I really wanted to post this next blog in the series on Using the Bible in Ethics much earlier, but I have so many baptisms, weddings, and sadly, funerals, going on at the moment, not to mention much building work - you get the idea!  Anyway, I was determined to post before the weekend.  I will try to tidy it up a bit over the next few days, but I hope you get the point of what I am trying to say.

On the same day as I posted about real Christmas cards, I got some!  The prize for the first one to be sent (that means, the one that was written first) goes to Bill and Diana, two dear members of the Christ Church community world-wide. Unbelievably, Bill and Diana live in Bedford, where my parents and brother and sister-in-law live.  Bill and Diana, if you read this, thank you!  We hope to see you soon.

It truly is a small world after all!

9. Using the Bible in Ethics: Divorce (Part Four - A Changed World and A Changed Institution)

We have seen in the previous post in this series how difficult it is to understand even seemingly obvious statements about ethics in the Bible.  (For previous posts see: Using the Bible in Ethics)  Jesus’ words on divorce, although apparently clear on the surface, occupy just a few verses.  This should warn against assuming that we know everything that Jesus would have said in answer to the questions we would like to ask today or even was asked then!  We can, I think, be certain that Jesus did not think divorce a ‘good thing’, but would he have ruled it out completely, as some argue?  That I think is a more difficult question to answer as St Matthew and David Instone-Brewer illustrate!

And this is all before we stop to consider the way society has changed today from the way it was at the time of the New Testament.  I am afraid that too many fail to take these changes on board before reaching conclusions on what our Lord may or may not have allowed.  Let us then be clear about some of the changes, pastorally, that have taken place when it comes to marriage since the time of our Lord and Paul:

Firstly, women have far great economic freedom now than they did and are not as dependent upon their husbands as generally they have been in the past.  The past century has witnessed great technological change.  It has witnessed great social change as well.  While not all would want to sign up for the feminist cause, there has been a particularly radical change in the role of women in society.  It is all too easy to forget that women weren’t expected to go to university not so long ago.  Their job was to stay at home and have babies.  Now, despite continuing inequalities, the expectation, in the developed world at least, is for them to pursue a career in their own right.

Secondly, and linked to this, is the way women have greater control over their fertility.  A baby has become for most couples a choice to be made and not an inevitable fact of life.  The woman’s role now is not to produce and manage a constantly increasing brood of children.  There is life apart from motherhood and child-rearing, even if for many women it still doesn’t always feel like it!

Thirdly, people today delay getting married much longer for educational and career reasons amongst others.  It is all too easily forgotten that at the time of the New Testament women would marry as soon as they reached puberty.  In my own ministry, I have seen great change in the age of those I marry.  When I was first ordained, it was not at all uncommon to marry people still in their late teens.  Then people started delaying marriage until after university.  Now, if they decide to marry at all, they delay marriage until after they have become established in their career.  Normally, the couples I marry are at least in their 30s and, let it be said, are also already living together.  Apart from anything else, this challenges us also to think about our attitude to sex and marriage, but I will resist the temptation to be side-tracked!

Fourthly, people live longer and so potentially could have much longer marriages.  Again, it is forgotten how easy it was to die in the world of the New Testament.  Life expectancy for a child born in the Roman Empire would have been under 30 years.  Now we expect to live way beyond that.  It’s just a fact that people change over time and if the time is a long time, how does that effect what we expect of marriage?

Fifthly, expectations of what the marriage relationship is about have changed.  It is not now primarily an economic contract designed for the production and rearing of children.  In fact, each partner may have economic independence and neither may want children.  We may deplore the romanticized and sentimentalized view of love all too common in popular-culture, but it remains a fact that this is what most people see as most important in relationships in a way that is simply off the radar in the New Testament.

How then do we apply Jesus’ teaching?  At one extreme, are those who argue that social changes are not relevant.  God’s purpose for man and woman in creation remains the same.  So divorce and remarriage are not allowed, except perhaps in cases of adultery (for some, not even then), and may be when an unbelieving partner walks out.  But that’s all!

At the other end of the scale, are those who argue that the process of pastoral application of Jesus’ teaching, seen in the Bible itself, should be continued and extended to today.  They would argue that it is illogical to argue that Paul (and perhaps Matthew) could modify Jesus’ teaching, but we can’t.  Those who take the first position would reply that Matthew and Paul were inspired in a way that we are not and never can be.

