion that monogamy is an ideal from on high and must therefore be in the Bible somewhere: Worldly power is happy to have us think its ways are divine and unquestionable.
  • It provides an explanation for why polygyny and gay marriage get different reactions from the public: The one is tribal and thus presents an existential threat to the entire Western worldview; the other is safely anti-tribal.
  • It places into context the deep offense some people take at polygyny: As an existential threat to the state with whose power we've been taught to identify, polygyny can reasonably be viewed as treasonous.
 
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