{
  "id": "dict_000090",
  "term": "adultery",
  "slug": "adultery",
  "letter": "A",
  "entry_type": "practice",
  "entry_family": "theological_term",
  "depth_profile": "standard",
  "short_definition": "Adultery is sexual unfaithfulness that violates the marriage covenant and is condemned by God.",
  "simple_one_line": "Adultery is sexual unfaithfulness that violates the marriage covenant and is condemned by God.",
  "tooltip_text": "Adultery is sexual unfaithfulness that violates the marriage covenant and is condemned by God.",
  "aliases": [],
  "scripture_references": [],
  "original_language_terms": [],
  "related_entries": [],
  "see_also": [],
  "lede_intro": "The topic of adultery concerns sexual unfaithfulness that violates the marriage covenant and is condemned by God, so this entry should be read from the texts that define it and then from its place within the wider doctrinal shape of Scripture.",
  "at_a_glance_definition": "Adultery is sexual unfaithfulness that violates the marriage covenant and is condemned by God.",
  "at_a_glance_key_points": [
    "Let the defining passages show adultery as sexual unfaithfulness that violates the marriage covenant and is condemned by God.",
    "Notice how adultery belongs to the church's worship, fellowship, discipline, and public confession.",
    "Do not define adultery by tradition, reaction, or church culture alone",
    "let the whole canon set its meaning and limits."
  ],
  "description_academic_short": "Adultery is sexual unfaithfulness that violates the marriage covenant and is condemned by God. In dictionary use, the term should be explained from its immediate contexts, its place in biblical theology, and its bearing on faithful Christian life.",
  "description_academic_full": "Adultery is sexual unfaithfulness that violates the marriage covenant and is condemned by God. More fully, the topic should be interpreted through the passages that name it, illustrate it, regulate it, or warn about its misuse. A sound treatment therefore asks how adultery relates to creation, sin, redemption, discipleship, and the church's life under Christ, without turning a practical category into a slogan detached from context.",
  "background_biblical_context": "Biblically, adultery is framed by creation order, covenant obligation, wisdom instruction, Jesus' teaching, and apostolic exhortation as sexual unfaithfulness that violates the marriage covenant and is condemned by God. Scripture therefore places adultery within holiness, fidelity, household responsibility, and love of neighbor rather than leaving it to custom, appetite, or private judgment alone.",
  "background_historical_context": "Historically, discussion of adultery developed where biblical teaching had to be worked out in household life, moral formation, economic relations, legal judgment, and public order. Jewish legal reflection, patristic moral teaching, medieval canon law, Reformation ethics, and modern social theology each pressed the term into new settings.",
  "background_jewish_ancient_context": "In ancient Jewish and wider Mediterranean context, adultery was heard within household structure, kinship obligations, inheritance patterns, marriage customs, honor-shame expectations, and covenant identity. That background clarifies why biblical commands address family life concretely while also challenging surrounding abuses and distortions.",
  "key_texts_primary": [
    "Exod. 20:14",
    "Matt. 5:27-28",
    "Heb. 13:4"
  ],
  "key_texts_secondary": [
    "Prov. 6:32-33",
    "Mal. 2:14-16",
    "1 Cor. 6:18-20"
  ],
  "original_language_note": "",
  "theological_significance": "adultery is theologically significant because it refers to sexual unfaithfulness that violates the marriage covenant and is condemned by God, clarifying how Scripture orders marriage, family life, and bodily conduct under God's authority.",
  "philosophical_explanation": "Philosophically, Adultery turns on what kind of creature the human person is: embodied, habituated, socially located, morally responsible, and answerable before God. The main pressure points are habit and intention, embodied limits and moral agency, and the difference between descriptive psychology and normative anthropology. The best accounts therefore resist both moralism and reductionism by keeping anthropology tethered to doctrine and discipleship.",
  "interpretive_cautions": "With adultery, resist defining the entry by modern instinct or later shorthand before tracing its biblical and theological usage. Watch how the language operates across redemptive history, and distinguish descriptive narrative usage from covenantal or doctrinal significance rather than lifting it out of the unfolding biblical storyline. Use the entry carefully enough to prevent it from carrying more doctrinal weight than the text assigns, while still allowing later theological reflection to summarize real biblical patterns.",
  "major_views_note": "Adultery is usually treated as normatively addressed in Scripture, but traditions differ over how its moral claims should be specified, casuistically applied, and pastorally administered. The main points of disagreement concern holiness, covenant fidelity, repentance and restoration, and how the church should teach and apply biblical standards without either compromise or harshness.",
  "doctrinal_boundaries": "Adultery must be framed within Scripture's account of creation, fall, embodied agency, and moral responsibility rather than reduced to psychology, sociology, or bare rulekeeping. It should neither excuse moral agency nor treat fallen desire as morally neutral, yet it must also avoid collapsing human life into therapeutic description or social mechanism. It should name sin as genuinely culpable while still accounting for habituation, weakness, and the need for grace. Used rightly, adultery marks the moral and theological fence lines within which repentance, discipleship, and holiness can be taught with clarity.",
  "practical_significance": "Pastorally, adultery matters because believers need wise, Scripture-shaped guidance for everyday obedience, worship, suffering, relationships, stewardship, and life together in the church.",
  "meta_description": "Adultery is sexual unfaithfulness that violates the marriage covenant and is condemned by God. In theological use, the topic should be defined from the...",
  "public_url": "/companion-bible-dictionary/adultery/",
  "json_url": "/companion-bible-dictionary/data/dictionary/adultery.json",
  "final_disposition": "PUBLISH_CANONICAL"
}