Personally, I find it very hard to resist the conclusion that when Jesus was talking about marriage, he was talking about something very different to what we think of as marraige today.  Insisting that the Bible’s teaching on marriage as it is now is the same as it was on marriage then seems to ignore the huge changes that have taken place in the nature of marriage itself.

This is not for one moment to argue that the Bible’s teaching can just be set aside or quietly ignored.  It is, however, to argue that applying the Bible’s teaching is not as simple as some like to think.

President Obama is in China and has been given a warm welcome by people here. Upon arrival he used the occasion to lecture the Chinese people on the importance of 'universal rights' to free expression, worship, political participation and access to information.

What, of course, he did not say was that freedom of expression in the West has led to the most degrading pornography being freely available to even the youngest of children, that in some countries you are not allowed to display a crucifix in public, that most voters are so disillusioned with politicians that they won't even get out of bed to vote, and that western governments secretly keep their citizens under surveillance in a way that the KGB would have been proud of.

Western politicians need to deal with their own issues of freedom and democracy before lecturing others. I have to tell you that I feel a lot more 'free' walking around Chinese cities at night, for example, than I do in England. In England, I am far more likely to have my freedom taken away from me by muggers or drunken binge drinkers.

Anyway, back to the latest series of blogs!

The thing for me about writing blogs is that while I may have a general idea for a series, the blogs themselves are not planned in advance, but develop as they go. The last few blogs on divorce have turned into a mini-series on its own within the one they were intended to be just a part of - if you see what I mean. Nevertheless, these blogs on divorce are meant primarily as a way of asking the bigger question of how we use the Bible to make ethical decisions today. I hope they are not becoming too rambling or repetitive!

8. Using the Bible in Ethics: Divorce (Part Three – Clarifying the Questions)

Let’s try and sum up what we do and do not know about what the Bible and Jesus, in particular, teach about divorce.

1. It is certain that Jesus taught about divorce. It is certain too that he took a strict approach and did not approve of frivolous divorces or divorce whenever someone happened to feel like it.

2. It is not clear whether he personally allowed any exceptions to this ‘no divorce’ rule. Certainly Matthew did, but scholars are unable to agree what Matthew’s exception is. The majority view seems to be that Matthew allows divorce in cases of ‘sexual immorality’.

3. Paul knows our Lord’s disapproval of divorce and repeats it. He finds himself having to apply it in a very different context, however, and distinguishes his teaching from that of Jesus, allowing divorce when an unbeliever who is married to a believer wants it.

4. It is clear that Jesus bases his criticism of divorce on God’s purpose in creation and on the fact that in marriage a man and woman become ‘one flesh’. It should be noted that this does not logically mean that the union is therefore automatically indissoluble. After all, Paul says that anyone who has sex with a prostitute becomes one flesh with her! He is not presumably arguing that an indissoluble union is formed with her.

So what happens when we try to interpret and apply Jesus’ teaching today? Some Christians think it is all very straightforward. Some such as John Piper, who is very influential amongst evangelicals in the States, argue that divorce is always wrong and remarriage is never permissible for a Christian. Other evangelicals would modify this to allow for divorce and even remarriage when one of the partners has committed adultery.

Other Christians argue that while permanent, lifelong marriage should be the norm and divorce discouraged and avoided as much as possible, marriages do breakdown for any number of reasons, not just sexual, and divorce then becomes a legitimate option with the possibility of remarriage.

In addition to the question then of what Jesus actually taught is a question that people don’t like asking. Is what Jesus taught then binding on us now? Christians don’t like to ask this because understandably they want to be loyal followers of Christ. Interestingly, they do not normally apply the same approach to other parts of the Bible. Simply put: because Paul, for example, forbids women to speak in Church would not mean for many that women shouldn’t speak in them to day.

When questioned about this difference of approach, they would, if pressed, argue that Jesus is different to Paul, and that it is one thing to ignore what Paul said today and another altogether to ignore what Jesus said. Actually, I think this is just plain wrong thinking. Not only was Paul an Apostle of our Lord, Jesus was himself incarnated in the society of his day and shared the same humanity as Paul. If there are good reasons for not following Paul’s teaching today, then there may be equally good reasons for not following our Lord’s, hard though this may be for some to accept. I am not arguing that we should not follow it today only that we need to be consistent in our approach.

