Divorce Your Remarriage

Your Questions Answered!

• Chris Iverson

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SPEAKER_00

Hey, so today we're gonna do something a little bit more laid back. You gave me some questions previously on YouTube, and uh I just want to go through and respond to some of your questions. These are some good questions. These are some good questions. I don't even know if I have great answers to them, but I'm just gonna give it a shot. Do the best I can here. So here we go. First question. This is a nightmare of a question. This is such a good question. If I attend a church that does not teach the truth about divorce and remarriage, what do I do? It's a great question. It's a great question. A lot of people who have marriage permanence views or whatever have to deal with this. And I guess this is a question you have not just on marriage permanence. I mean, you can have this on lots of things. Like let's say you have some views that kind of align more with two different traditions, and you can't find a church that blends those two different traditions and you really feel very strongly about it. It's a tough, that's a tough, tough question to answer. The first, you know, first thing I I ask is, you know, is the difference a primary issue that relates to salvation? Because, you know, primary issues will will cause more division, and secondary issues should cause like less division. So divorce and remarriage is a primary issue because remarriage is either continual adultery or it's not. And if it's continual adultery, the person's not going to go to heaven if they die in that state. So it's kind of a big deal. Hence why this is such a good question. Um, and so my second question is, you know, what kind of primary issue is it? So the first kind of primary issue is one where if you believe the wrong thing, it'll cost you your soul. I don't think it's that kind. I think somebody can have a wrong view on divorce and remarriage, and that doesn't cost them their soul. The thing that can cost somebody their soul is if they act on that wrong view and they remarry somebody and now they're living in a continual state of adultery. And some people will say, well, they just didn't know. It's not their fault. They misunderstood the doctrine. But Jesus says if the blind lead the blind, both fall into the ditch. They're both blind. They didn't know, they still fall into the ditch. So I don't think that works. And I agree that ignorance reduces guilt, but Jesus calls it adultery. He means it. Yeah, somebody dies in an adulterous state. That's that's really not good. So that's so it's not the first kind. It's not the kind where like somebody denies the trinity. That belief will cost them their soul, that false belief if they deny the trinity. But um, this is not that class. This is the class where somebody, you know, uh acts according to this uh their wrong view and divorce remarriage, uh, it can cost them their soul. There are some factors that counsel in favor of like not attending a church that believes that. There's things like, you know, it's impossible to avoid some kind of disunity in ministry. Um, so if like you evangelize, like let's say you and someone else from that church goes and evangelizes and you tell somebody the gospel and they seem eager and ready to repent and have faith. And then you find out that they're remarried and it's they're adulterously remarried, and then you go, Oh, we got a problem because I think they need to divorce their remarriage, but the other person at the ministry who's with you evangelizing is gonna say, No, you gotta just say you're sorry for your remarriage and stay in it. Well, yeah, you got a problem. So it's just gonna cause some disunity in in ministry. That's just one example. But it's also just impossible to avoid some uh discomfort in fellowship. You know, you guys are having a potluck and everything's great, and you know, here meet my third husband, i.e., third husband, you know. So it's it's gonna create some discomfort and fellowship at the church. It seems wrong to attend uh somewhere knowing you disagree with something that's contentious like this, and then to bring it up all the time and stir up trouble, right? So, you know, if you go somewhere and you know you disagree with the people and you go in, hey, you know, Colgate smile, glad hand, the whole deal, and then you but you know around the corner, here come the volcanic eruption argument type things, you know, that whole kind of mode, I just don't, I just don't think that's a great thing to do, just go in somewhere and just be like a wrecking ball. I'm not I'm not into that. And then if you're a member somewhere, you know, you might feel compelled to say something when they want to baptize or welcome a new member who is adulterously remarried. You might feel like a responsibility because you're a member, you're part of this now, which is different than attending. If you're attending, you're you're attending somebody else's deal. But if you're a member, that's your deal, if that makes sense. So you might feel something like that. Now, there are some things in council in favor of attending anyway, even though you disagree with their view. So there aren't a lot of other places to go. It's better to go somewhere than nowhere, uh, you might think. And you could also have some influence sharing your view in a way that's designed to like not cause drama. So you just