Chapter Nine

The Road to and from Divorce

Women these days are as “carnal as hell,” he said, and that’s why he wanted dating advice from me. He was a stranger to me, but he came to my office wanting to make sure that as he dated in this cultural environment that he would know how to find a godly Christian mate. He wanted, he said, to find a “Proverbs 31 woman.” She needed, he said, to agree with him doctrinally, especially on matters related to the doctrines of election and predestination. We were five or six minutes in before I made some comment about a passage of Scripture to which he replied, “Yes, that’s what my wife says.” It took me several seconds to orient myself. “Your wife?” I asked. “You’re married?” He said he was. “How on earth are we then talking about your dating?” He laughed, seeing my confusion, and said, “Oh, don’t worry. I’m not cheating on her. I’m going to divorce her.”

Didn’t I agree, he asked, that one could divorce if one is “unequally yoked” with another? Before I could even answer “no,” he further explained that his wife was not an unbeliever, but rather, he believed them to be unequally yoked because he was spiritually mature while she was, in his words, “carnal as hell.” His major issue with her was that she had a hyphenated name—her maiden name joined with his—which was apparently all the evidence he needed that she was not submitting to him as “the head of my house.” But, even beyond that, he said, her biblical ignorance sparked constant theological debates that would frequently confuse the children. So, he surmised, he could when freed from her, find a good, properly submissive, theologically-educated woman.

Intrigued, I asked about the theological disagreements, which he then told me were about the moderate use of alcohol. As I’ve mentioned, I am part of a church communion that sees wisdom in abstinence from alcohol, but I know that this is a minority report in the history of the church and that many Christians do otherwise. I couldn’t imagine this being a doctrinal fight that would disrupt a friendship much less a marriage. I asked, how do the arguments manifest themselves? “Usually it’s when she sees me moderately using alcohol,” he said. I pressed a little further, asking him to describe his moderate use of alcohol. “Well,” he said. “Every night I’ll start drinking a bottle of bourbon and a twelve pack of beer until I go to sleep.” Now I had some clarity. I started to reference biblical passages on drunkenness, and ministries various churches had for those who grapple with chemical dependence issues. He looked at me, confused, as though I had suggested swapping recipes for seven-layer salad or some other matter irrelevant to the issue of concern. He reached out his hand and said, “Oh no. I’ve never been drunk in my life.”

Now, I don’t know much about drinking, but I’ve dealt with many people who do, and I’ve listened to country music since I was three years old, so I feel confident in saying that consuming a bottle of whiskey and a twelve-pack of beer until you pass out is drunk. “You’re starting to sound like my wife,” the man snapped. “By the way, did you know that she has a hyphenated name?”

Carnal as hell, indeed. The problem wasn’t his wife, or at least it wasn’t only with her. This man sought to use biblical directives on marriage in order to prop up his appetites and to “free” him to violate his marriage vows. He wanted to win an argument, not to carry a cross. I am surprised that his wife agreed to take any part of his name—hyphenated or not. I also thought long and hard after this man left my office: where is his church? I don’t know what happened to this marriage, but, unless he pivoted toward repentance quickly, there’s a wife and children out there somewhere who had their entire lives pulled apart, all the while being told that this was Jesus’ will. And God help that Proverbs 31 woman who is next in line. His situation is extreme, of course, but it was easier for me to see from the outside than it would be from the inside.

How many times in my own marriage, I wondered after he left, have I also selfishly sought to think first of myself and my appetites? And how often have I done so, all the while believing myself to be secure in my biblical maturity? Marriage can reveal, sometimes as nothing else can, just how oriented we are to the self. Granted, again, his is an extreme case. Most people are not this brazen in their willfulness, but the brokenness he leaves behind is all too common. It’s easy for me to see this man as a villain or a buffoon, but I wonder what had happened in his life that led him to this view of marriage, and of what it would mean to have a meaningful life? Maybe back there, behind all of that, was some hurt that I couldn’t even fathom. Indeed, even with this man’s rather obvious (to me) self-deception, he really wasn’t that unusual except in his brazenness. In reality, much of the church has gone right down the path this man had trod: loud denunciations of other people’s sins, while convincing ourselves that Jesus is on our side as we do the opposite of what he commanded. That is nowhere clearer than when it comes to our attitudes about marriage. By this, I don’t mean—to be sure—our idealized notions of what marriage ought to be, but rather what happens to our Christian conviction when marriages begin to hit turbulence or even to break apart.

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Evangelical Christians in North America like to tell ourselves that we are “countercultural,” standing outside the mainstream of society, bearing witness for Christ. The reality, though, is quite different when we look at the actual data rather than our own slogans about ourselves. On the one hand, the entrepreneurial nature of American evangelicalism, centered on personal conversion and suspicious of institutions, has had the freedom to establish bonds with like-minded believers for the cause of missions and church-planting in ways never possible in the bureaucracies of other churches, with their byzantine structures and glacial pace. On the other hand, this “free market ecclesiology” can easily make it marketable to the point of eclipsing the very distinctiveness it has to offer to the world in the first place.

