It’s Time to Come Clean About Biblical Marriage

It’s not what you think it is

Dan Foster
Backyard Church
Published in
10 min readMay 25, 2023

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“Marriage was, and always will be, the God-ordained union between one man and one woman,” Shouted the pastor as he slammed his fist down on the pulpit. His face was beetroot red, and a little vein on his balded forehead bulged out as he delivered an impassioned exhortation to his earnest flock.

As my country prepared to vote in a nationwide plebiscite to determine the legal right of same-sex couples to marry, these sermons had regretfully, but not unsurprisingly, become increasingly common in my church.

Growing up in the world of Evangelicalism, I was taught in no uncertain terms exactly what constitutes “Biblical marriage.”

Hardcore conservatives like John Macarthur declare that the traditional pattern for marriage — the biblical model — is “one man and one woman, committing their lives to each other until death separates them.”

“The Bible is clear!” declares the chorus of the evangelical faithful.

But is it really?

There is no consistent view

According to my Evangelical upbringing, Biblical marriage was supposed to be a simple equation: one man plus one woman equals happily ever after.

But in reality, if you actually flip through that ancient book, it is a real rollercoaster ride of contradictions when it comes to marriage. The Old Testament, the New Testament — they both chime in with their own views and laws, but consistency? Nope! They can’t seem to settle on a single, unambiguous rule. The only thing that’s crystal clear is that the so-called “Biblical view” of marriage is light years away from what we consider the normal “Christian” view these days. It’s like trying to compare a donkey cart to a Lamborghini.

The next time a Christian refers to something they call “traditional marriage” or “Biblical marriage,” it might be worth asking them exactly what they mean by those terms because the Bible certainly has some ideas about marriage that are contradictory to the modern evangelical understanding. Here are a few:

Biblical marriage was about ownership

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Dan Foster
Backyard Church

Writer, Poet, Blogger: Tackling life, faith, culture, religion, politics, and spirituality. Connect with me: https://linktr.ee/DanFosterWriter