WHEN TRADITION TRUMPS TRUTH: A REBUTTAL TO THE PROTESTIA ARTICLE ON PASTOR RICH TIDWELL
- Abrahan Kilian
- Nov 11
- 8 min read
Updated: Nov 14
Written by Abraham Kilian.
INTRODUCTION
The recent Protestia (Protestant Pastor Announces He Has Two Wives, Claims ‘Polygamy is Biblical’) article denouncing Pastor Rich Tidwell’s public acknowledgement of his plural marriage does not read as theology, nor even as journalism—it reads as reflexive cultural outrage. (Should Polygamist Families be Welcome at Church?) It offers no Biblical exegesis, no historical evidence, and no theological reasoning, merely the admonition to “mark and avoid” Pastor Tidwell and his congregation.
In essence, the article’s entire argument amounts to: avoid this church because its pastor holds plural covenants. Such reactionary rhetoric betrays fear of discussion, not confidence in Scripture. If Protestia wishes to be taken seriously as a defender of Biblical orthodoxy, let its editors step forward for an open, moderated public debate on the subject: “Can multiple covenants coexist under divine law?”
For now, their position stands unargued, unexamined, and—most damningly—un-Biblical.
THE HISTORICAL ERROR: MONOGAMY AS PAGAN LEGACY
To stand in a plural covenant with multiple women is not made a sin by God but by the post-Roman Church. As John Cairncross demonstrates in After Polygamy Was Made a Sin, the Justinian Code of the sixth century was the first to criminalize plural marriage, transplanting Greco-Roman sexual ethics into ecclesiastical law[i] (some may even argue that the earliest restriction arose from Numa’s Law regarding patria potestas, the patriarchal absolute power of the Roman paterfamilias, which subordinated the covenantal household to state control[ii]). This was not the voice of Moses or Paul, but of Constantine’s legal heirs.
Even Cambridge Prof John Witte Jr., in his exceptional work The Western Case for Monogamy Over Polygamy, concedes that the Church’s monogamy doctrine drew[iii] upon both Greek[iv] and Roman natural law theory[v] rather than Hebrew covenantal jurisprudence.[vi] The Church thus replaced revelation with Roman respectability, adopting pagan anthropology as Christian moral law, but devoid of Biblical Law.
THE HERMENEUTICAL FALLACY: MISREADING PAUL
The Protestia commentators regurgitate a proof-text—1 Timothy 3:2—without exegesis, claiming that “an elder must be the husband of one wife” prohibits plural marriage. Yet, as William Luck’s linguistic analysis in Divorce and Re-Marriage: Recovering the Biblical View shows, this is a moral qualification, not a numerical prohibition. The Greek phrase mias gynaikos andra literally means “a one-woman man,” a Semitic idiom of fidelity, not an arithmetic count.[vii]
This reading is affirmed across the spectrum—Towner[viii], Bray[ix], and Mounce[x] among others—each noting that Paul lists character traits, not civil statutes. The idiom mirrors henos andros gynē (“a one-man woman,” 1 Tim 5:9), which no serious exegete takes as a ban on remarriage. To wrench a virtue phrase into a legal code is grammatical violence.
Both liberal and conservative Greek scholars agree on the idiomatic force; nevertheless, Protestia remains blind to the text and beholden to its Anglo-Latin inheritance—preferring Romanized natural-law literalism over Hebraic covenantal nuance. It enthrones translation over text and tradition over truth.
Paul’s concern is moral credibility and domestic order, not marital arithmetic. Nowhere does the apostle annul Mosaic permissions or redefine adultery to include lawful plural fidelity. To project post-Justinian Western monogamy onto Paul’s Jewish Greek is, hermeneutical malpractice.
Indeed, the irony is striking: if Protestia’s reading were taken seriously, it would forbid plurality only in the pulpit while permitting it in the pews—creating a church where the congregation may live in covenants the elders themselves are barred from modelling.
THE THEOLOGICAL OVERSIGHT: GOD’S OWN PRECEDENT
If polygyny is inherently immoral, then God Himself is implicated, for He both gave and blessed plural marriages, pointing at the irony:
Yahweh declared to David, “I gave you your master’s house and your master’s wives into your bosom… and if that had been too little, I would have given you more” (2 Sam 12:8).
