Friday, February 3, 2012

It Seems To Depend On How You Spin It

It is curious to me how much this picture of divorce and remarriage can look right or wrong, depending on how you look at it.

If a man leaves his wife, everyone in the church says to him that he needs to make it work with her, no matter how difficult, because it's the right thing to do. If he not only leaves his wife, but moves in with another woman, everyone in the church says to him that he needs to leave this relationship because it's adulterous; he needs to reconcile with his wife. If he divorces the wife while living with the girlfriend, the people in the church will encourage him to stop living with the woman, because it's immoral. But then, as soon as the husband and the new girlfriend make vows to each other to be faithful to each other as long as they live, all of a sudden this new marriage is the one that God now wants to bless - and now most people in the church will say that he shouldn't have done it, but now that he did, he has to remain faithful to these new vows he made.

So what do we do with Jesus' words where he says that anyone who divorces and marries another is committing adultery? Isn't this exactly what he is referring to when he says it is committing adultery? Voddie Baucham and the like would say that it is the making of the new vows which is the act of adultery; but now that the vows have been made, God expects the man to stay in this new situation.

I'm not sure I see this. Jesus didn't say it was an act of adultery. He described it as an ongoing condition of adultery. That's what the Greek says. And I find it an unfortunate thing that many will want to redefine adultery to mean "the making of vows" and take the greek where it speaks of an ongoing condition of adultery and try to state that it really must mean a single act of adultery. In fact, Craig S. Keener goes so far as to state that Jesus must have meant that it was an act of adultery, and not an ongoing condition of adultery, because if it was, then there would be all these people in the church who are living in adultery, but this can't be the case, so this can't be what Jesus meant.

The problem is that everyone in Jesus' day understood adultery to mean sex with someone outside of the marriage relationship. And you can't change the definition of the words to make them mean something else just so you don't have to deal with painful realities.

Why is it that living with the woman is adultery, but as soon as the man makes vows to commit to staying in this adulterous relationship for the rest of his life, and that he makes vows to faithfully commit adultery with no one else anymore except this one woman, that it's not adultery anymore, but now a valid marriage in God's eyes? How does the pronouncing of these vows change the definition of what they are doing from living in adultery, as Jesus says, to living in a God-blessed relationship?

I've struggled with the realities of this concept for a while now, I have to admit. Some have suggested it could it be that when Jesus made this remark about marriage to the Pharisees, that he was really speaking of a situation where a man had already in his heart decided that he wanted to share his affections with another woman, and so divorcing so as to be free to marry another he had already picked out was his true goal? In other words, was Jesus saying something like, "he who divorces his wife just to be free to marry another is really merely entering into an ongoing condition of adultery?"

What do you do with all the couples who divorce because of abuse, or neglect, or sexual infidelity or perversion, and who do not divorce at the time in order to remarry, but do so to break off (on paper) a relationship which has really already been violated anyway? What do you do about all the couples who, having divorced, believe that God brought someone else into their life and gave them permission to remarry? How do you go back and unscramble the egg?