more on same-sex marriage

Further to my previous post with links to the same-sex marriage debate I’d like to recommend one other.  My friend Jonathan McLatchie has an excellent post here.  Although general in scope, it addresses the Scottish situation.

homosexuality, divorce and remarriage, evangelical hypocrisy

Have you noticed how hot and bothered (righteously indignant) we conservative evangelicals get about the acceptance of homosexuality by society and yet how apparently indifferent we are to divorce and remarriage in the church?   We are appalled at the acceptance of homosexuality by the world and indeed by the wider church and yet divorce and remarriage in conservative evangelical circles today scarcely raises a concerned eyebrow.

There is a basic inconsistency here.  There is deep hypocrisy.

The God who condemns homosexual relationships equally is opposed to divorce and remarriage.  He is the God who says:

Mal 2:16 (RSV)
“For I hate divorce, says the LORD the God of Israel… So take heed to yourselves and do not be faithless.”

Now, I know that there is room for some debate and difference of opinion on who (if any) God permits to divorce and remarry.   Personally, I think he allows (as a last resort) divorce on very narrow grounds and it is a moot point whether he allows remarriage at all.  Be that as it may, my object in this post is not to debate which position is biblically cogent but to focus – somewhat aghast – on our increasingly default attitude.   We evangelicals seem more-and-more to have an outlook on divorce and remarriage that differs little from the world; divorce is regrettable but ‘that’s life’ and remarriage is taken for-granted.  In any case, it is a private matter and nothing to do with anyone else.

We fail to take seriously Christ’s plain teaching that divorce is far from God’s ideal and in fact remarriage in most cases is a form of adultery.

Matt 19:3-9 (ESV)
And Pharisees came up to him and tested him by asking, “Is it lawful to divorce one’s wife for any cause?” He answered, “Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’? So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate.” They said to him, “Why then did Moses command one to give a certificate of divorce and to send her away?” He said to them, “Because of your hardness of heart Moses allowed you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it was not so. And I say to you: whoever divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality, and marries another, commits adultery.”

By whatever criteria we apply, divorce and remarriage is a cause for serious concern and reflection.  Apart from anything else we may be making ourselves adulterers.

Now don’t get me wrong,  I am sure few if any believers divorce without a great deal of heartache and soul-searching.  Over the last thirty years, I have known a good number of Christian couples who have divorced and none did so lightly.  Divorce for all was traumatic.  It rocked all involved to the roots of their being.  Those divorces I have witnessed close-up have been truly tragic and destructive events.  No-one emerged unscathed.  I feel deeply for those who experience divorce and pray that God will preserve Christian marriages and his people from the devastation that is divorce.  I hope my concerns are not without compassion to those caught up in a divorce, especially those who find themselves there through no fault of their own.

Again, I am not so much thinking of the divorcing couples themselves as the culture in our churches  that sanctions it (and remarriage).  For one thing, the assumption is that divorced people are naturally free to remarry.  In fact, any suggestion that divorced folks should remain single thereafter is likely to shock.  At one time,  the very idea of remarriage would have occasioned outrage, now outrage is likely to flow from any querying of the legitimacy of remarriage.  The person ‘out in the cold’ is not the one who remarries but the one who remonstrates.  The climate is utterly different.

Not so long ago, remarriage (by Christians) on what were considered biblically acceptable grounds were quiet affairs.  Those remarrying realized, at best, remarriage implied previous failure and remarriage was on sufferance (divine forbearance) rather than a cause for celebration.  Now remarriage is celebrated as enthusiastically as an initial marriage.  There seems little sensibility to its irregularity and incongruity.

Few seem to see the anomaly.  Fresh ’til death do us part’ vows – generally before God -  are taken, the very undertaking of which only serves to demonstrate the failure to honour such vows of commitment in a previous marriage.  Can Christians celebrate this contradiction?  Can they witness with equanimity new vows that make a mockery of old ones, join in the banter and celebrations  that follow, and blithely forget the trail of destruction and disobedience that has led to this point?  Of course, each must decide for himself whether to attend a remarriage that has little biblical sanction.  Various factors come into play in deciding.  However, when I hear Christians speaking with unreserved delight about dubious remarriages, I begin to wonder where the Lordship of Christ features in our thinking.   Would we be so unalloyed in our pleasure at a same-sex wedding?  Would we celebrate an adulterous affair entered (remembering Jesus stigmatizes many remarriages as legalized adultery)?

I am told that I am too hard.  Of course the divorced person must remarry.  Am I going to sentence him/her to a life of singleness?  Surely this does not reflect the love and acceptance of Christ.  I am always slightly bemused by this reasoning.  I think of countless men and women who have not found a Christian partner in life and rather than marry a non-Christian have remained unmarried.  Somehow for them this is just par for the course but the poor divorcee must have our full support in remarrying.  The logic doesn’t stack up.  There are worse things than going through life single.  I guess the marriage that led to divorce became such a thing.  In any case the believer does not live with happiness in this life his chief goal and need.  He lives for the life to come – for the coming Kingdom of God (in which there will be no marriage).  Thus we read:

Matt 19:10-12 (ESV)
The disciples said to him [Jesus], “If such is the case of a man with his wife, it is better not to marry.” But he said to them, “Not everyone can receive this saying, but only those to whom it is given. For there are eunuchs who have been so from birth [perhaps homosexuals] , and there are eunuchs who have been made eunuchs by men, and there are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. Let the one who is able to receive this receive it.” 

