American in Spain

Marriage Classes Begin

June 13, 2007

Beginning tonight, for four days, we have marriage classes at the local church. I'm really quite curious to know what The Church thinks it can teach me about marriage. I've been reading up on the course material. The most relevant stuff I've found so far is Leviticus, Chapter 20, where it talks about how adulterers should be put to death. That seems perfectly reasonable. But, on careful observation, I've noticed the wording in the New International Version and the King James Version specifically define adultery as having sex with "another man's wife", so both the adulterer and the adulteress must be married for it to be officially "adultery", and therefore punishable by death. Although the definition of adultery has changed to "sex with anyone that's not your spouse", the Holy Bible pretty specifically doesn't prohibit having unmarried concubines.

The other thing that I'm unclear about is who, exactly, is supposed to put the adulterers to death? Hopefully the issue will never come up, but these are the kinds of worst case scenarios that The Church should be preparing us for going into a holy matrimonial union.

Of course, I would never say such things in class. Marga would kill me! See how much I know about marriage already?