gonna get to know people and you know, if if it seems right at the time, maybe bring up share your view with somebody uh who you think is more likely to hear what you have to say and and and uh be open to it. Um, you know, if all the permanent people leave all of the churches, we're not gonna have any influence, right? So there's kind of a pragmatic concept there. So this this legitimately is more complex than a lot of other issues we could run across. So, like for example, Paul writes, now we exhort your brother and warn them that are unruly, comfort the feeble-minded, support the weak, be patient toward all men, right? And so what Paul does there in 1 Thessalonians 5, 14 is says, you know, you need to kind of do a little diagnosis and try to figure out where people are at before you figure out what your response to them is going to be, right? So do you want to use pressure or persuasion? And it kind of depends on who you're talking with. And, you know, Paul reserves warning for the unruly. And you can't always know if a person's being unruly. Um, but on this issue, I think it's kind of rare that a person's actually being really unruly. I mean, I think they're confused, they're conflicted, maybe they're cowardly. Um, and I do I deeply sympathize with like all three of those things. Um, so I I I hesitate to use a pressure approach. I'd rather just try to persuade people there because I just don't think people are always being all that unruly about this. I mean, I think people, I mean, for 20 years, I had a more permissive view than I have now. I sincerely thought it. I had never heard the current view I have now. I'm sure if like 15 years into my wrong view, if somebody had come to me with the view that I currently have, I would have been stunned. And it would have taken me a while to find my footing. I'd be like, what is this? That's a lot, you know. So it took me, you know, a lot of books and a long time to come to the view that I have now. So I just sympathize with people who have a more permissive view. Um now I do think you can share it with them, and they need to be open to it. They need to not like try to pressure you and treat you like you're heretic adjacent. That's over the line. Um, we need to be open-minded. I mean, the the the permanence view was the view of the church for hundreds of years. They had counsel after counsel excommunicate people or would uh deny them communion for life if they were remarried. I mean, it's very obvious there's a marriage permanence view going on. And so to say that people today, or you're like heretic adjacent if you don't have a permissive view is just way over the line. We need to be able to have like honest, sincere conversations with each other about subjects like this when we have sincere disagreements and we can have good faith conversations. It doesn't not everything has to turn into uh has to devolve into a yelling match or whatever. But really, people shouldn't be like putting like intense pressure on you because you have an early church view or one that's close similar to the early church. So, anyway, so those are some of my thoughts on that. There's really a process question here, also just in evangelicalism, for example, how are we going to be able to address tough issues like these if we're not talking to each other? So we need to be able to have some kind of space where we're able to do that. I mean, and yes, we have it on YouTube, but I mean, uh there should be a way to have these conversations pre-Youtube, right? It can't just be all, you know, oh, now we can do it online. Well, I mean, these kinds of things have uh existed before online was a thing. So, and and there needs to be a way to be able to do that in a in a church setting. Yeah. So now my from my review of the academic and the popular literature, evangelicalism has a majority view, but it has not settled this issue. And it's a high-stakes kind of ongoing conversation. So I think it's permissible to attend a church that doesn't agree with you and continue the conversation. So let me read Revelation 2, 18 through 20. And to the angel at the church of fire, Tyra, write the words of the Son of God who has eyes like a flame of fire, and whose feet are like burnished bronze. I know your works, your love and faith and service and patient endurance, and your latter works exceed the first. But I have this against you that you tolerate that woman Jezebel, who calls herself a prophetess, and is teaching and seducing my servants to practice sexual immorality and to eat food sacrifice to idols. And then Revelation 2.24 says, But to the rest of you in Thyrotira, who do not hold this teaching, who have not learned what some call the deep things of Satan, to you I say, I do not lay on you any other burden. So whether you think divorce and remarriage is such a sin as to deserve like the Jezepel label. It's not trying to make an equ uh I'm not trying to equate it to that. What I'm trying to say is even in thyroid, even in the thyrotira situation, there were those who uh did not hold to the bad teaching, but they were still saved and they were still part of the church there. So that's kind of a nuance look at it. And I think pragmatically, we need to be able to continue to have these conversations. And if we just like retreat from even the conservative evangelical churches, we're just not gonna be in those places to have those conversations. But I mean, I'm not saying that I