By Oyewole O. Sarumi
The scene is now seared into the collective memory of the global church. A pastor and his prophetess wife stand before a congregation in Ohio, not to repent of a moral failure, but to celebrate a new marital arrangement.
The first wife introduces the second wife as her “sister in marriage,” and the pastor declares that monogamy is “unbiblical,” that polygyny is “divinely ordained,” and that the church has been wrongly taught for two millennia.
The second wife testifies that this arrangement is “the will of God”. The pastor defends his position by appealing to Exodus 21:10, a Mosaic statute regulating the treatment of a second wife, and he frames his innovation as a recovery of a truth that “many Pastors will not preach”.
This is not an isolated curiosity. It is a diagnostic event. It reveals a seismic shift in how the Bible is being read, not merely by the wider culture, but by those who claim to stand in the pulpit of God.
The Ohio pastor’s appeal to Scripture is not an appeal to the whole counsel of God, nor to the consensus of the church across history, nor to the plain teaching of Christ and the apostles. It is an appeal to a single verse, ripped from its redemptive-historical context, harnessed to a pre-existing desire, and baptized as “revelation.”
This is the hermeneutical crisis of our age in a single, viral moment. The question before the leadership of the church is not merely whether polygyny is permissible. The question is whether Scripture will be permitted to sit in judgment upon human appetite, or whether human appetite will be permitted to sit in judgment upon Scripture. The future of the faith in a postmodern age hinges on how that question is answered.
THE POSTMODERN SOIL IN WHICH SUCH INNOVATIONS GROW
The Ohio pastor’s declaration did not emerge from a theological vacuum. It is the fruit of a hermeneutical climate in which the authority of the biblical text has been steadily eroded by the acids of postmodern relativism. Postmodernism, as a cultural and intellectual condition, is characterized by a suspicion of metanarratives, a deconstruction of fixed meaning, and a relocation of truth from the objective order of revelation to the subjective realm of individual experience and community consensus. In this climate, the Bible ceases to be the Word of God that stands over the reader in judgment and becomes instead a resource to be mined for validation of the reader’s own truth. The text is no longer a master to be obeyed; it is a mirror in which the reader seeks to find his own reflection.
The data confirm that this shift has not remained outside the walls of the church. The 2025 State of Theology survey, conducted by Lifeway Research for Ligonier Ministries, found that while 49 percent of Americans believe the Bible is one hundred percent accurate in all it teaches, 48 percent say it contains “helpful accounts of ancient myths but is not literally true”. The church is now almost evenly divided on the very nature of the text it claims to follow.
More than a third of respondents believe modern science disproves the Bible. These statistics are not merely numbers; they are the symptoms of a profound crisis of authority. When the Bible is no longer received as the inspired, inerrant, and sufficient revelation of God, it becomes merely one voice among many, and the reader becomes the arbiter of which voice to heed.
The Ohio pastor did not need to deny the Bible to justify his polygyny. He merely needed to reinterpret it according to the hermeneutic of personal revelation. As John Owen, the great Puritan theologian, insisted, the Scripture does not derive its authority from man, nor is it “an interpretation of the will of God by the understanding of man,” but it is the Word of God, self-authenticating and self-interpreting. When that principle is abandoned, the text becomes clay in the hands of the potter, and the potter is no longer God but the pastor himself.
THE HERMENUTICAL QUESTION: DESCRIPTIVE HISTORY IS NOT PRESCRIPTIVE COMMAND
The pastor’s appeal to Exodus 21:10 demands a careful hermeneutical response, for it illustrates precisely how not to read the Bible. The passage reads, “If he take him another wife; her food, her raiment, and her duty of marriage, shall he not diminish” (KJV). This is a statute within the Mosaic covenant, and it is profoundly significant that it does not command polygyny, nor does it celebrate it, nor does it establish it as the ideal. It regulates a practice that already existed in the ancient Near Eastern world, and it does so in order to protect the vulnerable second wife from neglect. The Mosaic law, in its accommodation to the hardness of human hearts, tolerated polygyny for a season, just as it tolerated divorce, but it never endorsed the practice as the Creator’s original or ultimate intention.
The hermeneutical principle at stake is the distinction between descriptive history and prescriptive command. The Bible records many things that it does not approve. It records the polygyny of Abraham, Jacob, David, and Solomon, but in every case, the narrative is candid about the bitter fruit of these arrangements: jealousy, rivalry, neglect, and violence.
The patriarchs are not presented as moral exemplars in their marital arrangements; they are presented as men of faith whose lives were often fractured by their failure to trust the sufficiency of God’s design. To read the Old Testament narratives as a warrant for a practice is to confuse the patience of God with the permission of God, and the permission of God under the old covenant with the revealed will of God in Christ.
The hermeneutical key that unlocks this entire discussion is the person and teaching of Jesus Christ. When the Pharisees approached Jesus with a question about divorce, he did not begin with Moses. He began with creation. “Have you not read,” he asked, “that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’? So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate” (Matthew 19:4–6). Jesus’s argument is a hermeneutic of origins. He reaches behind the Mosaic accommodation to the creation ordinance, and he declares that the one-flesh union is between one man and one woman.