For some, commitment to the Kingdom of God means they will remain unmarried and this certainly includes, homosexually inclined people who feel unable to enter a heterosexual marriage, those who do not find a Christian partner, and those who separate from their partner on unbiblical grounds and for whom remarriage (and probably divorce) is expressly forbidden by Christ, their King.

We are far removed from this kind of thinking in many of our churches today.  So accepted is divorce and remarriage that it is possible to do/be both and to hold a position of leadership in a local church – another ‘norm’ expressly forbidden in Scripture.

1Tim 3:1-7 (ESV)
The saying is trustworthy: If anyone aspires to the office of overseer, he desires a noble task. Therefore an overseer must be above reproach, the husband of one wife, sober-minded, self-controlled, respectable, hospitable, able to teach, not a drunkard, not violent but gentle, not quarrelsome, not a lover of money. He must manage his own household well, with all dignity keeping his children submissive, for if someone does not know how to manage his own household, how will he care for God’s church? He must not be a recent convert, or he may become puffed up with conceit and fall into the condemnation of the devil. Moreover, he must be well thought of by outsiders, so that he may not fall into disgrace, into a snare of the devil.

Notice that what is an ‘ought’ for all Christians is a ‘must’ for spiritual leaders. Leaders (elders) must be ‘above reproach’.  Notice too what the first example of being ‘above reproach’ is; he must be ‘the husband of one wife’.  Paul’s point is that while people may be converted and become part of the church with ‘anomalous’ relationships (perhaps polygamous marriage or perhaps an unlawful remarriage) such believers should not hold office in the church.  The anomalous relationship (that could not be undone) debarred them from public leadership in the church because it was a poor witness to the world and poor example other believers.

Church leaders cannot simply bow to the wishes of the divorcee who wants to remarry.  They have an obligation to uphold by both example and command the dominical and apostolic teaching on divorce and remarriage.  A little leaven, leavens the whole.  It is simply nonsense to say that those whose marriages are stable should not judge.  They must judge.  If we are only to judge in situations we have personally experienced, then few will judge.  If only homosexual people can criticise homosexual practice then we are on a hiding to nothing.  Imagine a court where the judge must have committed the acts he is called to judge before being qualified to judge.  The suggestion is farcical.  The biblical premise for being competent to judge is spirituality not similar failure (1 Cor 2, 6).

Churches need to regain biblical standards (and backbone) on divorce and remarriage.  If how we deal with divorce and remarriage today in many conservative evangelical churches had been how it was dealt with in the first 1500 years of church history the low level of divorce and remarriage in Christendom for centuries would never have happened.

Why are we so keen to institutionalize divorce and remarriage?  Why do we accept such a trojan horse? Not only is it generally condemned in Scripture but society itself recognises its problems.  The percentage of breakdown in second marriages is considerably higher than in  firsts (almost double):  the baggage the new marriage brings puts a considerable strain on it from the word go;  children may accept a divorce but rarely accept and  settle well to a remarriage; and if you have broken vows a first time its easier to do so the second time.  If the increasing incidence of divorce and remarriage in society is reeking havoc there what will a similar pattern mean for the church?

And it is a mistake to confuse this with the embrace and acceptance of the gospel.  The gospel invites sinners but it does not promote sin.  The church is the community of the forgiven but not of the flagrantly and wilfully disobedient.  The forgiven are called to forsake sin and follow holiness without which no man will see the Lord.

Am I being hard?  Perhaps.  But sometimes the Bible is hard.  Love can be hard.  The way of the cross is hard – it makes no provision for ‘the flesh’.  The better question is – am I being biblical?  And, am I being truthful and faithful?  Conservative evangelicals simply cannot hold with integrity a firm line on what the Bible teaches on homosexuality while driving a truck through its teaching on divorce and remarriage.  It’s easy to be principled about issues we rarely face: it is much harder to be principled about issues that sit on our lap.  Yet it is precisely here that our faithfulness to Christ is tested and found out.

Marriage Thrives in Reality, Not in Our Dreams

Here is an arty, entertaining, yet valuable article (lecture actually) on the domesticity of marriage by Nathan Schlueter.    For more literary types it is well worth the read.  Below I have given a taster.

‘I have German in my blood, which means I often think about death.

I wish I could describe this as a philosophical experience, in the way that Socrates describes philosophy in The Phaedo, as “learning to die.” Then I would deliver an impersonal lecture on some fine point of philosophy, such as the adequacy of St. Thomas Aquinas’s arguments for the existence of God, or the perverse effects of Kantian deontology on contemporary ethics.

But no, this experience of mine has all the marks of a German thing, not a Greek one. It involves the silent mourning of the passing of time, of the rapidly closing circle of possible selves into a solid and fixed point. I never cease to be stunned, even scandalized, by photographs of the aged when they were young: How could that smooth flesh, straight form, and clear eyes have suffered a sea-change into this faded, wrinkled man propped up in a wheelchair? I think of the inevitable unfolding of my own future.

And yet to look on death is to look on reality. To be human, to be an embodied soul, means to suffer time, change, and death, and our responses to these experiences are determinative of how we will live, and ultimately, of our happiness…’