Yes, there are those out there who claim to be true followers of Christ and teach that Christians can be polygamous, supposedly based on Scripture. If there ever was a teaching that was meant to appeal to the fleshly, sexual appetites of men, this is it. That's how you know it's false.
Similarly, if marriage appeals to my sexual appetite it must be wrong, huh? There’s a bit in
The Screwtape Letters (C S Lewis) about God being the great hedonist—pleasures at his right hand! God is no wowser, and pleasure’s not sin, though how it’s sought can be.
From Jacob’s four coterminous wives I see Yahweh’s plan, not sin. Yahweh also pictured himself as polygynous (Jr.3:8), and having divorced one of his errant wives he threatened to divorce the other, her sister.
Such biblical data show that polygyny is not an absolute sin, even if it isn’t the ideal norm (Adam/Eve). My take of 1 Tm. is that the emphases are on marital faithfulness (if married), and role modelling (if married, monogamy). Incidentally Peter was married and an elder (1 Pt.5:1); presumably Paul without being married was also an elder: ie a church elder/supervisor can be single, so for instance 1 Tm.3:2 assumes an ‘if’.
To cite my old college notes on church elders/deacons:
[As noted by Jacob, faithfulness is also a virtue within polygamous relationships, where a husband ought to be faithful to all his wives. There may well have been a further desire by Paul that besides faithful spouses leading the church, they should also not be polygamists, not because polygamy was sinful but because it was not the ideal intended by God: the text
“prohibited polygamists from holding the office of elder. The verses have nothing to say about divorce and remarriage
” (Grudem 1994:916). By “faithful to his wife” the leader was not to stray from his wife’s marriage bed whether by affairs or by plural marriage, thus leading the church by example.
[1] The force of μιας in 1 Tm.5:7 might have implied her faithfulness to the
one whom she was last married to. So, no matter how chequered her marital history had been, was she faithful at the last, may have been the question Paul thought the important point.]
I deem it scandalous that some missionary practice has been to urge divorce in order to transfer from polygyny to monogyny. Such counsel has gone against the principle of marital faithfulness, as if Jacob had sinfully divorced Bilhah, Leah, and Zilpah.
[1] Our ratings: CEB/NIV (A); NLT (A-); ESV (B); HCSB/NCV/NKJV/NJB (B-); NABRE/NRSV (D+).
