Defending Latter-day Saint theology about Eternal Marriage

Another day, another eisegesis-driven video from David Bartosiewicz. We really should thank him for giving us countless opportunities to refute his claims and present a clear defense of the truth of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints:

Bartosiewicz, who is an Evangelical Protestant [update: Dave, as of 2018, is Eastern Orthodox], attempts to use Jesus’ debate with the Sadducees in the Synoptic Gospels, which will be addressed just momentarily.

It should be noted that Jesus as a bridegroom is a metaphor, just as the “Church” being a spouse is a metaphor (cf. Rev 18:23). Confusing the symbolic and metaphorical with reality is a common interpretive fallacy one encounters. Much of it is the result of the anti-biblical (not just un- or sub-biblical) theology espoused by Bartosiewicz.

It should be noted that LDS theology does believe that we will be with God and even subjected to him forever, so much of what Bartosiewicz says is only reflective of his poor exegetical skills and lack of critical-thinking skills; for instance, in D&C 76 alone, we read the following:

And saw the holy angels, and them who are sanctified before his throne, worshipping God, and the Lamb, who worship him forever and ever. (D&C 76:21)

These shall dwell in the presence of God and his Christ forever and ever. (D&C 76:62)

And thus we saw the glory of the celestial, which excels in all things--where God, even the Father, reigns upon his throne forever and ever. Before whose throne all things bow in humble reverence, and give him glory forever and ever. (D&C 76:92-93)

Then shall he be crowned with the crown of his glory, to sit on the throne of his power to reign forever and ever. (D&C 76:108)

And heard the voice of the Lord saying: These all shall bow the knee, and every tongue shall confess to him who sits upon the throne forever and ever. (D&C 76:110)

And to God and the Lamb be glory, and honor, and dominion forever and ever. Amen. (D&C 76:119)

 Scriptural Objections to Eternal Marriage

Now we get into the "meat" of the presentation.

Rom 7:2

For the woman who has a husband is bound by the law to her husband as long as he lives. But if the husband dies, she is released from the law of her husband.

In context, Paul is speaking about "the law" (ο νομος), as seen in Rom 7:1. He is not addressing whether the marriage sealing between two faithful Christians continues into eternity, but that the Torah's teachings about marriage are only binding while both are alive; when one passes away, it is not an act of adultery for the widow or widower to remarry. Such is commensurate with Latter-day Saint theology.

James D.G. Dunn, in his seminal commentary on Romans, wrote the following about the background to vv.2-3:

The point of the law is illustrated by the case of the married woman. Under Jewish law, once married to her husband she was bound to him, and there was no way provided by the Torah for her to end that relationship prior to his death. Only when he died she was released from that law which bound her to him. The law governing the marriage relationship became inapplicable and so powerless over the wife as soon as the marriage relationship ceased with her husband’s death. The authority and power of the law over the wife is shown by the fact that it names her adulteress, with all the opprobrium, guilty, and liability to the penalty of death which that word then carried, if she consorts with another man while her husband is still alive. Likewise the way in which the power and authority o the law I completely nullified and rendered inoperative by the husband’s death is shown by the fact that once her husband is dead the same woman can do precisely the same thing without incurring any name or blame of adultery. There is a death which liberates from the lordship of sin (6:9-10, 18), so there is a death which liberates form the lordship of the law. (James D.G. Dunn, Romans 1-8 [Word Biblical Commentary 38a; Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1988], 368)

Furthermore, as Dunn (ibid., 360) notes, under Roman Law, the widow was not freed from the law of her husband by his death, since she was obliged to mourn his death and to remain unmarried for twelve months.

Matt 22:23-30

As for Matt 22:30, which is the most commonly-cited text used against LDS teachings on this issue has Jesus addressing the Sadducees, saying:

For in the resurrection they neither marry, nor are given in marriage, but are as the angels of God in heaven.

Firstly, it should be noted that the Sadducees rejected belief in angels and the resurrection. Furthermore, when one examines the Greek, it refutes the argument.

“[Neither] marry” is [οὔτε] γαμοῦσιν, the present indicative active of the verb “to marry” (γαμεω). “Given in marriage” is γαμιζονται, again, the present indicative active of the verb γαμιζω “to give in marriage.” Jesus is not speaking of there being no marriage bonds in the hereafter, but that, in the age to come, there will be no performances of marriage. One’s opportunity to be married is something that can only take place on this side of eternity, to borrow the common phraseology. Matt 22:30 is therefore addressing the act of being married; nothing is said, for or against, marriages performed in this age continuing into the hereafter.