The fact is, the popular caricature of Western Christians as censorious scolds, standing athwart culture with a kind of embittered separatism, is negative, but not true. The problem for us is that the reality is not any better. There are some ways in which Western Christianity does run counter to the prevailing culture—our views on sexual morality and in the practice of charitable giving, for example. In other areas, such as the actual practice of sexual integrity, the data show that we are only as countercultural as we want to be. As one observer noted, the culture war is mostly an illusion since the church is gladly enmeshed in the same therapeutic, consumerist milieu of autonomous individualism that gave us the Sexual Revolution in the first place.35 In terms of pornography, premarital sex, and many other issues, this scholar argues, if evangelical Christians are fighting, we are fighting for the other side, whether we know it or not. This is probably nowhere more clearly seen than in the shockingly high numbers of those who make the trek from our baptisteries to the local divorce court. In fact, some studies show that areas where there are more evangelical Christians have higher divorce rates than those without.36

Now, again, some of these statistics are misleading. After all, to ask someone in Bible Belt America who is over the age of forty if he or she is “born again” or an “evangelical Christian” is somewhat the equivalent of asking someone elsewhere if he or she is a patriot. To say otherwise would be to opt out of the social system, built as it is on nominal, cultural Christianity. Evangelical Christians tend to proliferate, at least in this country, in places of long-term economic struggle. These populations, studies show, marry earlier, marry more often, and divorce more frequently. Nonetheless, we could explain away these data points, showing others that demonstrate committed churchgoers are less likely to divorce than their secular peers in the same situation, but such would prove little. The very fact that this is a point of discussion is already a defeat for the idea that the gospel is transforming our subculture. Whatever the exact rates of divorce among Christians, they are far too similar, if not worse, than the general population.

Moreover, one need not look at statistics to see the cultural accommodation to a divorce culture within professing Christian circles. Notice how divorce is rarely even mentioned in the hubbub of culture war issues around us. Is this because the Bible does not speak to the matter? Hardly. The Bible addresses divorce far more extensively than many of the questions we confront loudly with a “Christian worldview.” Leaders within the political sphere, and even within the church, have broken marriage vows, sometimes scandalously, with virtually no protest, or even moral evaluation, from the church. It is not that, in these cases, the church weighs and agonizes over these matters and comes to a different set of conclusions, but rather that there is virtually no moral analysis at all.

Years ago, I came across a list of quotations on the family from various articles and sermons across the denominational spectrum. The most impressive was from a pastor within my tradition, speaking at a 1980s-era conference organized by the organization I now lead. This pastor prophetically charged evangelical Christians with relegating the issue of divorce to “descriptive statements in which we are drowning” at the expense of “normative statements, a divine word, a prophetic word, an authoritative word, a transcendent word from God.” This leader displayed what impressed me as some of the most remarkable pastoral courage I had seen on this point as he laid out the carnage left in gospel churches by rampant divorce, noting what this does to our global witness for Christ. The leader did not attack “the culture” or his political opponents but lamented instead that divorce was the only great issue where his own church tradition was “tongue-tied” with a “mutinous silence.” As I read these words, I was sobered to contemplate how this leader’s warnings were still true, many decades later. I was about to quote these remarks in a speech until I looked to find the author’s name, only to realize that, by the time I was reading the statement, he himself was divorced.

Now, as I will discuss a bit further down in this text, there are a variety of views among conservative Protestant Christians about when, if ever, it is biblically permissible to divorce or to remarry after divorce.37 Nonetheless, even the most expansive view of the biblical exceptions would rule out most of the divorces in modern American culture. How can Christians—whether on the Right or the Left culturally or politically—speak to issues of social justice and the common good without addressing what is no doubt the leading cause of “orphans and widows” (James 1:27) in our midst? How can we speak with any moral credibility at all about “family values” while speaking in muted tones on the issue of divorce and at full-volume on other matters? One survey of the preaching in a very conservative Christian denomination shows a distinct “softening” of preaching when it comes to divorce, often related to pastoral comments on forgiveness and “second chances” for those who have been divorced and remarried.38 Forgiveness and second chances are precisely right, and ought to be at the center of our preaching. But what needs to be “forgiven” if it is not first seen to be sin? Would we pronounce “forgiveness” to adulterous spouses in our congregations who do not see adultery as wrong or, if wrong, as necessary in their situations? No. We would proclaim full forgiveness in Christ, but we would call for repentance, including an agreement with God that the sin is, in fact, sin. When it comes to divorce, though, often our churches speak in terms of “divorce care” ministries and “single again” Bible studies (both of which are commendable and missiologically appropriate), but rarely in the context of prophetic preaching and congregational discipline.

Some of this is a reaction to the censorious and condemnatory attitudes of many Christians, especially in previous generations, to those who have been divorced. When divorce was uncommon, those who had experienced it (regardless of whether they were the initiators of the divorce, or just the victims of it) were marginalized, sometimes treated as pariahs. As one woman who had been abandoned by her husband put it to me, “I wanted the gospel so badly, but the unspoken message to me seemed to be that divorce is the unforgivable sin.” Such is out of step with the gospel, and a correcting of this is necessary for any church focused on the cross of Jesus Christ. We should offer full forgiveness and justification for any person who entrusts himself or herself to the atoning Jesus Christ. That does not explain, though, why we would not warn people away from a sin for which the wages are death, and the temporal consequences ruinous. Nor does it explain why we are willing to speak of all of us as sinners but not willing to speak of this—in many, if not most, cases—as itself sin, sin for which Christ died and for which we need forgiveness. Some of the issue here is that of pastoral courage, or lack thereof. One can watch the way that Christian national leaders can pivot away from any moral consideration of divorce the minute someone they “need” in terms of fundraising or political influence is unrepentantly divorced and remarried. The same often happens, just at a less noticeable level, in local congregations. And this is tragic, but easy enough to understand. Who wishes to speak to an issue, in the hard tones with which the Bible speaks to it, that affects virtually every family in the pews? John the Baptist telling Herod he could not have another man’s wife is a quite rare profile in courage in almost any era. Rarely do cultural influence-makers need more than a handful of silver platters to silence the voices they don’t want to hear.