know that I'm right. I mean, there are verses I'm sure people can put them in the comments and people can you can make the argument, oh, we have to leave all the churches and everything. So I'm not saying that I'm right on that, but those are some factors to consider. All right, here's another question I got. How can I get my church to focus on this issue? Great question. If we can, if we could just get the churches to do that, uh, that would be really helpful. Um, I would say you want to empathize with the person you're gonna speak with. You know, many of them have never heard the permanence view, or they've heard like an intellectually weak defense of the permanence view. Uh, in their world, this view is just outside of reasonable interpretations. And people aren't like calculators, we don't just like process data and come to conclusions. We're not like AI, right? So we're much more complex than that. So even if we read a strong argument, we're not always like psychologically ready to accept it. And we might need, you know, might need a day or a week or a month later before we're really actually open to hearing and under and really considering it. Um, I would establish a commitment to using a tone that's somewhere in the range between like gentle to matter of fact. And I would avoid a tone that's like overbearing, insistent, angry, condemning. Uh, you know, if they have an IQ over like 80, uh, they'll know that by your words, you think their view is like super wrong. Like it doesn't, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure that out. Um, but if but a strong tone when somebody sincerely doesn't agree tends to be less persuasive. And I, and and thinking, you want to think of yourself as like sharing your perspective and you're hopeful that they're consider they'll consider it. I just think that's just gonna be more effective in general. In these potential conversations that you might have with individuals at your church or leaders at your church, there are going to be disagreements which can make tempers flare. And I think we want to avoid people hardening their position. Sorry, that's a barrier to being like open-minded when people harden their positions. So I recommend using phrases like, I hear what you're saying, the reason I have a hard time agreeing with that is X. Or the challenge is, or if we proceed on that basis, we run into a problem because this, right? And so it's not you're trying to make it like not personal against them. You're just trying to talk about how we have a challenge, or like, I don't know how I could accept that because I just intellectually run into this problem. I just don't think that's gonna work. Um, and those are just ways of disagreeing that are less likely to harden people's positions. So it does take some uh finesse to try to navigate conflict without it getting out of hand. So um also you want to learn this issue. Um, you and you can learn more stuff with my book and all that, you know. But honestly, if all you did was watch my episodes, you're you'll know more than the vast majority of church members and church leaders on this subject. I think a lot of people think, well, pastors need to know all the things. That's just not realistic. It's just not realistic. They're generalists, they got to know a lot of different stuff in order to like run this institution, this church. And, you know, if it's a smaller church, then they don't they don't have enough other people to like specialize, you know, you know, the accounting and running the building and you know, all this kind of stuff. And I understand there's elders and stuff, but depending on how your church is structured, the pastor is like a generalist trying to do all the things, and he's got to be a scholar. There's just too many things for him to be able to do for him to be able to have like expertise on every verse in the Bible. So hopefully he went to Bible college or seminary or somewhere. And so he's gonna know more than like the average person, you know. But you know, I've done a ton of research on this. There is just no way a pastor, a normal pastor, is gonna have time to be able to do this much research. I've read the 30 books on this, and the early church writers, they haven't read all this stuff, they haven't had time to do all that. So just empathize with their background, the demands they have on themselves, and just be like be realistic that they're just have not heard all of these arguments before. And when you first hear an argument, you gotta go, okay, oh, that's new and new new neural pathways are forming. And you gotta, is that true? I don't know. What do other people say about that? And then they're gonna bounce it off of their colleagues who probably have the wrong view. So that's a whole nother barrier. But just try to put yourself in their shoes. I think that's helpful. Um, maybe you want to practice online. Sometimes I'll look on YouTube for videos on divorce and remarriage and like filter for like the last day or whatever, and I'll listen to the speaker and then put in a comment sharing where I uh where I differed, and I'll give you know some reasons for why I differed with what they presented. And sometimes people will engage. And once you have a conversation online where you feel like you know the answer and you don't have to like look it up every time, um, then you're probably pretty well prepared for like an in-person conversation. So you want