We have two questions then:

1. What did Jesus teach?

2. What authority does his teaching have now and how do we apply it?

If all this isn’t hard enough, there is, I think, yet another question: what about what Jesus doesn’t teach? This is where Instone-Brewer would argue that we should assume that Jesus in keeping with others in his day would have allowed divorce in cases of abuse and abandonment. This is difficult because, in the first place, it is an argument from silence and, secondly, we don’t know if abuse and abandonment were specific grounds for divorce in Jesus’ day.

This does, however raise an important point. Jesus was asked a question about divorce in general. Many in his day favoured easy divorce; Jesus does not. That much is clear. But what if Jesus had been asked the more specific questions about abuse and abandonment, and, indeed, about adultery? Would he then have qualified his teaching? If he had qualified his original reply to the Pharisees, it would have dramatically lessened its impact, but does his reply admit to any qualification?

With some reluctance, I think we have to assume from what we have of Jesus teaching in the Gospels, as also reflected by Paul, that when Jesus spoke about divorce, he completely opposed it without qualification. There is the possibility, and it is no more than a possibility, that he made an exception in cases of adultery. We are left to speculate on how he would have answered the questions we would now like to ask.

So what authority does Jesus’ teaching have now and how do we apply it today?

A long and difficult post to follow today, but I hope it is not impossibly so. It seeks to show how difficult it can be to understand what the ethical teaching of the Bible is even before we try to apply it today!

7. Using the Bible in Ethics: Divorce (Part Two - Trying to Understand the Teaching)

As if Jesus’ teaching on divorce is not hard enough, understanding it has been somewhat complicated, paradoxically, by a recent attempt to clarify it! Dr David Instone-Brewer, a senior researcher at Tyndale House in Cambridge, has researched and written extensively about divorce and marriage in Israel at the time of Jesus. His writing is scholarly and pastorally sensitive, and represents a genuine attempt to understand what Jesus taught.

In the Old Testament, Deuteronomy 24:1 says that a man may divorce his wife ‘for a cause of indecency’. This was the text referred to in Jesus’ discussion with the Pharisees about divorce. Instone-Brewer argues that originally this phrase meant sexual immorality. However, at the time of Jesus, he continues, a new interpretation of the clause was taking it to mean that a man could divorce his wife ‘for any cause’. This was the interpretation favoured by the followers of a Rabbi called Hillel. Others following another Rabbi, Shammai, argued that the phrase was restricted to sexual immorality.

Instone-Brewer argues that by the time of Jesus this new ‘any cause divorce’ had become very popular. The Pharisees in the Gospels are asking Jesus, not about divorce in general, but about what he thought about this new type of divorce. Instone-Brewer’s interpretation is given some weight by the fact that in Matthew 19:3 the Pharisees ask Jesus whether it is lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any cause. Instone-Brewer further argues that in Mark’s formulation of the question in Mark 10:2 (‘Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?’) while Mark does not have the words ‘for any cause’ most people at the time would have understood the question that way. In the same way as today when you ask someone if they drink, the question is readily understood to mean, ‘Do you drink alcohol?

Jesus, he concludes, is thus not giving a complete statement about divorce and remarriage, but about the narrower issue of a particular type of divorce that was becoming very popular.

In fact, says Instone-Brewer, in the Old Testament there are two texts governing the grounds for divorce not just one. In addition to Deuteronomy, which is quoted in the discussion between Jesus and the Pharisees, there is also Exodus 21:10f. Deuteronomy allowed divorce for immorality, but Exodus 21:10 allowed divorce on additional grounds: for a failure to provide love, for abuse and for abandonment. Jesus, he says, never revoked this text and these grounds for divorce were accepted by both schools of Pharisees and, more importantly for our purposes, implicitly by Jesus himself. Jesus gets rid of the ‘any cause’ type of divorce, but allows divorce on the four Old Testament grounds of sexual immorality, failure to provide love, abuse, and abandonment. This fits well, he also argues, with Paul allowing a Christian to divorce and remarry if abandoned by an unbelieving partner.

What are we to say about this?