The shift in evangelical attitudes toward marital permanence does not seem to have come through any kind of theological reflection or conversation at all. Instead, our approach to divorce seems to have meandered just a bit behind the mainstream of American cultural patterns of acceptance of “one spouse at a time” as a sad, but normal, part of life. We have grown accustomed to a divorce culture the way that, perhaps, our own future grandchildren or great-grandchildren may become accustomed to polygamy or artificially intelligent sex robots. Will they be more countercultural than we are? Many Christians don’t register the same alarm when it comes to divorce as they do other aspects of family decline because they have seen divorce so often that it seems almost “normal” to them. This is precisely the problem. One poet of the last century was right to say, “Whoever considers as normal the order of things in which the strong triumph and the weak fail, and life ends with death, accepts the devil’s rule.”39 The devil’s rule is all about us when it comes to what we think of the tearing apart of the embedded picture of the gospel—the Christ-church one-flesh union—all around us. Some would tell us that when it comes to a divorce culture, we cannot “turn back the clock,” but as Neil Postman warned us a generation ago, “in some respects the clock is wrong.”40 In order to bring a word of liberation, we must be willing to say so.

This is even more thorny when we move from the cultural terrain to the personal. I remember years ago, a commentator, tongue in cheek, addressing the abortion debate, with rising numbers of Americans opposed to abortion. She said: “Most Americans are pro-life with three exceptions: rape, incest, and my situation.”41 Her point was that moral abstractions could show up rather easily in answers to questions from a polling firm. When, though, a “pro-life” man has a pregnant teenage daughter or a “pro-life” woman finds herself to be pregnant in the middle of medical school, sometimes these abstractions are easily tossed aside. The same is true in this case. Moral commitments to the permanence of marriage are always readily assumed. In our culture, it is the rare couple—even among unbelievers—who do not pledge at the wedding to remain together “until death do us part.” It’s also true that divorce is often a deeply painful issue for those who have had nothing to do with the conflicts in the marriage whatsoever. How many children are, right now, shuttling back and forth between a mother and a stepfather and a father and a stepmother? And how many of them are suppressing a palpable sense of guilt—as if somehow they could have kept their parents’ marriage together—or else a simmering rage at the parents who could not keep their childhood homes together?

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So how did we get here? Some would suggest that the problem lies in early marriage rates. Those regions where the typical person delays marriage until well into the twenties or even into the thirties tend to have lower rates of divorce than regions with higher rates of very young marriage. To some degree, this is no doubt true. We would all agree that there are many people who are too young to marry, which is why, were one of my sons to announce that he, in high school, is engaged, I would step in to veto the notion. And yet, marriage rates throughout history and all over the world have been much younger than ours are now. That’s not just the case in the distant Isaac-and-Rebekah past. My grandmother was married in the 1940s at the age of fourteen. She was not pregnant, and there was no scandal involved, in her little community in Mississippi. She was also in a culture which—for all of its many social and moral and structural evils—did not see much divorce. Those lacking maturity to rough out the difficulties of marriage—whatever their age—should not marry. And yet, delaying marriage indefinitely does not seem to solve the problem.

Delayed marriage is a reality in our cultural ecosystem. In some ways, this could be good, if it means a person preparing himself or herself for marriage, spending the time it takes to discipline himself to be a faithful husband, or herself a faithful wife. Often, though, delayed marriage is about something quite different from this. To some degree, marriage is often delayed due to the extension of adolescence, a fear of “grown-up” commitments and responsibilities. This is not though, I believe, the primary reason marriage time lines have inched up and up on the chronological scale. Instead, this is probably most often due to an idealization of marriage. In a culture in which marriage is about finding the one soul mate who can meet every need, forever in the haze of romance, then one will often search endlessly for such a person, never finding him or her. When one adds to this the lack of social bonds that might make divorce rare, we end up with an awful predicament: seeking to determine who, out of billions of possibilities, is “the One,” while also making sure that this partner will never leave or cause pain. That’s an impossible mission. No wonder some secretly see marrying, whomever they marry, as “settling.” If, though, we see marriage as sharing a cross, as bearing suffering together, walking together on a pilgrimage toward the New Jerusalem, the picture changes dramatically.

Yes, those who delay marriage in our culture have lower divorce rates than those who marry young, but often they do so by opting out of marriage altogether or by cohabiting sometimes with multiple partners through their young adulthoods. This hardly does away with divorce; it just keeps divorce out of the court system as people experience serial, kind-of “marriages,” just without the commitment or the accountability. Many of these people often suffer multiple cases of what we might call common-law divorces. So these statistics are quite confused. I cannot claim to have solved the problem of highway car accidents simply by pointing to reduced rates of such accidents in my town if in fact people have stopped buying cars altogether. And this would be especially absurd if, in this scenario, people are having just as many accidents on motorcycles. Yes, literally and technically, the car accident problem would then be resolved, but to no substantive end. One can certainly understand why those who have lived through the trauma of divorce—often in the lives of their own parents—would seek to protect themselves by avoiding the arena of divorce, marriage itself, but this is hardly the solution.

