Divorce
Many Christians today vehemently oppose gay marriages because they see that the marriage of two people in the same gender waters down the idea of marriage. But I man not so much worried about that. Mind you, I totally agree with the Church’s teachings about homosexuality, and I do not believe that God recognizes the marriage of two people of the same sex. But I do not think this is what threatens our marriages. What threatens marriage is divorce, and yet even Christians today are getting a divorce. Gospel singer Amy Grant divorced and immediately married someone else. The Southern Baptist preacher Charles Stanley got a divorce, and although the Southern Baptist denomination has a strict rule against a man remaining in the ministry, they are allowing it in the case of Stanley.
But strictly looking at the Bible alone, there can be no justification for divorce and remarriage.
Malachi 2:16
And Pharisees came up and in order to test him asked, "Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?" He answered them, "What did Moses command you?" They said, "Moses allowed a man to write a certificate of divorce, and to put her away." But Jesus said to them, "For your hardness of heart he wrote you this commandment. But from the beginning of creation, `God made them male and female. '`For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined 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 put asunder." And in the house the disciples asked him again about this matter. And he said to them, "Whoever divorces his wife and marries another, commits adultery against her; and if she divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery."
Mark 10:2 – 12
But unto the married I give charge, yea not I, but the Lord, That the wife depart not from her husband (but should she depart, let her remain unmarried, or else be reconciled to her husband); and that the husband leave not his wife.
1 Cor 7:10,11
God hates divorce. Jesus said that anyone who remarries after a divorce has committed adultery. Now, please continue reading. I am not condemning everyone who has done this. Divorce is a very complex issue. On one side we must uphold the value of marriage. On the other side we must have compassion for those who are in unfaithful or abusive marriages. But I want to point out that based on the Bible alone there is no justification for divorce at all. This to me is a dilemma for Bible-only Protestants. They will criticize us Catholics for adding onto the Bible with our “human traditions”, and say that we should stand on the Bible alone. But the Bible alone does not allow for any divorce! So divorces among sola scriptura Christians to me seems hypocritical. How can divorced Christians such as Amy Grant or Charles Stanley tell us we should pattern our lives after the Bible when the Bible tells us that God hates divorce and that anyone who divorces and remarries commits adultery?
There is a passage that Bible-only Christians that will justify divorce in some cases.
But I tell you that anyone who divorces his wife, except for marital unfaithfulness, causes her to become an adulteress, and anyone who marries the divorced woman commits adultery
Mattew 5:32 (NIV)
Theologians call this “the exceptions clause”. We are allowed to get a divorce IF our mate was unfaithful. Even if this exception was there, this is still a small exception. But I do not think this is an accurate translation. I think a better translation is the NAB which has:
But I say to you, whoever divorces his wife (unless the marriage is unlawful) causes her to commit adultery, and whoever marries a divorced woman commits adultery.
So here is the exception is not if the spouse was unfaithful but rather if the marriage itself was lawful.
The word in question is , which is transliterated to porneia. Porneia is something unseemly or disgusting. It is where we the the word pornography. The word that is used for adultery is “moiceia” ( ). If Jesus meant by this word to be “marital unfaithfulness”, then He would have use moicheia, not porneia. By use the word porneia, He is contrasting it to adultery.
The word porneia is also used in 1 Corinthians 5:1
It is actually reported that there is immorality (porneia) among you, and of a kind that is not found even among pagans; for a man is living with his father's wife.
Here we have a totally immoral relationship between a man and his father’s wife. Paul calls this as being porneia – it is unseemingly and disgusting. It is not that the woman is unfaithful to the man, or the man unfaithful to the woman. It is that their union itself is disgusting and an abomination to God.
So Jesus is not really giving an escape clause whereby we can get a divorce. He is saying that we cannot get a divorce unless the union between the man and woman is such an abomination to God that according to God the union itself is not a valid union – such would be the case if the union was incestuous.
Please do not misunderstand me. I am not saying that a person should be stuck in a bad marriage. I am saying that if you believe that all our doctrines on faith and morality must be based on the Bible alone then in order to be consistent you must not allow for any case whereby a person can divorce and remarry. But I am not a Bible-only Christian. I do not believe that every we believe and do must be found in the Bible. I believe in the magisterium of the Catholic Church. I believe that Jesus gave Peter the keys to kingdom. I believe that Jesus gave Peter and the successors the authority that whatever they bind on earth who be bound in heaven. I believe whole-heartedly that the Bible is God’s Word to man, but the Bible is not God’s LAST Word to man. So even though the Bible offers no option for a person to leave his or her spouse and to remarry, the magisterium of the Catholic Church does. But this is not a divorce, this is an annulment. The Church could never nullify the teachings of the Bible. The Church could never say that in some cases divorces are justified when the Bible clearly says that God hates divorce. But suppose the marriage itself was not a valid marriage at all? The Bible makes it clear that what God has joined together let no man put asunder. But what if God did not actually join those two souls together?