to, you know, figure out, you know, do I feel like I have a good answer for these things? Sometimes I have noticed people have a tendency to say, well, they'll they'll discuss an issue, and if they get an answer back from somebody and they don't have a quick persuasive answer on their mind, they resort to some kind of debate tactic. It's almost like a defense mechanism. They raise their voice, or they use some like really bad argument. It makes them look look less credible, or they just start talking really fast and saying things that don't totally add up, or these are not good ways of arguing. You really want to try to find what the persuasive, you want to really understand what is it they're really objecting to. And sometimes people give you an objection, they don't even know what it is that's driving their objective. You kind of have to help them understand what's like moving their moral intuition and then identify what that is and then address it. And that's how you can be actually persuasive for people who are open-minded. And again, not everyone's going to be open-minded. We would hope Christians would be open-minded, but you know, not everybody is. Um, if you're in a church and you want to share uh the divorce or remarriage view with your fellow church folk, um, you know, get to know people, be social. And while you're doing that, kind of take mental notes of the different people who are there and, you know, who's most likely to be open to your view. And then that way you can have a conversation with them in a way that's designed to not create a bunch of drama and you know, if even if they were to end up disagreeing with you. Um, but I would do my best just to make sure that the conversation ends positively, even if they're not persuaded by your perspective. And I leave the door open so you can have future conversations about it uh if they're open to that. If this is like a multi-part answer, if uh you're a member and you want to talk to somebody in leadership about it, you want to identify which leader has the most influence. Uh it's often the senior pastor, but sometimes it's an elder or a deacon, and that's the person you want to set up a meeting with and talk with. If you really, if you really want to do the meeting thing, which is a little bit more like intense. You have to understand in an organization like a church, there's often one or two people who end up having the most influence. That's just how it works. And other people who are there, they end up being kind of like middlemen. And this is really something that's important to understand. Um, I actually can think of multiple examples earlier in my life where I just did not understand this and talking to the wrong guy. So you got somebody who is informally really the real leader, and then you have somebody else who's like a pastor and they're like a leader, okay, or whatever. But on something like this, you really got to go to the top person. You really just can't, somebody in between, they are organizationally limited in what views they can take. They're just not, they're rarely going to, on an issue like this, deviate from what their like leadership says, because that's like the job or that's like their position on the elder board or whatever it is. So you really want to go to like the person who has the influence. You got to try to figure out who that is and then talk with them. And obviously, I understand this is an entirely new concept for a lot of people. And you know, you really want to be prepared uh for this. Uh and um, you know, you want to have uh there's a quote from the Damascus document that might be helpful. There's a quote from the Talmud that might be helpful, there's a quote from Augustine who said people need to divorce their remarriages, and that's going to surprise people, especially the Augustine quote. That's going to surprise people who just don't think anybody has ever had this view at all before. This is really going to surprise them that actually the vast majority of the church has had a marriage permanence view. And it's only evangelicalism and Protestantism that is deviating from the norm, historically speaking. We have a minority view in Protestantism. And most Protestants don't think that. They think they think they have the majority view. That's how they feel that they have the majority view. They Protestants do not have the majority view. It's not even close, uh, historically speaking. And I have a chapter in my book about how a church can take uh steps to implement on the marriage permanence view in their church if you can get a church to get to that step. And it provides a draft of a plan the churches can take, and you know, they can obviously customize it for the particular situation. But the the draft of the plan is really more just to help people think through the factors and like, here's one way you could do it. And people are gonna go, well, we can't do it that way because of blah, blah, blah. That's fine. Make the modifications that would then be necessary at your particular church if you can get a church to get to that step. Third question: What is the history of no-fault divorce in the United States? Well, pre-1969, uh, divorce required uh proving one party was guilty of specific misconduct like adultery, uh, abandonment, abuse, that kind of thing. And it was hard to prove, uh, which means people who thought they deserved the right to divorce were denied it. And then