Will my Christian wife have a 3-way with me?

It’s tough to handle situations with the Bible because it’s all about how we interpret it as individuals. But here is how I see it.

If your wife runs everything through a Bible filter, she’s probably pretty dead set in her views on this, but a lot has changed in these last 2000 years or so. She likely doesn’t live literally as the Old Testament says to, so she’s probably open to the idea that things do in fact change. Sure, the Bible is clear that adultery is a no-no. However, it’s the definition of adultery that is the issue here. Is it still what it once was? I say no.

Way back in the day, wives were considered their husbands’ property. The problem with adultery was that for the wife, she had defied her husband because her sexuality was not hers to give. In fact, as seen in Numbers 5:12-14, a woman could be tried for adultery even if she didn’t do anything. All it took was for the husband to feel jealous and/or suspected her to be cheating on him. If she did actually do the deed, the problem for her lover was that he had violated the husband’s property rights by being with the wife.

That’s why you see kings in the Bible with all these concubines and wives. Sure, they were married and had sex with many women, but it wasn’t an issue with adultery because those women didn’t have husbands. But ol’ King David could have had a wife executed if she would have hooked up with the donkey groomer. Hell, she might end up dead even if he smelled the wool blankets on her person.

Now that it’s 2007, we are a bit more civilized and ruled by a different set of reason, so we don’t consider wives to be property. In that sense, the old school definition of adultery is archaic. Everyone is ideally equal now in role and levels of respect. Anything that goes against this is obviously a problem. A husband secretly banging his secretary on his desk is completely different than a spouse giving her swinging husband permission to have selective partners if she is involved.

So in my view, there’s not adultery in the sense that she’s thinking. The two of you inviting one or two people into your bed is not mean-spirited or about deceit. As long as there is openness and permission from everyone involved, you should be good to go. She may not agree to it anyway, but it shouldn’t be because of 2000 year old text.

Adultery in the church sense is out. Maybe it’s from the reason George Bernard Shaw thought: “The early Christian rules of life were not made to last, because the early Christians did not believe that the world itself was going to last.”