One day, very early in my ministry, I was approached by a Pentecostal couple I knew well and asked if I would be willing to marry them. When I asked why they were not planning to be married in their own church they explained that each had had a brief marriage many years previously. Both had, since that time, been committed Pentecostal Christians, raised families as single parents, and lived exemplary Christian lives, but their spouses, whom they had not seen for more that two decades, were still living, so they remained married as far as their church was concerned. – The indissolubility of marriage is by no means an exclusively Catholic doctrine. – As we talked the woman remarked wryly, “If I had murdered my husband I’d be out of prison now and free to remarry.” A sobering thought.
At this point I realized two things that remained with me throughout my ministry. First, pastorally speaking, this is an intolerable situation. Even if we view divorce as sinful, people need to be able to find forgiveness and move on with their lives as they do with any other sin. And second, this is the logical result of the doctrine of the indissolubility of marriage.
Michael Coren, of course, defends this doctrine, as he does all things Catholic. And he builds an interesting, traditional case right from Scripture. But pastoral theology needs to influence biblical theology from time to time. And if Coren and our Catholic brothers and sisters could set aside their “infallible” conclusion in this matter, they and their Church might benefit from a little Evangelical pastoral theology.
Jesus addresses the matter of divorce in three main passages of scripture: Matt 5:31-32; Matt 19:3-9; Mark 10:2-9. From these passages it is quite possible to maintain that a marriage can be ended only by the death of one or both partners, but this is not a necessary conclusion. For the sake of brevity we’ll consider just one of the passages.
Matthew 19:3-9 Some Pharisees came to him to test him. They asked, "Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any and every reason?"
"Haven't you read," he replied, "that at the beginning the Creator 'made them male and female,' and said, 'For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh'? So they are no longer two, but one. Therefore what God has joined together, let man not separate."
"Why then," they asked, "did Moses command that a man give his wife a certificate of divorce and send her away?"
Jesus replied, "Moses permitted you to divorce your wives because your hearts were hard. But it was not this way from the beginning. I tell you that anyone who divorces his wife, except for marital unfaithfulness, and marries another woman commits adultery."
The question being raised here is not our abstract question of the permanence of marriage but a concrete and controversial teaching of some Rabbis in Jesus’ day that allowed a man to divorce his wife – never a woman her husband— on any pretext whatever, as long as he returned the dowry to her family. This reduced marriage to a financial bargain among men and, as we might expect, Jesus condemns this interpretation of scripture. He insists that from the beginning God intended that marriage be a lifelong bond between a man and a woman, that divorce is a product of human sinfulness (hard-heartedness), and that to leave a faithful wife and take another is adultery, pure and simple.
Jesus is not saying, as the Catholic Church interprets him, that this is adultery because divorce doesn’t really end the marriage. He is making the simpler and more obvious point that the sin of adultery can’t be finessed by legal posturing and manipulation. Adultery is the sin of unfaithfulness to one’s marriage vow and no legal loopholes can make it okay.
Marriage is a life covenant, sealed by a vow that pledges each partner to the other until death. Its purpose is to provide a foundation for a secure home, but if we say that it can only be ended by death we make it a prison. An abandoned or abused spouse has no recourse but to remain in abandonment or abuse, or to be forced into a life of celibacy. This may not seem terribly cruel to a childless priest, bishop or pope who has chosen a life of celibacy, but to most Christian pastors it has always seemed an unacceptable conclusion. And it leads, within the Catholic Church, to the scandal of annulment, i.e., thousands of couples seeking to prove that, for some reason, their failed marriage was never valid in the first place. There are, of course, forced and fraudulent marriages that should be annulled, but to hold out annulment as a faint hope clause is just more legal posturing and manipulation of the sort that Jesus condemned.
Sorry Michael, this is an instance where the Catholics are wrong.
Next: How does an Evangelical pastor (yours truly)
handle the thorny question of divorce?
2 comments:
I wonder, what do churches who allow annulment of marriages do for the children of such a marriage?
Thanks April - Actually all churches allow for annulments, but it’s a good question. If someone was under age when they married, or was deceived or forced into marriage, the marriage may be invalid. But this would make any children of such a union illegitimate in retrospect, and this seems pretty unfair. Coren insists that this is not so in the case of annulment, but it seems obviously so.
I suppose the lesson here is that the whole concept of the illegitimate child is a gross injustice as well as the height of absurdity. All children come into being in the same way and are, therefore, legitimate children. If the parents have broken some sort of law or rule or expectation I suppose they might be illegitimate, but not the kids. Illegitimate parents, maybe, but no illegitimate kids.
Just as with any divorce of course, the children need to be cared for by their parents. It's legitimate.
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