How should the Church deal with divorce?
"Waah! Waah! He did it toooooooooooooooo!" is not and never was a valid argument. Grow up.
If I sign a lease to live in an apartment, duplex or house, I cannot legally decide to break the lease, move out and stop paying rent to my landlord. There needs to be some sort of “fault” by the landlord in order for me to be free of the obligations I agreed to when I signed a legal document as a consenting adult. This is boringly normal across contract law, where people are obligated to keep their end of the agreements they signed.
Since 1969 and California’s law allowing no-fault divorce, marriage has lost that protection. For all of the good things that President Ronald Reagan did, his action as Governor of California was exceedingly harmful. (In fairness, President Reagan did reportedly describe allowing no-fault divorce as his “greatest regret.”) Marriage is the fundamental building block of societies. Men, women and especially children benefit from a stable marriage, so marriage should have at least the same level of legal protection as a rental agreement.
Today, divorce is tragically common, even in the Church. There is little hope for a revival of the civil magistrate’s protection of marriage while the Church is faithless in protecting an institution that was designed by God at the creation of the universe and that represents the union of Jesus Christ and the Church. Faithful Christians understand this needs to be reversed, especially within the Body of Christ. Malachi 2:16 teaches us that God hates divorce and the Lord Jesus Christ emphasized that teaching in Matthew 19:3-9.
This is the normal position of Christians throughout history, and used to be the position of most people in these United States. We have become an apostate nation, which is why I stirred up furious anger on social media when I wrote this:
“Given that 70% of divorces are initiated by women, there is clearly a need for the Church to intervene. The Church should counsel, rebuke, exhort, discipline and in some cases excommunicate women who initiate an unbiblical divorce. Do pastors have the faith to do this?”
Note a key word I used here: Unbiblical. Scripture specifically allows for divorce in the case of adultery and abandonment. I was damned to Hell and back for saying women should stay in abusive marriages or with an adulterous spouse. Of course, I never said that, and these claims are desperate and pathetic lies meant to cover up for no-fault divorce. Jesus explicitly allows divorce in the case of adultery. A man who beats his wife, obviously, has abandoned her, even though he may be physically present in the home. The Sixth Commandment gives the wife both the right and obligation to preserve her life from a violent and abusive husband.
Pastor Tim Bayly wrote this on BaylyBlog back in 2008:
In the twelve years since Church of the Good Shepherd was founded, our session has made such a recommendation two or three times, each by unanimous consent.
It has never been the Protestant tradition that divorce is never allowed.
But the Church (and by this I mean all denominations) does have unbiblical divorce in its midst, and Church leaders have been too tolerant of this sin in their midst. That is why any true reform must start in the Church. We cannot hope to reform civil laws if we do not start with the Church. It is the case that women initiate the vast majority of divorces, and that is much higher with college educated women, so the Church needs to focus this teaching on women.
Most Church discipline is informal. It often starts with a fellow congregant (perhaps an older woman) exhorting a younger woman not to abandon her marriage. It can move up to Church leadership. Formal censure and excommunication are tools the Church can use to call a rebellious woman to repentance. But I can hear the whining response now:
“Waah! What about the men? Waah! Waah!”
Yes, OBVIOUSLY the Church should rebuke men who are sinning against their wives in any number of areas. But can we please be adults and recognize that the sins of one sex do not justify or excuse the sins of the other? Is every argument really going to be reduced to “he did it too?” The statistical reality is that that women - especially college educated women - are the driving force behind the divorce epidemic. The failure of the Church to speak against this sin is what is leading men to abandon the Church.
Women sin, but large swaths of the Church has been cowed by feminism and the real sins of the Church’s past to the point that they are intimidated against rebuking the sins of women. But the Church has always worked against cultural headwinds. The world hates us because, as Jesus explains in John 15:18-25, they hated Him first. The hatred of the dominant culture, instead of “proving” that we are wrong, should be evidence that the Church is being faithful to God’s Word and His Law.