Divorce and Remarriage: Four Christian Views (Spectrum Multiview Book Series Spectrum Multiview Book Serie)

By 

Johann W. Vanderbijl (Greenville, SC, USA) –

  

The Rev. Fr. Johann W. Vanderbijl III

My mother divorced her first husband because he beat her repeatedly and severely. (He evidently did the same thing to his second wife, allegedly attempting to strangle her in front of my older half-brother.) She was excommunicated by the Church of England for doing so, an act that caused her to lose her faith for a long period of time. Nonetheless, she did get remarried to my father and I am the second of their two children. All this to say that I must admit that I approach any book on divorce and remarriage with a certain presupposition firmly in place – just like the four different writers. Perhaps it is best to be up front about the myth of total objectivity and at least be honest with regard to one’s particular slant. Having said that, I agree with all of the writers that the Scriptures must be allowed to speak for themselves and in trying to find a solution to this very emotional and difficult subject one must strive to be as objective as possible, however hard that may be.

Some of the basic principles of biblical interpretation that I was taught at seminary involve:

1) a determination to use the whole of God’s revelation (and to avoid like the plague the temptation to use only texts that support your particular view or, worse, to use one part of Scripture to contradict another – there are many forms of this, one of which is to assign the offending portion to a later redactor or editor and another is to repeat ad nauseum that this is the ONLY place that the “exception” is to be found, giving the impression that the “exception” may be explained away in one or other fashion) in an attempt to present a studied and balanced conclusion of all the biblical data (Edgar makes an excellent case in his reply to Laney’s chapter on page 62: “Any adequate analysis of Scripture on this subject must be based on all the passages. All the passages must be allowed to speak and must speak in harmony with all the others. To interpret some as if the others did not exist, and to then use the resulting interpretation as the basis to deny the explicit statements (exceptions) of those not originally taken into consideration is not really basing one’s view on Scripture. It is instead a selection of passages which, taken by themselves, seem to fit the interpreter’s presuppositions and then using these to get rid of those passages containing specific statements contrary to the interpreter’s presuppositions.”);

2) a determination to interpret a passage within the larger and more immediate context within it’s own historical sitz-im-leben;

3) a determination to prefer the most obvious interpretation rather than to perform amazing feats of mental and exegetical gymnastics to prove that some obscure meaning at the far end of the semantic range of the word in question is really what the author meant to say.

and 4) a determination not to base one’s argument on silence. In other words, the fact that text does not say anything about a specific subject (either affirming or denying) does not mean that it is open season for interpreters to shoot down another’s reluctance to be dogmatic. Deuteronomy 29:29 says: “The secret things belong to the Lord our God, but those things which are revealed belong to us and to our children forever, that we may do all the words of this law.” That which is revealed is sufficient for us to live godly lives…speculating on that which has not been revealed is moving into areas where we may wander if we wish, but only with extreme caution.

Another thing to avoid is emotionalism. Just because my mother was divorced and remarried doesn’t make it biblical. So it unhelpful to ask questions like: “Does God expect the battered wife to remain, waiting helplessly for the next outburst of fury? Does God expect the victim of constant verbal abuse from a spouse who can only prop him or herself up by cutting down the partner, to continue being diminished and demeaned?” (cf. p. 69) Questions such as these tend to cloud the issue and bring in more confusion than clarity. In short, we are to be as honest as possible and to avoid any form of deceit no matter how well meaning our intentions may seem to be.

Having said this, how do the four different writers (J. Carl Laney: No Divorce and No Remarriage; William Heth: Divorce, but no Remarriage; Thomas R. Edgar: Divorce and Remarriage for Adultery or Desertion; Larry Richards: Divorce and Remarriage under a Variety of Circumstances) handle the biblical text in their various attempts to arrive at their respective conclusions? They all seem to agree that God’s original intension for Man was for marriage to be a permanent bond between one man and one woman (Genesis 2:20-25). It is from the Fall on that their views on the indissolubility of marriage, impropriety in marriage (mixed marriages, adultery, abuse,…

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