The singular “a man” and “his wife” are not incidental; they are the grammar of creation. Polygyny, by definition, destroys the one-flesh imagery, for it introduces a third party into a union that God designed to be exclusive.
The apostolic application of this creation ordinance is equally clear. Paul, writing to Timothy, insists that an overseer in the church must be “the husband of one wife” (1 Timothy 3:2). This phrase, “mias gynaikos andra”, is a positive requirement of monogamy, and the patristic consensus understood it as such.
Augustine, in On the Good of Marriage, argues that “the Sacrament of marriage of our time hath been so reduced to one man and one wife, as that it is not lawful to ordain any as a steward of the Church, save the husband of one wife”.
The church father saw clearly that the minister of the new covenant must embody the monogamous union that signifies the exclusive covenant between Christ and his church. To appoint a polygynist to leadership is not merely to tolerate a private irregularity; it is to contradict the very gospel the leader is appointed to proclaim. The pastor in Ohio has not recovered a biblical truth; he has resurrected a tolerated Old Testament practice and elevated it to the status of a divine mandate, all while ignoring the Christological and apostolic trajectory that moves decisively from tolerance to prohibition.
THE CLOUD OF WITNESSES: PATRISTIC AND PURITAN CONSENSUS ON MARRIAGE
The pastoral and theological leadership of the church has never been left to individual private judgment. From the earliest centuries, the church understood that the Scriptures must be read within the community of faith, guided by the rule of faith and the consensus of the fathers. On the question of marriage, that consensus is unambiguous.
While the early fathers were aware that the patriarchs practiced polygyny, they consistently interpreted those accounts as belonging to a former dispensation of divine patience, not as a pattern for Christian discipleship.
Tertullian, in his treatise On Monogamy, argued that Christ has limited his disciples to one wife, and the Council of Trent would later codify the church’s settled conviction that “it is lawful for Christians to have several wives at the same time” is a proposition to be rejected under anathema.
The Puritan tradition, which so deeply shaped the English-speaking evangelical world, was equally clear. The Westminster Confession of Faith declares that “marriage is to be between one man and one woman: neither is it lawful for any man to have more than one wife, nor for any woman to have more than one husband, at the same time”.
The Puritan divine Thomas Gataker, in a wedding sermon, described a good wife as “God’s gift,” bestowed by God’s own hand upon Adam. The reformer Hugh Latimer preached that “Christ limiteth unto us one wife only,” and he added, with pastoral realism, that “it is a great thing for a man to rule one wife rightly, and ordinately”. These are not the musings of antiquarian scholars; they are the settled convictions of the church’s most careful interpreters, men who read the same Bible the Ohio pastor reads and who concluded that the monogamous covenant is the inviolable norm of Christian marriage.
This consensus is not a matter of cultural tradition. It is a matter of the church’s Spirit-guided reading of the whole canon. When a pastor claims a private revelation that contradicts this consensus, he is not merely disagreeing with his denominational headquarters. He is placing himself outside the great cloud of witnesses that stretches from the apostolic age to the present.
The hermeneutical principle is simple and urgent: no single verse may be used to overturn the teaching of the whole canon, and no private revelation may be permitted to trump the public revelation of God in Christ and the apostolic witness to him.
As John Owen warned, heretics “begin first to wrest Scripture expressions to a sense never received nor contained in them”. The pastor in Ohio has done precisely this. He has taken a verse about the treatment of a second wife and made it a charter for a marital innovation, while ignoring the creation ordinance, the teaching of Christ, the apostolic requirement for elders, and the unanimous testimony of the church.
THE PASTORAL AND SPIRITUAL CONSEQUENCES : POLYGYNY AS A FAILURE OF LEADERSHIP
The question of polygyny among pastors is not merely academic. The research data are sobering. A 2025 study of polygamy and Christianity in Southwest Nigeria found that 81.2 percent of respondents consider polygamy sinful, and 87.1 percent strongly oppose allowing polygamous individuals in leadership roles. The same study found that polygamous families face emotional distress, gender inequality, and legal uncertainties, and that children from polygamous homes reported the highest level of dissatisfaction, citing neglect and inheritance conflicts. These are not abstract statistics. They are the human faces of a practice that the Ohio pastor has just baptized as “the will of God.”
The pastoral consequences for the congregation are equally grave. When a lead pastor enters a polygynous union, he sends a message to the flock about the sanctity of marriage that contradicts the gospel itself.
The pastoral epistles insist that the overseer must be “above reproach” and must manage his own household well, for “if someone does not know how to manage his own household, how will he care for God’s church?” (1 Timothy 3:2, 4–5). A polygynous household is, by its very structure, a household of divided loyalties and competing claims.
The pastor’s primary covenant relationship with his first wife is no longer exclusive, and the congregation is forced to navigate the emotional and relational complexity of a leader whose family life no longer models the self-giving, exclusive love of Christ for his church.
