The Hermeneutics of Biblical Sexual Ethics

My wife likes doing puzzles. She has a standard way of doing it. She first finds the borders of the puzzle and then puts that together. Then she fills in the middle. The border provides the framework for everything else and it lets her know where the other pieces in the puzzle belong, how much surface the puzzle will take up, etc. 

Now imagine if you could fit different puzzle pieces into others that did not create the same picture. I imagine that having that border put together would allow one to determine whether they have the rest of the pieces right, whether the picture they ended up with was the one the artist of the puzzle intended.

When people often study biblical subjects they can often do so with unbiblical assumptions concerning what paradigms to use. They often just look for verses about a subject and then try to make conclusions based upon what they think they are allowing or prohibiting or telling us to believe or not to believe. For instance, when the Pharisees approach Christ concerning the subject of marriage and divorce, they are not denying the Bible outright. Their problem is that they have a faulty hermeneutic that takes a verse out of the Bible in isolation from any clear passage that may function as an interpretive guide for the present passage. 

The number one hermeneutical principle is to always interpret the ambiguous in light of the clear, never the other way around. Yet, so many look to undermine the clear by reinterpreting it in light of the ambiguous. They seem to have a habit of muddying the clear water with dirty lenses rather than cleaning dirty lenses with clear water.

In Matthew 19 and Mark 10, Christ makes the argument to the Pharisees that their interpretive paradigm when it comes to sexuality/marriage and divorce is flawed. What should interpret a passage about sexuality is what God said about it in the beginning, in Genesis 1-2. This is what I call a priority argument, which is an argument that makes the case that what came after must be conformed to what came before because what comes before shows God's original intent and not a later accommodation or expression with which He means to reinterpret the original text. In other words, Jesus is telling the Pharisees that they are moving the wrong way in the Bible. They think the most recent thing is the most relevant thing to practice in life and something that can replace what came before. What Jesus argue instead is that the most relevant thing is what came before and if something that comes after is interpreted in a way that contradicts what came before, it has been misunderstood. What came before is the clear and guiding principle for all that comes after. He applies this to sexuality and its relationship with the divorce and marriage debate among the rabbis. Moses did not command them concerning divorce, not because God is ok with it, but because the Israelites were hard-hearted. What God desires is seen clearly in the statements of Genesis 1-2, which contradict the practice of divorce and remarriage and they express the will of God within which all other passages about the subject are to be interpreted.

What Jesus does in Matthew 19 and Mark 10 is tell us something that the Old Testament already does for us. For instance, Leviticus 18 assumes the one flesh union of Genesis 2 when it discusses incest. To uncover the nakedness of your father's wife is to uncover the nakedness of your father (18:8). Familial connections link everyone together. But a wife is not linked by blood to a husband. The only link between them is marriage itself and marriage consists of the one flesh union. My point is that this is being assumed in the passage so that the question concerning the rightness or wrongness of the sexual act of incest must be run through the clear teachings concerning God's intent for sexuality in Genesis 1-2. 

Likewise, I have argued countless times that these crimes, both in Leviticus 18 and 20, get the death penalty under the lex talionis because they are anticreational crimes that assume the morality of the creation mandate in Genesis 1. The sexual act of homosexual sex, bestiality, cuckholding, sleeping with a wife during her menstrual period, and sacrificing children all assume that engaging in sexual activity that is contrary to God's clear expressed will for the sexual act in the creation mandate is evil. 

The New Testament assumes this framework everywhere in its use of porneia. Paul assumes that incest and homosexuality and any form of porneia are contrary to what the body was made for (1 Cor 6:13), something he would only know by assuming that the Lord had use of the body for His own purposes that porneia rejects. As we see him use terms he derives from Leviticus 18 (e.g., arsen, koite) and then continues to talk about marriage and divorce in light of the one flesh union, we see that he assumes the same paradigm concerning sexuality and marriage/divorce that Moses does in Leviticus and Jesus does in the Gospels.

It seems that these chapters do what Jesus is doing by assuming that Genesis 1-2 convey God's universal revealed will for the sexual act, and anything that contradicts it is not God's moral will in any situation. Hence, to look for other verses to establish a different practice or to reinterpret verses to fit some other paradigm, like trying to argue that sex can be for pleasure only by using the Song of Solomon or trying to argue that the Scripture's condemnation of homosexuality is only a condemnation of certain forms of it, is to employ a fallacious hermeneutic that runs counter to the one God provided via His revelation to man. 

It simply is wrong-headed to attempt to reinterpret verses outside of Genesis 1-2 in an effort to find caveats to Genesis 1-2. That is what the Pharisees are doing. I'm sure they were aware of Genesis 1-2. That wasn't the issue. The issue is that they did not see it as the guiding passage to govern their understanding of sexuality and marital relationships. Hence, they simply thought using a later passage in the Bible was still a legitimate way to come to a conclusion concerning the issue. Jesus contradicts this by telling us that God set down a hermeneutic for us already that we might interpret all other verses concerning sexuality and marriage in continuity with it rather than in discontinuity with it as the Pharisees were doing. 

Hence, any other biblical passage used to sanction a sexual or marital act must assume Genesis 1-2 as its governing matrix and any conclusion that runs contrary to it would be erroneous. Genesis 1-2 are not one passage in a large mix of others. It is the border of the puzzle and anyone failing to stay within its boundaries is simply putting together a different picture than God intended.