As Kevin Barney wrote in a blog post addressing this topic:

If Matthew had wanted to report that Christ had said in effect “Neither are they now in a married state (because of previously performed weddings),” the Greek in which he wrote would have let him say so unambiguously. He would have used a perfect tense [gegamēkasin] or a participial form [gamēsas] of the verb. He did not, so that cannot be what he meant. Jesus said nothing about the married state of those who are in heaven. By using the present indicative form of the verb, Matthew reports Jesus as saying in effect “In the resurrection, there are no marriages performed.” Jesus goes on to compare those in the resurrection to the angels of God, for unlike mortals they will never die and, according to Jewish tradition, they do not need to eat. The key point is that, contrary to the misconceptions of the Sadducees, life in the resurrection will be different in many ways from life in mortality. (Jesus then goes on to make an additional argument in favor of the resurrection in the following verses.)

The potential continuation of the marriage state in the hereafter for those married in mortality is consistent with another statement of Jesus, as recorded in Matt. 19:6: “Wherefore they are no more twain, but one flesh. What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder.”

One non-LDS scholar, Ben Witherington, wrote the following, showing that the question of the eternality or lack thereof of marriage is not in view in Jesus' encounter with the Sadducees; commenting on the Markan parallel found in ch. 12, he wrote:

Jesus’ response, which begins at v.24, suggests that the Sadducees are ignorant of both the content of the Hebrew Scriptures and the power of God. Jesus stresses that in the age to come, people will neither marry nor be given in marriage. Notice what Jesus does not say. He does not say there will be no marriage in the age to come. The use of terms γαμουσιν and γαμαζονται is important, for these terms refer to the gender-specific roles played in early Jewish society by the man and the woman in the process of getting married. The men, being the initiators of the process in such a strongly patriarchal culture, “marry,” while the women are “given in marriage” by their father or another older family member. Thus Mark has Jesus saying that no new marriages will be initiated in the eschatological state. This is surely not the same as claiming that all existing marriages will disappear in the eschatological state (see, for example, Tertullian, On Monogamy 10, who specifically denies that God will separate in the next life those whom he has joined together in a holy union in this one). Jesus, then, could seem to be arguing against a specific view held by the Sadducees about the continuity between this life and the life to come, a view involving the ongoing practice of Levirate marriage.

 I would suggest that Luke’s expansion of his Markan source at Luke 20:36 understands quite well the rift of the discussion. In the eschatological state we have resurrected beings who are no longer able to die. Levirate marriage existed precisely because of the reality of death. When death ceases to happen, the rationale for levirate marriage falls to the ground as well. When Jesus saying in v.25b that people will be like the angels in heaven in the life to come, he does not mean they will live a sexless identity (early Jews did not think angels were sexless in any case; cf. Gen. 6:1-4! [Though there is, interestingly, evidence that some early Jews believed that angels didn’t marry—see 1 Enoch 15:7. There was furthermore the belief that the dead became angels after the resurrection [cf. 1 Enoch 51:4; 104:4; Bar. 51:9-10]. On the discontinuity of this world and the world to come [including the assertion that there will be no begetting], see B. Ber. 17a), but rather that they will be like angels in that they are unable to die. Thus the question of the Sadducees is inappropriate to the condition of the eschatological state. I would suggest that Jesus, like other early Jews, likely distinguished between normal marriage and levirate marriage. In Mark 10 Jesus grounded normal marriage in the creation order, not in the order of the fall, which is the case with levirate marriage (instituted because of death and childlessness and the need to preserve the family name and line). Thus Jesus is intending to deny about the eschatological state “that there will be any natural relation out of which the difficulty of the Sadducees could arise.” (Ben Witherington, The Gospel of Mark: A Socio-Rhetorical Commentary [Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2001], 328-29)

Implicit biblical evidence for Eternal Marriage

Firstly, one should note that much of Dave's comments about biblical evidence or lack thereof for eternal marriage is based on the concept of sola scriptura and the belief that a doctrine must be explicated in the Bible for it to be true. I would like to challenge him to defend this biblically. Such is an impossible task, both biblically and historically.

Notwithstanding, there is implicit biblical evidence supporting this doctrine from the Bible. Jeff Lindsay provides a typical list of biblical evidence for “eternal marriage”:

There are indications of eternal marriage and eternal families in the Bible. One of the earliest comes from Job. At the end, Job is blessed with double of all the things he had lost (Job 42:10,12). We are then given a lost of these things, and indeed we see that he was blessed with double the number of sheep, camels, oxen, and asses. But "he had also seven sons and three daughters" (Job 42:13), the same number be had before his trial (Job 1:2). The implication is that he still had the original children, consistent with the LDS view that families can be eternal.

