Divorce is horrible.
As a son of divorced parents and pastor of families and individuals affected by divorce, I know personally and intimately the pain and devastation that always result. There has never existed a “positive” divorce because even the most necessary divorce is the result of human sin.
Divorce is horrible.
And we all know it.
What I do not think we all know is that the way in which the Church tends to deal with divorce is also horrible and, just like divorce, it has produced pain and destruction in individuals and families.
In most evangelical churches, all that is offered to the person suffering in his or her marriage revolves around the question: “When is divorce permissible?” In many churches, this question is answered with the words: “when one member of the union has been sexually unfaithful to the other”. In others the following words are also added: “when one person has been abandoned by the other”. By reducing our counsel about divorce to a legislative question we have converted ourselves from a community of brothers and sisters who care for God’s sheep to a collection of judges who evaluate the sin and suffering of broken people. We have converted ourselves from those who carry the burdens of others according to their needs to those who declare their approved options based on our own determination of their relative guilt. In the process, we have placed obstacles in the way of people’s ability to follow their own consciences and hidden Jesus’ desire to show mercy where it is most needed.
After so much unpleasant fruit, the time has come to reevaluate our strategy. In this article I will propose three reasons for which we should reconsider –and ultimately reject– the traditional position on divorce and develop a new position that better reflects the heart of Christ for his suffering children.
In the two points that follow this one we will talk about the ways in which the traditional position fails to fulfill biblical teachings, but before we evaluate the position in light of the Scriptures, I would like us to consider the contradictions and absurdities that we can see in plain sight. Upon seeing them, we should be convinced that a better interpretation of the biblical data exists and we should be desperate to discover it. Here are just some examples of the absurd situations that the traditional position produces.
The traditional position causes a man or woman in a miserable marriage to long to see the other party commit adultery and, if the other party does so, it causes the same person to rejoice over having been betrayed in this way, simply because it is the only way to be free from their marriage. If our position causes people to long for and celebrate adultery, something is wrong with our position.
The traditional position allows a woman to divorce from a man who has been unfaithful but not from a man who is guilty of attempted murder, or who has abused his children, or has failed to provide food or accommodations, or who has given himself to drugs, alcohol, or other addictions. If our position says that the only sin that justifies divorce is adultery, while there are other sins that destroy families in ways even more difficult to repair, something is wrong with our position.
The traditional position causes us to say to those who are in a marriage filled with suffering: unless your partner has been sexually unfaithful, Jesus wants you to stay in this situation in order to learn to be more like him. It may be that this counsel is useful for someone who is battling with the normal challenges of living with another imperfect sinner, such as impatience, disagreements, miscommunication and the like. However, do we really want to romanticize unhealthy marriages by telling victims of negligence, abuse and unrepentant sin that Jesus is responsible for their pain and that not only is he not going to do nothing to rescue them, but that they are in their specific situation to “learn their lesson”? If our position makes it so we have no other counsel to give those who suffer apart from, “Jesus is teaching you a lesson”, something is wrong with our position.
The traditional position makes it so that a man can completely ignore his wife for 25 years, denying her affection, sex, support, respect, provision, and spiritual leadership every day of their marriage, yet if one day this women decides that she can no longer tolerate this treatment and seeks a divorce, or if for the misery of the marriage she falls even one time into sexual sin with another man, she is the one who will be “disciplined” by the church and he will be treated as if he were the victim. If our position causes the true victim of years and years of unrepentant sin to be seen as the victimizer, and the true victimizer whose sin carried the other to the point of desperation to be seen as an innocent victim, something is wrong with our position.
The traditional position makes it so pastors exchange their calling to preach Christ to a supposed calling to discover who has done what to whom. As pastors we listen to “her side of the story” and “his side of the story” and we put ourselves in the position of the one who determines if divorce is “permissible” or not. If it is, we declare which member of the marriage is innocent and which member is guilty and, if we decide that divorce is not “permissible”, we warn the person who is most wounded that he or she is obligated to stay in the suffering of her marriage and that God does not allow her any escape. If our position allows pastors to decide for someone else if he should stay in his marriage or not; if our position causes us to take sides and choose a team in spite of not having any way to truly know what has happened in the relationship nor how it has affected either party; if our position causes pastors to preach to suffering people the law of what can be done or cannot be done instead of the gospel of what Christ does and has done, something is wrong with our position.
The traditional position produces absurd results due its injustice, ineffectiveness and inconsistency. This is one of the reasons for which we should reconsider –and reject– the traditional position on divorce and develop one that better reflects the heart of Christ for his suffering children.
Read part 2 of the series in which we see the second reason for which we should reconsider and reject the traditional position on divorce: because it uses the law like the Pharisees and not like Jesus.