1. If right, it means Biblical teaching becomes what most people think it should be! That is, that marriage is important and should be taken seriously, but that divorce is allowed when there is adultery or serious unreasonable behaviour by one of the partners in the marriage. Jesus thus sounds far more reasonable and less harsh. Rather like an Anglican, in fact.

This, however, should itself urge caution. Is Jesus’ otherwise strict teaching being re-interpreted to soften it? One can applaud the desire to be pastorally sensitive, but we need to be honest about what we are doing. We cannot solve the problem by refusing to admit it exists. We should not be tempted to adopt Instone-Brewer’s approach simply because we like the sound of it.

2. Instone-Brewer effectively sees Matthew as giving the more nuanced account of the discussion between the Pharisees and Jesus rather than Mark. This reverses the normal way of looking at it. As we noted in the previous post, most interpreters would see Mark as being the more accurate and original with Matthew trying to soften what Jesus said. Instone-Brewer may, however, be right and Matthew, because of his Jewishness, might have been in a better position to understand what was really going on.

But this means that whereas in the normal interpretation of the Gospels, Mark records the original and Matthew softens it, on Instone-Brewer’s interpretation, Matthew records the original meaning, if not the original words. Matthew, on this view, is not softening, but explaining. Mark, then, has either misunderstood what Jesus was saying or, as Instone-Brewer believes, has recorded it in such a way that Jesus’ words were misunderstood once read in a non-Jewish setting.

3. So is Instone-Brewer right in his interpretation of the passages in the Gospels? Quite simply, I don’t know! I just do not have the knowledge of the ancient sources to be able to make a judgement. A person who does have such a knowledge is J P Meier. Meier in the fourth volume of his consideration of the Historical Jesus, A Marginal Jew, specifically rejects this reconstruction of Instone-Brewer’s. Meier argues that ‘any cause’ divorces far from being new were the norm in mainstream Judaism and always had been. He also rejects a dispute between two rabbinical schools as being the context for Jesus’ teaching. In the way I lack the detailed knowledge to be able to assess Instone-Brewer’s position, so too I lack the knowledge to be able to asses Meier’s.

But that I think is the problem. As Instone-Brewer readily admits, on his position Jesus has been misunderstood as forbidding all divorce from the very beginning of the Church: as soon as his teaching was taken out of a Palestinian setting, in fact. This means for years the Church has sentenced people to a life of misery, refusing to allow divorce, and causing all sort of guilt and hang-ups, because it believed it was being faithful to Jesus’ teaching and because that seemed to be the obvious way of understanding it. The truth for Instone-Brewer, however, was that Jesus never intended such a blanket restriction on divorce in the first place.

It wasn’t that the Church was being cruel. And nor was it that the Church was being stupid. It just couldn’t have been expected to know that Jesus was only dealing with a question about a specific type of divorce and the interpretation of a specific text. To understand Jesus’ teaching, if Instone-Brewer is right, needed the resources only now available to us through modern scholarship and even then two respected specialists, Instone-Brewer himself and Meier, reach opposite conclusions! If the Bible is so hard to understand on something so basic and important to all our lives, what use is it? If we cannot know for sure what it means on something upon which it appears to speak directly, how on earth can we know what it teaches on issues about which it is less direct?

4. Even if Instone-Brewer is right and the context of Jesus’ teaching in the Gospels is a question about ‘any cause’ divorces, Jesus’ reply to the Pharisees does seem to go beyond this question. Jesus, on any understanding, has a very high view of marriage and opposes divorce using very black and white language. Instone-Brewer argues that had Jesus been asked about what happens in cases of abuse and abandonment, he would have allowed divorce. This is an argument from silence and such arguments are always dangerous.

For our purposes, though, this brings us back to the conclusion in the last post. We today still have to answer questions Jesus did not address and we have to do so in a much changed context. If this were not difficult enough, apparently we have to do it without even being sure what Jesus said and meant in the first place!

In my series on Using the Bible in Ethics, I now turn as promised to the difficult issue of divorce. In this the first part, I want to look at the texts in the New Testament. In the second, I want to look at suggestions that we have misunderstood Jesus' teaching. Finally, I want to move on to how we should apply Jesus' teaching, whatever it was, today.