After one of the many studies on divorce came out showing higher rates of divorce in more culturally conservative states, I had an exchange via text message with a sociologist friend about the results. He blamed country music. I think he was mostly kidding me—knowing that I am a fan of old-school outlaw country—but not entirely. Country music, with its roots in the folk songs of the Appalachian and southern regions of the United States, illustrates, he said, that southerners have a more “romanticized” view of marriage than other Americans. I responded that southerners have a more romanticized view of everything than other Americans. Country music, it seemed to me, was actually less problematic than other forms of popular music, which idealize not marriage but adolescent, hormonal experiences of romance. At least the older forms of country music would speak lyrically to marriages lasting into old age, and, even when they (frequently) dealt with divorce, many of these songs lament the divorce, sometimes in haunting terms. I had to admit, though, that my friend was not totally wrong. Country music is indeed problematic when it comes to the divorce culture. This is not, though, due to its vision of marriage (which is often remarkably good) but in its tacit acceptance of a Bible Belt gospel.

Secularized conservative evangelicals in Tennessee are in a much worse place than secularized liberal Episcopalians in Connecticut. First of all, the Connecticut Episcopalian has a greater sense of economic stability and social capital. The secularized evangelicals, moreover, don’t know that they are secularizing. The Connecticut nominal Episcopalian is in a region that has been secularizing since well before his or her grandparents were ever born out of Puritanism, with its strong commitment to social structures and community solidarity. There is no illusion of Christendom for this person. The southern evangelical, though, is also secularizing—accepting as normal what his ancestors would have seen as scandal—but is secularizing out of revivalism. The need for a “personal relationship with Jesus Christ” is, in my view, both biblical and necessary. But if this is disconnected from a sense of belonging within the church, it can easily lead to an almost-gospel of “praying to receive Christ” with no sense of Christ’s lordship over one’s life or accountability to Christ’s church. When that is added to biblical illiteracy and theological minimalism, the result is disastrous, both for persons and for marriages and families.

If the Christian life is mostly about my individual emotional experience with God, then this pattern of life easily enough translates into marriages that are about my emotional experience with my spouse. When that sense of revivalist mysticism is added to a “Christian” culture in which no church will notice or care what I do, so long as I say the right words about Jesus and vote for the right candidates, it feels natural enough to believe—as Paul denounced in Romans 6:1—that my divorce is just one more thing for God to forgive, and forgiving is his job. A sense of “Christianity” without theological definition, ecclesial identity, and community accountability does indeed lead into a perfect storm of divorce culture: an idealized view of marriage in which my spouse will always be “the one” to meet my needs, and an individualized view of the gospel in which Jesus exists to meet my needs just as my spouse does, except for eternity.

My sociologist friend might well be right that country music illustrates the problem, except that it is not the songs about divorce and adultery that do so, but the gospel song at the end of it all. In some ways, these closing songs at a concert that was otherwise full of choruses celebrating getting drunk and being cheated on, represent the very best aspects of Bible Belt revivalism: namely, that no one is too far gone for redemption. But the worst aspects are there too—Jesus is my Savior but doesn’t tell me what to do. This feeds directly into a view of the gospel and a view of the gospel icon of marriage that are disturbingly similar. Both views are built off a kind of emotional commitment, one at the altar call and one at the wedding altar, of “I Surrender All,” without a serious “counting of the cost” of either one. Nominal Christianity empowers this much easier than does secularism or paganism because with nominal Christianity one has the social pressure for marriage without strong community and discipleship. The gospel doesn’t propel a divorce culture, but an almost-gospel certainly does.

For Christians, this is more than just a social problem or even an issue of personal hurt and crisis. The prophet Malachi looked to the future for the day when, as he said to the people of God, “the Lord whom you seek will suddenly come to his temple” (Mal. 3:1). This would seem to be good news for a people disappointed that the rebuilding of the temple after exile did not usher in the messianic time they were expecting. And yet Malachi wrote this in warning, not in reassurance, asking “who can endure the day of his coming, and who can stand when he appears?” (Mal. 3:2).

What would prompt such hard words from the prophet? He wrote that it was because of the breaking of the covenant, by the people of Judah. This was expressed in two ways. The first is straightforwardly spiritual. “For Judah has profaned the sanctuary of the Lord, which he loves, and has married the daughter of a foreign god” (Mal. 2:11). As was the case repeatedly, the nation slinked into idolatry. And, as he also did repeatedly, God compared this idolatry with a violation of marriage vows. This culture of spiritual “divorce” was linked, inextricably, to a culture of literal divorce. The second grievance God had against his people was this: “You cover the Lord’s altar with tears, with weeping and groaning because he no longer regards the offering or accepts it with favor from your hand. But you say, ‘Why does he not?’ Because the Lord was witness between you and the wife of your youth, to whom you have been faithless, though she is your companion and your wife by covenant” (Mal. 2:13–14). This was a matter of social injustice, for which God comprehensively indicted his people in this prophet’s book and elsewhere, but it was more than that.

