Inzamam said:
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Hello my brothers and sisters under God.
I am Inzamam from Pakistan. I am here to find out more about Christianity as I am struggling to reconcile parts of my Muslim faith. The story of the prophet is sacred and holy but there are some aspects that make me uncomfortable like his keeping of an under age wife. How would a Christian get to grips with such a problem?
Thank you kindly.
Your friend, Inzamam
Time for a reboot.
Correctly the mod deleted my post; and I confess to being somewhat jaded whenever a Muslim posts something like that on a Christian forum. On another forum, I saw similar language used as a pretext to try to convert posters to Islam. Therefore I assumed that there may be something similar going on.
As the saying goes, "Once burned, twice learned." That is the reason I was posting something ultimately off topic. I wanted to "get ahead of the curve" of where the discussion could have gone.
As to the question of Inzamam, marriage age differs in many cultures. This is a true story.
Our church's denomination is known as a church-planting denomination. By that, I mean that we send missionaries to many different countries. Our express purpose is to build indigenous churches that in turn send other missionaries and pastors to create churches in new countries, and in difficult in-country places. We were in Laos working with Hmong tribes well before the Vietnam war.
When Vietnam fell in 1972, it opened the door for the insurgents to go expand their influence. Our Caucasian missionaries fled, and the churches they planted continued as the Hmong people (mostly subsistence farmers) escaped to Thailand, eventually having refugee camps in the Philippines.
Many refugees came out of those camps and resettled in the US. My wife and I were living in the western suburbs of Philadelphia, and our church, (very international) sponsored them and helped them get acclimated to the US culture.
We worked with the teens, and with infants teaching them USA standards of health and hygiene. Of course, we assumed that they married in their 20s, as we did.
One time a regular attender, My Ker, a 13 years old girl stopped coming. After investigating, and involvement by Philadelphia Child Protection Services, and the Philadelphia School District, we discovered that she married her 16 years-old boyfriend, and was living with him in his extended family's home.
Of course, we were shocked. But the adults who were mature, well-taught Christians were shocked at the response of the authorities. In actuality, all they did was follow the customs of their culture in Laos, marry early, and live a short, hard life as subsistence farmers.
So, Inzamam, there are several answers to your question, and they are all related to the culture.
When I attended a world-wide conference of our denomination in Orlando, I met several pastors from Africa who were bigamists, having two wives, and that really shocked me. Later I found out that while pagans, they took two wives, as part of their culture. Once they became Christians, the big issue became "what to do with the extra wife".
In reality, they were a strong family unit, and it was unfair (and against the qualifications for being a pastor) to divorce.
Therefore, the higher ups made the exception to honor the bigamist marriage, and prohibit the practice and the ceremony of blessing bigamy for other Christians, if they did not already have two wives.
That is how it worked in my denomination; others may see it differently. For example an acquaintance from Elmira NY has a brother who is a Catholic priest in Africa, who has a wife.
Long answer, but true stories. Hope this helps you, but in the USA, bigamy is prohibited by all the states. So while it was finally OK for My ker to marry at 13, her husband could not take on another wife.