6. Using the Bible in Ethics: Divorce (Part One - Texts)

I have been contrasting two types of approach amongst those who wish to give the Bible a prominent role in arriving at ethical decisions. The first focuses on the actual text of the Bible, while the second seeks to identify broad themes within it that are then applied to specific ethical issues. This is done even if the application contradicts or appears to contradict individual texts. (See previous posts in this series under Using the Bible in Ethics)

One area where these two - texts and themes - would seem to come together is over the subject of divorce. In the New Testament, at least, our Lord no less, seems explicitly to forbid divorce giving the theme or principle upon which he bases his prohibition (see Matthew 5:27-32, 19:3-11; Mark 10:2-12; Luke 16:18). Even the more sceptical scholars seem to agree that Jesus took a strict, rigorist stance when it came to divorce based on his understanding of God’s intention in creation.

There is one problem, of course, the so-called ‘exceptive clause’ in Matthew (Matthew 5:32, 19:9). Jesus forbids divorce ‘except for unchastity’. Mark and Luke, however, do not allow any exceptions in their version of the text as it stands. So did Jesus say it, or is it, as many argue, an addition by Matthew to soften Jesus’ otherwise strict demands?

And then there is the problem of what the word translated in the NRSV as ‘unchastity’ actually means. Some take it very narrowly to mean something like marriage within the forbidden decrees of the Old Testament, so that the text would mean that you could only divorce if you discovered you had married a close relative. The obvious question is why you would only find out you were closely related after you got married! Others take it more broadly to mean that divorce is allowed if the partner has sex outside of the marriage.

So even though we may conclude that Jesus was strict in his approach to divorce, we are still not sure how strict he was. If we take the position that he allowed divorce for adultery, then it is interesting that Mark does not include the permission! If he did not allow divorce at all, then we have the interesting position within the Bible itself of one evangelist feeling able to modify Jesus’ teaching, perhaps in the light of pastoral realities in his own church community.

Again, the text based approach runs into some difficulty and may have done so from the beginning. Jesus’ theme seems clear enough: that God’s original purpose in creation was that man and woman should live together as one flesh. Given that God has joined the man and the woman together, no-one should now divide them. The problem remains of how rigorously to apply it: strictly, as in Mark or Luke, or less so, as in Matthew.

This ‘no divorce’ teaching has, of course, led the Church into difficult pastoral situations. What do you do when one of the partners in the marriage – usually the woman – is physically abused by their husband? Even Christians wanting to stick to the letter of what Jesus said, have accepted that the wife should separate from her husband, even if they would not let her marry again. But why stop with physical abuse, what about mental cruelty? And what constitutes evidence of mental cruelty?

Jesus’ teaching was found to need further explanation from the very first. Even if Matthew does have Jesus’ original words, Paul found in Corinth that he had to do some serious pastoral thinking about separation, divorce and re-marriage (see 1 Corinthians 7:10-16). Jesus’ context was that of Israel, where people were expected to keep God’s law. He was, after all, speaking to those who historically were God’s people. Paul, however, is dealing with a Gentile context. Paul seems to have been asked by the Corinthians about separation and divorce, in general, and more particularly about separation and divorce when one of the partners was not a Christian. In some of the marriages one of the partners in the marriage is an unbeliever. In general terms, Paul feels it is clear. Paul repeats the Lord’s teaching, making it plain that he is quoting Jesus: believers should not divorce, but if they do separate they should not remarry.

When it comes to marriages in which one of the couple is not a believer, Paul makes it clear that what he has to say is his teaching and not that of Jesus. He doesn’t mean by this that what he says isn’t authoritative, but rather that this is his teaching in the light of what he knows Jesus to have said. He is applying Jesus’ teaching to a situation and context that Jesus had not addressed.

His teaching is that in marriages where one of the partners is an unbeliever, the believer should still stay married and not divorce his or her partner. However, if the unbeliever separates from the believing partner, says Paul, the believer is not bound. Divorce, in other words, in this situation is allowed. A new pastoral reality, not addressed by our Lord allows Paul to adapt our Lord’s teaching to the changed context. Now it is clear that Paul isn’t keen on divorce and wants to avoid deviating from our Lord’s teaching, but he does recognize, as may have Matthew, that changed pastoral realities may require an interpretation and application of it.