The divorcing of these marriages was no more just a matter of individual vows breaking apart than the idolatry in the temple was just a matter of misused space. Of marriage, the prophet proclaimed: “Did he not make them one with a portion of the Spirit in their union? And what was the one God seeking? Godly offspring” (Mal. 2:15). These marriages were not just about personal love and commitment (although they were that), and they were not just about social breakdown (although they were that too). Each marriage was, mysteriously, a matter of spiritual union. God made these couples one, and dispensed his Spirit into the union. He is, therefore, a witness against those who have wrongly divorced their wives, just as he is elsewhere spoken of as a witness against those who mistreat their workers or the poor (Mal. 3:5; James 5:4). The message from God was not one of mere judgment but of a warning to those who were not yet in the situation. “So guard yourselves in your spirit, and let none of you be faithless to the wife of your youth” (Mal. 2:15). And then God pronounced, once again, his verdict on a divorce culture. “For the man who does not love his wife but divorces her, says the Lord, the God of Israel, covers his garment with violence, says the Lord of hosts” (Mal. 2:16). The breaking of marriage vows, God says, is an act of violence.

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As Malachi promised, God did come into his temple, though not the way his people expected. He provided a new temple—in the flesh of his Son Jesus—whereby God would tabernacle with his people (John 1:14). Some would see Jesus as the “sweeter side of God,” talking as he does against being judgmental or retaliatory. I once heard a man threaten to beat up someone by saying, “I’m going to go Old Testament on you.” Jesus is indeed the embodiment of the grace and forgiveness of God, but the cross shows us that this is not at the expense of God’s holiness and justice. Jesus’ teaching is consistent with this as well. Jesus offered mercy—startlingly so to the culture around him—to the Samaritan woman at the well, but in so doing he uncovered her five failed marriages and her current cohabitation (John 4:16–17). In order to draw her to his grace, he must show her why she needed it. The same is true for us.

Nowhere is the reality of Jesus more at odds with the sentimental caricature of him than in his teaching on the permanence of marriage. The Pharisees came to Jesus “in order to test him,” on the question of divorce (Mark 10:1–11). Since the religious leaders often “tested” Jesus by attempting to put him at odds with popular opinion (on, for example, whether to pay taxes to Caesar or on whether there would be a resurrection), one might conclude that the topic of divorce was as personally sensitive in the first century as it is today. The Pharisees appealed to Scripture—to the Mosaic law permitting divorce (Deut. 24:1–4). Jesus, though, taught that the Law of Moses was a temporary measure, meant to rein in the consequences of hearts that were too hardened to hear God’s voice on this matter (Mark 10:5). Citing Genesis, Jesus said that God’s design was monogamy and permanence of the one-flesh union of male and female (Mark 10:6–7). “So they are no longer two but one flesh,” he said. “What therefore God has joined together let not man separate” (Mark 10:8–9). This prompted a follow-up interrogation by his disciples, but Jesus did not back down, and, if anything, ratcheted up the rhetoric. “Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her,” he said, “and if she divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery” (Mark 10:11–12).

So does this mean that there is never a cause for divorce, or that those divorced must remain celibate and unmarried? Some Christians believe so. The Roman Catholic Church historically has taught that those who are divorced and remarried are in a state of perpetual adultery, unless the first marriage is recognized by the church not to have been a genuine marriage and thus annulled, and so those in this state have not been admitted to communion. Many Protestants agree with this assessment. I do not. Matthew’s account of Jesus’ words include what many call an “exception clause” to the question of adultery in the case of remarriage after divorce: “except in the case of sexual immorality” (Matt. 19:9). Some would argue that this merely means that in the case of sexual immorality, one is an adulterer already, even before the divorce and remarriage. I think this assumes too much on the text, and doesn’t see the ways in which, throughout the Old Testament, sexual infidelity can indeed sever the one-flesh union.

The apostle Paul also wrote to the church at Corinth about the plight of those who have been abandoned by unbelieving spouses. It is not difficult to see why a Christian might assume that, having come to faith in Christ, he could divorce his spouse to which he was joined before coming to faith. He might easily conclude: I am a “new creation,” aren’t I? I did not marry this person; the “old me” did, and that old self is crucified with Christ and no longer alive. Paul though, like Jesus, treated marriage as a creation institution, one that remains until death. Moreover, one might have worried that remaining in a marriage with an unbeliever would be the same situation as the believer marrying an unbeliever, a case of being “unequally yoked” (2 Cor. 6:14). This is not the case though, the apostle said. God sanctifies the union through the believing spouse (1 Cor. 7:13–14). One shouldn’t seek a divorce because one’s spouse isn’t a Christian (1 Cor. 7:12). The marriage is real, and can even be, relatively speaking, holy. Some, though, had been abandoned by their spouses after their conversion to Christ. They are, he said, “not bound” (1 Cor. 7:15), which implies that they are now free, as the Bible directs for those whose spouses are dead, to remarry in the Lord. Again, these exceptions are not universally held, but I believe them to be biblically accurate. The one-flesh union may be dissolved in the cases of unrepentant sexual breaking of the marriage bond or by the abandonment of that bond. In such cases, the divorce is no sin for the “innocent party,” and that person may remarry without sin. Let me qualify these a bit more.

Sexual immorality is not here exclusively adultery. The word porneia includes a broader sense of sexual uncleanness. I believe that Jesus here permits divorce in some cases of such immorality, but he does not mandate divorce, here or elsewhere. If your spouse has cheated on you, the first step should be, just as it is within the broader church when it comes to the full range of sin, to reconcile the relationship (Matt. 18:15–18). If the cheating spouse repents, the years to come may be difficult in restoring trust and establishing boundaries, but the marriage is intact. In some cases, the spouse will not respond and the innocent party needs then to take the matter to their church, again to call the erring one back to repentance (Matt. 18:17). Only when the spouse is clearly unrepentant, usually over an extended period of time, is the situation irrevocable, and thus grounds for the formal recognition of what is already a fact: the dissolution of the marriage. If you find text messages of a sexual nature between your husband and your best friend, your natural response might be to call a divorce attorney. At first, though, call your husband to repentance. Such marriages can be saved, and often should be.