He regulated plural covenants under Torah (Ex 21:10; Deut 21:15–17), ensuring justice and provision for each wife. The moral focus of these laws was not prohibition but equity—a legal recognition that plural marriage, when governed righteously, preserved covenant order and family stability.
As Tom Shipley rightly observes in They Shall Become One Flesh, where the Law of God regulates, it legitimizes.[xi] Condemnation requires prohibition—regulation implies acceptance. Moreover, in Jeremiah 3:8 and Ezekiel 23, God Himself portrays His own covenant relationship as plural, betrothing both Israel and Judah as distinct wives—two covenants existing simultaneously under His divine headship. The divine metaphor itself testifies that multiple covenants, rightly ordered, are not adultery but faithfulness.
THE ETHICAL INCONSISTENCY: WESTERN DOUBLE STANDARDS
The modern Church denounces concurrent polygyny while quietly permitting successive polygamy through serial divorce and remarriage. It forbids a man to have two wives in covenant but blesses him for having four in sequence.
This is moral schizophrenia. As J. Wesley Stivers demonstrates in Eros Made Sacred, the elevation of monogamy to moral supremacy was not a divine decree but a juridical inheritance from Western respectability culture, mistaking social conformity for sanctification.[xii] The West baptizes its own failures—broken vows, abandoned children, and disposable unions—while condemning the ancient and honourable practice that Scripture never forbids.
THE SCRIPTURAL CONTINUITY: TORAH AND THE EARLY BELIEVERS
Dr. David Friedman’s They Loved the Torah establishes beyond question that Yeshua and His apostles lived in continuity with Mosaic Law. No verse in the New Testament abrogates the marital provisions of Exodus or Deuteronomy.
Paul, a trained Pharisee and student of Gamaliel himself, presupposed this legal foundation. His pastoral instruction to leaders concerned moral discipline and public witness—not the mathematical limitation of wives. The early believers would have found the Western equation of “monogamy = holiness” incomprehensible.
THE SOCIOLOGICAL BLIND SPOT: THE FRUITS OF MONOGAMY-ONLY LAW
The West’s enforced monogamy has not yielded holiness but havoc. Divorce rates soar, fatherlessness abounds, and the demographic winter deepens. Meanwhile, societies that honour covenant plurality as a stabilising provision—Biblically or customarily—maintain stronger kinship structures and lower sexual exploitation.
The moral crisis of the modern Church lies not in too many wives but in too little covenant fidelity. Christianity’s addiction to Greco-Romanism has left it poor in moral responsibility and profoundly out of touch with Torah ethics, preferring philosophical purity over covenantal integrity.
THE CHALLENGE TO PROTESTIA: DEBATE OR RETRACT
Protestia’s editorial staff have every right to hold opinions. They have no right, however, to call evil what God never condemned and to anathematise believers without offering a single exegetical argument.
To call for avoidance of Pastor Tidwell’s church without scriptural engagement is not discernment—it is dereliction of theological duty. Such behaviour mirrors the Pharisaic tradition of “teaching as doctrines the commandments of men” (Matt. 15:9).
Ironically, in their crusade against Pastor Tidwell, Protestia has ignored the very words of Messiah in Matthew 18:15–17, which commands private admonition, witness confirmation, and ecclesial appeal before public condemnation. Their public campaign thus constitutes a clear violation of Biblical Conflict Ethics, preferring spectacle to Scripture and accusation to due process.
Therefore, I extend to Protestia and its contributors an open invitation to an academic and public debate on this proposition:
“Can multiple covenants coexist under divine law?”
Let the issue be tested by the Word of God, by historical evidence, and by sound hermeneutics. If Protestia declines, it shall confirm that its outrage is not born of Scripture but of sentiment—and that its theology, like its article, is built on tradition without truth.
CONCLUSION
Scripture regulates plural marriage; Rome forbade it. YHWH instituted it in righteousness; the Church outlawed it for respectability. The Protestia article thus stands as one more witness to the Church’s captivity under Greco-Roman moralism—a captivity that calls good evil and evil good. Until modern Protestantism recovers the courage to question its inherited dogmas and return to Biblical jurisprudence, it will remain, as Luther warned, “a slave of popes even while it curses them.”