1 Pet. 3:7 hints at eternal marriage, when Peter speaks of the man and woman being "heirs together" of the grace of life. Another suggestion of eternal marriage comes from the word of Christ about the sealing power he gave to Peter (Matt. 16:19 and Matt. 18:18): whatsoever you bind on earth will be bound (sealed) in heaven. And of marriage, Christ said "What God hath joined together, let not man put asunder" (Matt. 19:6). Also, in the Lord (possibly meaning in heaven or in the eternities), the man is not without the woman and vice versa, according to 1 Cor. 11:11.

Admittedly, at best, these are allusions or implicit evidences for such; nothing explicit as one finds in D&C 132:12, 15-17. Jeff admits that “The Bible is admittedly incomplete in its teachings of eternal marriage." However, this would only be problematic if one believes in the formal sufficiency of the Bible.

The Antiquity of Eternal Marriage

Dave argues that the ancient Jews did not believe in eternal marriage. Firstly, it should be noted that his harping on Jewish women and the temple to be a red herring--sealings do not require a temple to be valid when a sanctioned temple is not available (the temple during the time of Jesus was in great apostasy). One finds a parallel to this in the early history of the LDS Church (e.g., D&C 124:31).

The concept of eternal marriage is well-attested among Jews in the medieval period and is frequently mentioned in the Zohar, which also notes that God has a wife, the Matrona ("mother"), and is known in the Talmud. In the Falasha (the black Jews of Ethiopia) the text 5 Baruch, has Jeremiah's scribe, Baruch, being shown various parts of the heavenly Jerusalem, with different gates for different heirs. The text then says, "I asked the angel who conducted me and said to him: 'Who enters through this gate?' He who guided me answered and said to me: 'Blessed are those who enter through this gate. [Here] the husband remains with his wife and the wife remains with her husband'" (Wolf Leslau, Falasha Anthology [New Haven: Yale, 1951, 1971], 65) 

A hint of the eternal nature of marriage is found in Tertullian's discourse on the widow, in which he wrote: "Indeed, she prays for his [her husband's] soul, and requests refreshment for him meanwhile, and fellowship (with him) in the first resurrection" (On Monogamy 10). In the same passage, speaking of marriage, he wrote: "If we believe the resurrection of the dead, of course we shall be bound to them with whom we are destined to rise, to render an account the one of the other…But if 'in that age they will neither marry nor be given in marriage, but will be equal to angels,' is not the fact that there will be no restitution of the conjugal relation a reason why we shall not be bound (to them), because we are destined to a better estate - destined (as we are) to rise to a spiritual consortship, to recognize as well our own selves as them who are ours…Consequently, we who shall be with God shall be together, since we shall all be with the one God - albeit the wages be various, albeit there be 'many mansions,' in the house of the same Father - having labored for the 'one penny' of the selfsame hire, that is, of eternal life; in which (eternal life) God will still less separate those whom He has conjoined, than in this lesser life He forbids them to be separated." (Tertullian, Ante-Nicene Fathers 4: 56, 67) 

Such a belief also appears in John Chrysostom's "Letter to a Young Widow":

  

. . . But perhaps you long to hear your husband's words, and enjoy the affection which you bestowed upon him, and you yearn for his society, and the glory which you had on his account, and the splendour, and honour, and security, and all these things being gone distress and darken your life. Well! The affection which you be stowed on him you can keep now just as you formerly did.

 

For such is the power of love, it embraces, and unites, and fastens together not only those who are present, and near, and visible but also those who are far distant; and neither length of time, nor separation in space, nor anything else of that kind can break up and sunder in pieces the affection of the soul. But if you wish to behold him face to face (for this I know is what you specially long for) keep your bed in his honour sacred from the touch of any other man, and do your best to manifest a life like his, and then assuredly you shall depart one day to join the same company with him, not to dwell with him for five years as you did here, nor for 20, or 100, nor for a thousand or twice that number but for infinite and endless ages. (John Chrysostom, Letter to a Young Widow, 3)

 

The pseudepigraphic Joseph and Aseneth 15:6 has a heavenly messenger telling Aseneth, "Behold, I have given you today to Joseph for a bride, and he himself will be your bridegroom, forever (and) ever." In a later passage, the Egyptian king tells Joseph "Behold, is not this one betrothed to you since eternity? And shall be your wife from now own and forever (and) ever?" (Joseph and Aseneth 21:3). Pharaoh then tells Aseneth, "justly the Lord, the God of Joseph, has chosen you as a bride for Joseph, because he is the firstborn of God. And you shall be called a daughter of the Most High and a bride of Joseph from now and forever" (Joseph and Aseneth 21:4) (My copy of the text is from The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, ed. James H. Charlesworth [2 vols.; Broadway: Doubleday, 1983], 2:202-47). 

Again, we see that David Bartosiewicz has no scholarly bone in his body. Furthermore, notwithstanding having once been a Latter-day Saint, his ignorance of Mormonism shows that he was a very ignorant member of the Church and/or is engaging in deception.

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