The message is not lost on the congregation: if the pastor can redefine the covenant of marriage, then perhaps the covenant of salvation can be redefined as well; if the plain teaching of Scripture can be set aside in the name of a private revelation, then perhaps the authority of Scripture itself is up for negotiation.
There is also the question of the spiritual formation of the pastor himself. The pastoral vocation is a vocation of self-denial, of taking up the cross, of laying down one’s life for the sheep. Polygyny, whatever its defenders may claim, is a logic of acquisition rather than sacrifice. It expands the pastor’s domestic realm rather than limiting it; it multiplies his claims upon the devotion of women rather than emptying himself in covenant faithfulness to one.
The pastor who stands before his congregation and declares that monogamy is “unbiblical” is not exercising a prophetic courage; he is exercising a hermeneutical self-indulgence, and he is doing so at the expense of the very people he is called to shepherd.
THE FUTURE OF THE FAITH: ANCHORED EXEGESIS AND THE RECOVERY OF CATECHESIS
What, then, is the future of the faith in this postmodern age? The future is not found in nostalgia for a Christendom that has passed, nor in the mere repetition of traditional formulas without understanding. The future is found in the recovery of a disciplined, canonical, Christ-centered hermeneutic that is taught, modeled, and embodied in the life of the local church.
The church must recover the lost art of exegesis, not as a technical specialty for the academy, but as a vital discipline for every believer. The pastor who appealed to Exodus 21:10 needed someone to ask him a simple question: “What does the rest of the Bible say about this?” The future of the faith depends on raising up a generation of believers who know how to ask that question and who have been formed by the whole counsel of God.
This recovery must begin with catechesis. The church must teach its people the grammar of the faith: the creation ordinance of marriage, the fall and its distortion of human desire, the patience of God under the old covenant, the coming of Christ as the second Adam, the apostolic teaching on marriage and leadership, and the eschatological vision of the marriage supper of the Lamb.
The 2025 State of Theology survey reveals that nearly half of self-identified Christians in America do not believe the Bible is literally true. This is a catechetical failure of the first order. The church has not taught its people what the Bible is, how to read it, and why its authority is binding upon the conscience. The result is a generation that is hermeneutically defenseless, vulnerable to every wind of doctrine and every private revelation that claims the mantle of “the will of God.”
The church must also recover the communal reading of Scripture. Postmodernism’s challenge is not merely intellectual; it is communal. The postmodern claim is that truth is constructed by communities, and the church’s answer must be a counter-community, a community formed by the Word of God, accountable to the creeds and confessions, and accountable to one another.
The pastor in Ohio stood before a congregation and made a declaration that contradicted the faith once for all delivered to the saints. In a healthy church, that declaration would have been met not with silence, but with the gentle and firm rebuke of a body that knows its Bible and loves its pastor too much to let him destroy himself and the flock. The future of the faith depends on the recovery of church discipline as an act of love, and on the recovery of the local church as a community of interpretation, where no one person’s private reading is allowed to become the law of the house.
Finally, the church must recover the centrality of the gospel itself. The reason polygyny is incompatible with Christian leadership is not merely because it violates a rule about marriage. It is because marriage is a sign of the gospel. Paul tells the Ephesians that the one-flesh union of husband and wife is a profound mystery that refers to Christ and the church (Ephesians 5:31–32). The exclusivity of the marriage covenant is a sign of the exclusivity of Christ’s covenant love for his people. To introduce a second wife into that union is to distort the sign, and to distort the sign is to obscure the gospel. The pastor who celebrates polygyny is not merely making a mistake about marriage; he is preaching a different gospel, a gospel in which Christ is not the sole and sufficient bridegroom of his one bride, the church.
THE UNCHANGING WORD IN A CHANGING WORLD
In closing, the Ohio pastor’s announcement is a symptom of a deeper malady, but it is also an opportunity and a wake up call for church leadership. It is an opportunity for the church to rediscover the sufficiency and clarity of Scripture, to recover the hermeneutical discipline that distinguishes between the patience of God and the permission of God, and to reassert the apostolic standard for leadership.
The postmodern age will continue to press its claim that truth is private, that authority is suspect, and that the individual’s experience is the final arbiter of meaning. The church’s answer must be the same as it was in the days of the apostles: “All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness” (2 Timothy 3:16). The Word of God is not a wax nose to be shaped according to the desires of the preacher. It is a fire, a hammer, a sword, and a lamp. It is the living voice of the living God, and it will not be domesticated by the hermeneutics of appetite.
The future of the faith does not depend on the novelty of our revelations. It depends on the faithfulness of our exegesis, the courage of our discipline, and the clarity of our gospel. The church must raise up leaders who can say with the apostle Paul, “We do not boast beyond limit in the labors of others, but our hope is that as your faith increases, our area of influence among you may be greatly enlarged” (2 Corinthians 10:15). That enlargement comes not by accommodating the spirit of the age, but by standing firm upon the Word that endures forever. The pastor in Ohio has chosen a different path. The church must choose another.
Prof. Sarumi, a disciple of Jesus and teacher of the Word of God, write from Lagos