Pastor Tidwell’s family, grounded in covenantal fidelity, stands not as an offence to Scripture but as an indictment of a Church that has forgotten the meaning of covenant and lost the ability to discern sin by the standard of Scripture.
Further Reading: The Monogamy-Only Fallacy: A Forensic Dissection Of A Sacred Cow
Protestia declined our generous offer to debate: here.
REFERENCES
Bray, Gerald L. The Pastoral Epistles: An International Theological Commentary. London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2019.
Plutarch, The Life of Numa Pompilius, in Plutarch’s Lives, trans. John Dryden, rev. Arthur Hugh Clough (Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2000), accessed November 11, 2025, https://classics.mit.edu/Plutarch/numa_pom.html
Protestia. “Protestant Pastor Announces He Has Two Wives, Claims ‘Polygamy Is Biblical.’” Protestia, November 10, 2025. https://protestia.com/2025/11/10/protestant-pastor-announces-he-has-two-wives-claims-polygamy-is-biblical/
Towner, Philip H. The Letters to Timothy and Titus. New International Commentary on the New Testament. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006.
Shipley, Tom. They Shall Become One Flesh: A Study of Biblical Polygyny. Self-published,2009.
Stivers, Wesley. Eros Made Sacred. New York: Paragon House, 1991.
ENDNOTES
[i] John Cairncross, After Polygamy Was Made a Sin: The Social History of Christian Polygamy (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974), 1.
[ii] Plutarch, Life of Numa Pompilius, in Plutarch’s Lives, trans. John Dryden, rev. Arthur Hugh Clough (Cambridge, MA: The Internet Classics Archive, MIT), accessed November 11, 2025, https://classics.mit.edu/Plutarch/numa_pom.html
[iii] “Lactantius had put his fi nger on a central question for the later Church Fathers – and indeed for the Western legal tradition altogether: how cogent was a natural law argument for monogamy alone, without the further wisdom of the Bible and the Christian tradition, without the further support of practical, prudential, or philosophical arguments, or without adverting to the common practices, customs, and experiences of diverse peoples – the “common law of the nations” ( ius gentium ) as the jurists called it?” John Witte Jr., The Western Case for Monogamy Over Polygamy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 84.
[iv] “Already half a millennium before the time of Jesus, ancient Greece and ancient Rome had chosen monogamy as the only valid form of marriage that could produce legitimate and heritable widows and children. Monogamy was a “quintessentially Greek” institution of the ancient world, Stanford ancient historian Walter Scheidel has shown, and the Thracian Greeks and the Romans after them regarded polygamy as “a barbarian custom or a mark of tyranny .” Supra John Witte Jr., 104.
[v] Supra John Witte Jr. 148.
[vi] “By marked contrast to same-sex relations, not a single command against real polygamy appears in the Bible. The Mosaic law, in fact, contemplated polygamy in cases of seduction, enslavement, poverty, famine, or premature death of one’s married brother, and it made special provision for the maintenance and inheritance of multiple wives and children in those cases. More than two dozen polygamists appear in the Hebrew Bible. Almost all of them were good and faithful kings, judges, or aristocrats, and not one of them was punished for practicing polygamy per se.” Supra John Witte Jr. at pg 448.
[vii] William F. Luck, Divorce and Remarriage: Recovering the Biblical View, 2nd ed. (Dallas: Bible.org, 2009), 349.
[viii] Towner, Philip H. The Letters to Timothy and Titus. New International Commentary on the New Testament. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006.
[ix] Bray, Gerald L. The Pastoral Epistles: An International Theological Commentary. London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2019.
[x] Mounce, William D. Pastoral Epistles. Vol. 46 of Word Biblical Commentary. Edited by Ralph P. Martin. Grand Rapids: Zondervan Academic, 2016.
[xi] Tom Shipley, They Shall Become One Flesh: Resurrecting the Biblical Family (Baltimore: Institute for Christian Patriarchy, 2009), 64-65, 74-76, 79-80, 97-98.
[xii] J. Wesley Stivers, Eros Made Sacred: The Biblical Case for Polygamy (Self-published, 1991), Preface, pp. 1–2, and ch. 3, p. 17.
When tradition trumps truth
When tradition trumps truth