Moreover, “abandonment” is more, in my view, than simply the walking away from the physical location of the home. Paul is speaking of a marriage in which the other partner has determined that the marriage is over. This is obvious to see in the case where, for instance, a man’s wife leaves him and refuses to come home, saying that she’s “moving on” with her life. I believe abandonment would also include, for instance, abusive behavior that makes the home an unsafe environment for a person or his or her children. If you are being abused, or if your children are in danger of being abused, leave the home immediately. The abuse calls for the response both of the civil authorities (Rom. 13:1-4) and the church. Call the police, first, to establish physical safety and temporal justice, and then call the leadership of your church. Do not, under any circumstances, put your children at risk of physical or sexual predation. The church, if suspecting such abuse, should also alert the civil authorities and also act to respond spiritually to this matter. Such satanic behavior toward the vulnerable makes a home uninhabitable and thus, in my view, clearly constitutes abandonment. Someone escaping such abuse is not in sin to divorce the abusive spouse and is, in my view, free to remarry.

Some would say that this abandonment exception applies only to those with an “unbelieving” spouse, and yet the New Testament does not categorize “believing” merely as those who are formally aligned with a church. The one who is unrepentant in sin may or may not be personally regenerate; we cannot know the heart. That person, though, is to be, finally, where there is no repentance shown, treated “as a Gentile and a tax collector” (Matt. 18:17). That doesn’t mean irredeemable (consider how Jesus treated sinners and Gentiles and tax collectors!); it does mean that the person is to be considered outside of the people of God. If the person repents, then “you have gained your brother” (Matt. 18:15).

These exceptions are not individually determined. I cannot, in the middle of a marital crisis, conclude on my own that, for instance, my spouse’s sexual immorality is irrevocable. Marriage is to be part of the discipline of the church. In an era of rampant autonomous individualism, we do not see how one’s marriage—or one’s divorce—should be anyone else’s business. The Scripture declares it to be (1 Cor. 5:1–5). Church discipline is not—as I will elaborate later—simply, as we often think, summed up in the final step of excommunication (indeed, such cases ought to be rare). The goal of discipline is formative and restorative. That means that the church ought to start resisting divorce long before it starts by, among other things, only marrying those who are accountable to the church.

Marriage is a creation institution; it is not reserved only for believers. Unbelievers can and should marry, if they meet the Genesis 2 requirements. Such is a matter of statecraft, though, not of the church. The state has an interest in, among other things, safeguarding children, by holding mothers and fathers accountable to their vows and to the next generation. These unions are the business of the larger society in ways that other relationships aren’t. When those marriages dissolve, the state rightly exercises authority. Our divorce laws, as they are, are often unjust, but think of the lack of justice there would be if we had no divorce laws at all. People would still leave their marriages, but with no restraints on the wreckage that could be caused through financial deprivation, child custody, and a thousand other contingencies. A divorce lawyer who advertises to entice people to divorce for his financial gain is wrong, but the attorney seeing to it that an abandoned spouse is not left destitute or that a sexually-abusive spouse doesn’t gain custody of a child can be working for justice. Divorce is only possible in a fallen world, but in this fallen world there are often those who experience divorce as victims, not as perpetrators. These people have divorce foisted upon them, and they need protection.

The church, though, holds authority only over those who are united to it through the gospel (1 Cor. 5:9–13). Every marriage that the church solemnizes should be a marriage the church takes as its responsibility. When I, as a new groom, sign the state’s marriage license, I am stating that I am accountable to the civil state should I break these vows. When I, as a Christian, marry within the church, I should have the same expectation of the church. The problem is that many go to the church at the start of a marriage—because it’s expected that one would be married by a priest or a minister, or because the church is a beautiful venue for the photographs—but go only to the courts when the marriage dissolves. Churches should, then, marry only those who are accountable to the church—as well as to the state—and to the gathered witnesses for the keeping of their vows.

The “marrying parson” who will marry anyone, who stands where the wedding coordinator tells him to, reads his script and dutifully signs the paperwork for whatever couple shows up, should resign the ministry and do an honest day’s work as a justice of the peace rather than as steward of the mysteries of God. We should gladly render to Caesar what belongs to Caesar, but the image imprinted on the marriage union isn’t that of Caesar and his court but of Christ and his church. This means also that the church should work to prepare couples for the difficulties of marriage. If anyone should evaporate the sentimental idealization of marriage, it should be the church. That’s especially true in an era in which that idealization is perhaps the leading driver of divorce. We should talk openly about what is at stake in divorce, not just emotionally but morally before God. And we should provide mentors—older, established couples who can guide others through challenges—for those struggling in their marriages.

