Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!cs.utexas.edu!rutgers!aramis.rutgers.edu!athos.rutgers.edu!christian From: ok@goanna.cs.rmit.oz.au (Richard A. O'Keefe) Newsgroups: soc.religion.christian Subject: Re: divorce and remarriage Message-ID: Date: 6 Nov 90 08:11:02 GMT Sender: hedrick@athos.rutgers.edu Organization: Comp Sci, RMIT, Melbourne, Australia Lines: 86 Approved: christian@aramis.rutgers.edu In article , ta00est@unccvax.uncc.edu (elizabeth s tallant) writes: > In article , jhpb@granjon.garage.att.com writes: > > I had a discussion with a Southern Baptist on this once. It came down > > to one passage: > > Whosoever shall put away his wife, except for fornication, maketh > > her to commit adultery, etc. (Mt. 5:32) > On the other hand, my current pastor and two of my previous pastors disagree > with her point of view. My current pastor, Ron Helms, interprets the passage > > "Whosoever shall put away his wife, except for fornication, and marries anothercommitts adultry... > > as saying that remarriage after fornication is not unlawful. Um, let's get one thing straight. NT Greek has a word for "adultery" (moicheia) and a word for "fornication" (porneia). Whoever wrote the Gospel according to Matthew knew and used both words. Any satisfactory account of this verse (which itself contains both words) has to explain at least two things: -- why is Matthew the only Gospel to contain an "exception clause"? -- why does the "exception clause" talk about _fornication_ in the context of divorce? If a wife had sex with someone else, that was adultery, not fornication! The explanation which makes the most sense to me is this: -- the Gospel according to Matthew was written to Jews (it contains a much higher proportion of quotations from/allusions to the Tenach than any of the other Gospels) -- Jewish marriage customs of the time required a divorce to end an engagement -- so the exceptional condition where divorce is permitted is this: man A is betrothed to woman B, but A hasn't taken B into his household yet (she is still living under the authority of her parents/guardians). A discovers that B has had sex with man C. In _this_ case, where Jewish custom spoke of a "marriage", but it hadn't been consummated, it was permitted to break the engagement. This makes it clear how each of the different versions of the logion on divorce could have _faithfully_ presented the intent of whatever it was that Jesus said; the other Gospels, not being written to people who required the same kind of legal procedure to end an engagement as to end a marriage, didn't need this clarification. On this account, then, Jesus' teaching was something like "divorce and remarriage from a consummated marriage is _out_". This is certainly a hard saying. Frankly, it's frightening. I had one near-engagement that went badly wrong. What if my next choice is as bad, but I don't find out until too late? I _think_ I can justify the following. In Jesus' time, a woman needed the economic support of her own family or her husband's. Remarriage was all but essential for economic survival, so to divorce one's wife was to force her to remarry. It is not so now: if I were to marry, and the marriage were to be intolerable, I don't see anything in the Bible that would force us to live together. (Economic support, _yes_, but live in one household? Have I missed Something?) If I were to allow her to divorce me, I _think_ I'd be ok as long as I didn't remarry during her lifetime. (That's certainly consistent with the 3 other occurrences of this logion in the Synoptics.) > Then, he noted that in the OT times, an adulteror or adultress was put to > death. Er, not quite. If that were so, the book of Hosea wouldn't make sense. The penalty for adultery was certainly death, BUT people could be ransomed from the death penalty in every case except for deliberate murder. According to Matthew, it was _righteous_ (dikaios) of Joseph to choose to divorce Mary quietly (as far as Joseph could tell, he was in precisely the situation of "A" above). It couldn't have been righteous to go for a quiet divorce if the death penalty had been obligatory. > Since we are now living during the age of grace, those who commit > adultry are not put to death, but Rev. Helms maintains that unfaithful > spouse is "dead" to the faithful spouse and therefore, divorce and > remarriage is permitted. There is much in what he says. But it's rather odd nevertheless. Doesn't the Bible teach that if A divorces B and B marries C and then C divorces B, A shouldn't remarry B? (Sorry, the tools I need to find the reference for this aren't in my office just at the moment.) How can you (re)marry someone who is dead? -- The problem about real life is that moving one's knight to QB3 may always be replied to with a lob across the net. --Alasdair Macintyre.