Eric, from Pietist, recently commented on the citation from The Catholicity of the Reformation, from whence I meandered over to his blog and started reading. He has a lot of interesting things on there, but the following is a selection of one post that really caught my eye. It’s from a sermon by Eric’s friend Samuel Zumwalt entitled The Christian Home: Holy Sex. You really should read the whole thing and check out Eric’s blog.

Forensic pathologists of the Bible will usually point out that God’s commandment against adultery functioned early on in Israel’s life together as a control mechanism to insure that male owners of property (which includes the woman) could be assured that they wouldn’t leave their physical property to some other man’s offspring. Hence, forensic pathologists of the Bible say that a patriarchal God didn’t want men to have to worry about another rooster in the henhouse.

I won’t go so far to call all forensic pathologists of the Bible bigots, but I will say that such comments on the reason for the commandment against adultery rather miss the obvious point. Please refer back to Genesis 2 where God reveals His original will for women and men. Women aren’t created to be a man’s property or his concubine or even one among his serial or harem of wives. One woman is created for one man and vice versa. If women and men are running around changing partners as if life itself were the same as what takes place on the prom dance floor, they will never be able to have the kind of intimacy for which God created them. And…they will create the kind of hell we have today where kids are often introduced to the surrogate parent or partner du jour.

{Read it all}