Suppose that a man threatened to kill a woman unless she married, she marries him under duress, and he is later caught and sent to jail. Would she still be bound to stay with him in marriage? Of course not! When a priest pronounces the words that they are now man and wife, this is not some magic where God is obligated to join their two souls even though the woman is being held at gunpoint! God is still God. God would see her heart, and know that she did not willfully give her heart that man. Although outwardly it appeared that they were married, it was not, so to speak, a match made in heaven. God did not unite their two souls. So she is free from that man. No one put their union asunder, because God had never really joined them in the first place.
So there needs to be a certain disposition in each person for God to join two souls into one. It matters not whether you have the marriage license. If God did not join you, then you are not married from the perspective of heaven. If you were threatened to marry someone, then you would not have been in the proper disposition to be married. If one or both lacked a certain amount or maturity, or one is addicted to alcohol, or one is mentally or emotionally incompetent, or one had no intention of living up to the marriage vows, these can all be grounds why God did not actually join the two souls together.
But this cannot be left up to each individual to determine the validity of his marriage. This is what the Church is for. Since Jesus gave Peter and his successors the authority to bind and to loose, the pope has established marriage tribunals to determine whether God had ever joined those two souls. This is not a divorce. It is a declaration that God has never joined them in the first place.
Some may object that to annulment because they are afraid that that this means that their children are bastards. But this is not the case. It does not nullify the civil marriage. In the eyes of the government, you were still once married. It is just a recognition that, although there was a civil marriage, the marriage of the two souls was not a match made in heaven. God had never joined the two souls. And since from heaven’s perspective there was never a union, they are free to marry someone else.
But when it comes down to it, is this not the same as a divorce? I learned from my personal experience that this is not the case. As I mentioned in my personal testimony, I was engaged to a woman while I was a minister. She assured me that the reason that she divorced her husband was that he was cheating on her. At that time, I interpreted Matthew 5:32 to mean that divorce and remarriage was allowed for marital unfaithfulness. When she broke up with me, she admitted that she did not really know that he cheated on her. So if she did not break up with me, I could have married her with the false assumption that she had Biblical grounds to remarry! This made me realize the need for a marriage tribunal to thoroughly investigate the situation. It is not enough to take the person’s word for it. Suppose a person got a divorce because he was cheating on his wife, or that he was beating her. I doubt that he would admit this to the next woman he dates. Everyone does what is right in his own eyes. A man rarely admits to be current fiancée that his previous divorce was his fault. This is which we need an objective tribunal to investigate the case.
Going through an annulment process at least makes a person pause before considering divorce, and this is a good thing in our era of no-fault, quickie divorces. There are times when a marriage must terminate, but we should not make the process easy. There are tremendously negative effects to divorce, especially to the children. Children of divorce experience higher crime and drug abuse rates, more depression, more problems in school, higher drop-out rates, less likely to go to church, and more likely themselves to get divorced. A person who is divorce once is more likely to be divorced a second time. There is a growing awareness that divorced people are filled with regret.
C.S. Lewis once wrote an excellent book called The Four Loves. In this book, Lewis talks about romantic love and true intimacy. When a man and woman first get married, they first go through the idealized romantic love phase. In this phase, they see each other as perfect partners. But they do not really love each other as they really are. They only love a mental image of what they think there are. But as the years pass, this honeymoon phase is over. They start seeing each other as they really are – with all their faults. They start having conflicts. They start seeing each other as they really are – some of which they do not like. But if they work themselves through these conflicts, then they start truly loving each other. They see each other with all their faults, and they accept each other as they really are. They love each other, instead of just loving an image they have of each other. Then true intimacy is possible. That is why the marriage commitment is so necessary. There is a temptation to separate once the idealization phase is over, so they never get to the true intimacy phase. But if they take the serious nature of making bows before God, they are willing to working to take the hard road of working out their differences.
But unfortunately, in our culture, we do not take our vows before God seriously anymore. So when the marriage becomes difficult we leave. We then never know true intimacy. All our relationships are shallow. We never experience true love, of being accepted for what we really are – warts and all! Christ’s road shows us the road we must all follow. Before we get to the Resurrection we must go through the Cross. Before we can experience true love, we must go through the hard times. It takes strong people who remind themselves that they gave their word to God that they will always love, honor and obey each other until death do they part.