What would happen if churches really took our biblical responsibilities seriously to care for marriages within the body and to hold accountable those who would hurt others by their vow-breaking? What would happen in one local congregation if a couple felt free to come forward and ask for prayer from the whole body over their faltering marriage, without feeling embarrassed or shamed or judged? What would happen if abuse were, in every one of our churches, not ever covered over, but in every case were dealt with in terms of civil justice and in terms of ecclesial accountability? What would happen if single mothers in our community—many of them abandoned or divorced by men—were treated as the Bible tells us to treat widows, cared for by the entire congregation spiritually, emotionally, socially, and, where needed, economically? What would happen is that we just might demonstrate to the outside world what we in fact are called to be: not a civic club or a political precinct or a self-improvement society but a community formed by a cross.

* * * *

What should couples themselves do to work against a creeping divorce culture in their own marriages? Again, it is best if this starts at the very beginning of the marriage. Really believe your vows, that this is not just a “love contract” but a permanent union. Divorce should not be silently hidden away as your last resort. If divorce is an option for you—even a last resort—it will happen. No marriage that is not—consciously and unconsciously—committed to permanence can survive. Even if it remains legally intact, such a marriage will not flourish. That’s especially true when a culture of choice gives us the illusion that there’s always the chance for a better spouse, a better marriage, a better life, if you could just go out looking for such things. When a couple in premarital counseling asks me if they should craft a prenuptial agreement, I almost always stop to more closely examine what is happening that they would be negotiating a divorce before the marriage. If the groom cannot trust the bride, or vice-versa, with money, how can they trust each other with their lives, their children, their future? Conclude that your options are not to be married to this person or to someone else, but to be married to this person in the pattern of the cross or to this person in the tumult of self. Our approach to marriage ought to resemble something akin to the answer given by one celebrity musician’s wife when asked by reporters what the “secret” was to staying married as long as they had. “The main reason is that neither of us has died.” For her, divorce was not the option they had avoided, but was not an option at all. That is, in fact, the key to a long marriage.

I remember early in my marriage talking to a friend about a couple we knew that had been driven apart by an affair. “If Maria ever cheated on me, I would be crushed,” I said. “But I still wouldn’t divorce her. I would take her back a thousand times, if I had to.” My friend said, “Why don’t you tell her that?” I chafed a bit. I didn’t want to tell my wife that I would stay with her, even if she had an affair with another man. What would then keep her from having an affair? Well, it might be that what keeps her from having an affair is the knowledge that she has a husband so committed to their marriage that he would still love her, even if she had an affair. In marriage, only by laying down your weapons, can you really find the love you will need to withstand whatever battles lie ahead.

Behind that sense of permanence, though, is an ongoing struggle to learn how to love each other. Again, this does not mean simply the feeling of love, but the other-directed, self-sacrificial love that God demonstrated in sending his Son to the cross for us (John 3:16). Some will say, “Love is a decision, not a feeling.” That’s not quite right, though I affirm the point they are trying to make here, namely that one does not always “feel” like one is in love. But love is not a decision in the sense that it merely is a coldly rational choice. Look at the exuberance of the Song of Solomon. You press through difficult times in order to build a future together that will be less difficult. You choose to stay together when you don’t feel like it, in order to “feel like it” at a later time. As a matter of fact, only when I give up my demand to constantly feel in love can I actually ever feel love for more than a fleeting moment. That requires commitment, fidelity, and the self-sacrifice we see in the cross.

A couple should not go into a marriage expecting not to fight. Even Jesus and his bride, the church, had disagreements, including about the most central truth of his mission, the cross. This analogy is not one-to-one, of course, because in the Christ-church union, unlike your marriage or mine, there is one sinless, infinitely wise spouse. When Christ and the church disagree, the outcome is easy enough to see. Christ is right; the church is wrong. That’s not the case with marriages between fallen people. Often the solution to a disagreement is not to settle who is right and who is wrong, but to remind ourselves that we are, as Jesus put it, not two any longer but one. When my wife loses an argument with me, I haven’t “won,” and vice-versa. Even with the limitations on the analogy, we can glean from Jesus’ response to disagreement from his church—especially Simon Peter, one of the foundation stones. Jesus does not avoid the conflict, at any turn, but he also knows his disciples well enough not to crush them with his words. The way of Christ will draw us toward patient engagement and away from the typical pathways many couples face: cold withdrawal from each other or angry rage, sexual bartering, threats to leave, and so forth. Couples who have disagreements shouldn’t conclude that this means their marriage is necessarily imperiled. Often, the marriage in real jeopardy is the one in which there are no arguments at all—because one or both of the spouses just don’t care enough anymore to fight. You will have disagreements.

The way to move forward is to plan ahead for those disagreements. Fight your arguments ahead of time when you feel the most affectionate toward one another. Few want to do this. Why would you want to ruin a perfect weekend away by bringing up what is triggered for you when your husband says, “You’re just like your mother!” That’s exactly the time to do so, just as the harvest is the time for the wise ant to store up for the winter (Prov. 6:8–10; 30:25). The tempers are cool, at those moments, and the affections are warm. These conversations need not be argumentative at all, but actually can be fun and playful—laughing at your own foibles, and showing how you want to love each other by reading what goes through the others mind or heart in certain situations. Many divorces could perhaps be avoided if couples would just reverse the timing of their planning sessions together. Plan your romantic getaways during a fight, and plan how you will fight on your romantic getaways.

Even beyond arguments, a marriage must prepare for times of stress that can wreck the unity of marriage. Building strong bonds between you, learning in small ways what to do when one of you faces disappointment, can help build the kind of resilience needed when one day you face stillbirth, liver cancer, a grown child in prison, or dementia. Learning to bear with each other, to forgive and to show patience, is about more than just “getting along,” but about kindling a love strong enough to withstand suffering, the sort of love necessary to make it to the edge of the Jordan River together.

Watch for warning signals. Watch when you find yourself feeling or showing contempt for your spouse. Watch when you find yourself looking to escape away from your spouse, for comfort from the outside world, rather than the other way around. Watch when you find your sexual interactions becoming less frequent, and ask why that is. And do not, then, be afraid to ask for help. There is no shame in saying, “My marriage is in trouble.” Everybody’s marriage is in trouble at some point or another. Those who know their marriage is in trouble are the ones who can fight to save it.

We can work to prevent divorce within the church, and we can seek to reconcile separated or even divorced couples, but the reality is that many of us will still be divorced, and many of those remarried to other people. How do we respond to those already divorced? The question is not whether there are many in this situation who are blameless, and have biblical warrant to make exactly the decisions they made. I believe there are indeed. The question is what about those many situations, probably the vast majority, in which the divorce was in fact sinful, in which the remarriage was not allowable in Scripture. Again, we must look to the cross. We do not offer condemnation to the world. We do not liberate consciences though—many of them burdened down by guilt after divorcing when they shouldn’t have—by avoiding the subject. We speak honestly about divorce not just in terms of therapy but in terms of its violation of God’s holiness.

We don’t stop there, though. Jesus came to save sinners, not the righteous, and he calls all of us to repentance. What does repentance look like in these situations? Take the worst-case scenario of the unbiblical divorced and remarried couple. They have, in fact, committed an adulterous act in the remarriage (Matt. 5:31–32). What now would we have them to do? Do they repent of this adultery by divorcing again? How can they repent of sin by repeating it, abandoning yet another spouse, breaking yet another set of vows? No. The Scripture does in many of these cases see the act of severing a marriage, and entering another, as an adulterous act. This does not mean that, once entered into, they are not marriages. The Samaritan woman at the well had five “husbands”—and Jesus uses that word.

A Christian entering into a marriage with a non-Christian is forbidden by Scripture. They are treated as real marriages, though. The person who repents of wrongly marrying an unbeliever does not follow Jesus by divorcing that spouse, but by remaining faithful (1 Cor. 7:12–17; 1 Pet. 3:1–2). We don’t remedy our past sins by adding new ones. The person or the couple who are repentant of divorces or remarriages that weren’t biblically allowed cannot go back and alter the past. They can, though, commit to “go, and . . . sin no more” (John 8:11), by acknowledging their own culpability, claiming full pardon through the atoning work of Christ, and working to remain, from now on, faithful to whatever vows they have made. Many of these persons and couples can then serve Christ, as many do, from their broken places.

One writer said long ago that he was suspicious “of fat revolutionaries and recently divorced marriage counselors.”42 True enough. But there are many on the far side of such divorces. In many cases, they may be the ones who equip and mentor younger people by saying, “Don’t go in the direction I went, but if you already have, here’s the path home.” They know what’s at stake, and they know, in this area, what all of us should know in many areas: what it means to be forgiven much.

* * * *

A divorce culture is built off of the assumption that a divorce can actually give a “new start.” Those who are divorced can tell you that there really is not such a thing as an ex-husband or an ex-wife, even though such may be true legally or even morally. One can divorce a person, but one cannot divorce the history one had together. That’s why some of the hurting divorced people in our pews are grieving, not just over a failed marriage, or over the loneliness of being, as we so callously put it, “single again.” Many are grieving because they thought at the end of the divorce there would be a “new start.” The next marriage will be the one that meets all their needs, but the old marriage lingers, in the psyche and in the conscience. A covenant cannot be just packed up in boxes and moved out the door.

A church that is anchored in the gospel of the cross will be a church that can say to the couple in crisis: “Stay married. Don’t divorce,” can say to the wrongly divorcing person: “Repent of this sin against your family and your God,” and can say to the repentant divorced person: “God is not angry at you; you are forgiven,” all at the same time. We can get there only when families and churches and pastors and leaders love divorced people more than we fear being unpopular with them. And it can only happen when we frame what marriage is in terms of the cross.

As one marriage researcher puts it, one reason modern marriage is so difficult is what she calls the porcupine’s dilemma, defined as “the desire to achiever deep intimacy while remaining invulnerable to pain.”43 We see on the cross that such intimacy is impossible. We gain true communion only in vulnerability, only by surrendering the illusion that we can be impervious to hurt. This same researcher notes that one driving factor behind marital breakdown is the “all-or-nothing” ideal, that marriage must mean everything in order to be “good.” When this doesn’t happen—and all utopias short of heaven disappoint—all that’s left is bitterness and resentment. The cross should point us to the fact that marriage will not, and cannot, be that for us. If we have a Wedding Feast before us, we should expect marriage to point us to that, but not to be that. Marriage is to teach us to hunger for the communion of God’s kingdom, not to replace it.

The cross shows us the permanence of marriage, in a covenant sealed with blood. The cross also shows us that the nature of marriage is the sacrifice of self. That means we give ourselves to each other. We do not wield the threat of divorce as a means of self-protection. Instead, we build marriages that, as best we can, reflect the one-flesh union of Christ and his church. And then we run to that cross-shaped gospel even when we fail. The bride of Christ needs no prenuptial agreement. The bride of Christ needs no divorce lawyer. The bride of Christ needs no hyphenated name.