in 1969, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan, as the Republican governor of California, signed into law no fault divorce at the state level. And within five years, it had swept through nearly all the states. New York was the last state to adopt it. So is it wrong to have no fault divorce? You might think, of course, Chris would say yes. Chris has got divorce year remarriage as a book. Chris has the divorce or remarriage podcast. Of course, Chris is going to be against no fault divorce. Well, I have to tell you, not it's not necessarily wrong. And here's why. So the government's legitimate purpose is to bring about like the best possible outcomes uh in a given circumstance. So therefore, its laws and regulations balance moral and pragmatic considerations. And, you know, a classic place where you see this is in Matthew chapter 19 and verse 8, where Jesus says that Moses wrote the divorce thing for your hard-heartedness. It was not immoral for Moses to have that law. It's not an immoral law. Sometimes, when you balance the moral and pragmatic considerations, your law is going to not mirror the moral law. So it is okay to have incremental laws on some things sometimes if that is the best way to bring about the best possible pragmatic like outcome. That's why public policy, you know, just is never going to mirror the moral law. It's just not going to happen. So pragmatic considerations include lots of difficulties. So, for example, you know, writing the moral law precisely in legislation is not really all that easy in a lot of cases. There's barriers to enforcing an actual law like that. There's, you know, national and economic security concerns. There's the, you know, you want to avoid black markets, uh, hard heartedness of the elite and the wider population as well. So, therefore, to show that a law is wrong, what you have to do is not only make the moral case, you have to uh respond to the pragmatic fact. That were at issue there as well. And that's why it's a little more complicated than just like, oh, that's wrong. Well, you need a little bit more than that. All right. So here's a twist. A lot of people aren't going to be thinking of right now, if somebody is in an invalid adulterous remarriage. So let's say a man married a divorced woman, for example, and her first husband is still alive. Well, they're living in a continual state of adultery. I would want him or her, I don't care which it is. I want somebody to divorce that marriage. They're just living in adultery. Well, currently they would use the no-fault divorce provision in the law in order to divorce that remarriage. Now, it's true you could write a law that said that had some kind of out for that kind of situation where you can't divorce unless it's this particular situation. You could do that. But just right now, I'm just saying, technically speaking, people would use the no-fault divorce provision to get out of that marriage. But I'm just saying I would be against a law that said you could never divorce. I would be against that law because what if they're an adulterous remarriage? I think if there's a safety issue uh for a spouse or a child, separation is permissible. And even divorce, if divorce is necessary to secure safety. And like if you have a stalking abusive person and he can take the, he can take the kid out of school unilaterally, unless you have some kind of legal provision that prevents that. Anyway, so divorce might be necessary for safety, is my point. And you know, remarriage isn't permissible uh because they're still married in God's eyes, despite the civil divorce. But the civil effects of the divorce could be safety, and and that could justify getting a divorce. You know, right now we have no fault, but under a fault divorce system where you have to like prove wrongdoing or whatever, you know, a judge will often be forced to deny the request of divorce, even if it's morally permissible, because it's, you know, the person is retreating from an unsafe environment. Because, you know, you have to prove it to the judge. Well, good luck. I mean, a lot of times that was very difficult to do, to prove to the judge that it wasn't an unsafe uh situation. So no fault divorce kind of gets around that problem. Uh, however, it also results in more legal divorces than people should get. So these are the difficult trade-offs in public policy. These divorces have weakened the perception of marriage in the wider culture, right? So the rise in divorce and remarriage has made it harder for churches to accept Jesus' teaching on the subject. On the subject, the world has evangelized the church, and the church has gotten, you know, slowly but surely closer and closer to the world's view on divorce and remarriage. We're not all the way to where the world is on divorce and remarriage, but we're closer to them than we should be, because the world is making inroads into the church when it comes to divorce and remarriage. And part of that is the law and the practice and the high rate of divorce. I mean, you go to church, not only do you have fellow church members who are divorced and or remarried, but like their parents are divorced and remarried, or their siblings, or their friends. So it's a very challenging situation to be in. So what I think would be better than limiting divorce would be limiting remarriage. So if someday in the future, if it were possible and we could get uh enough people behind the idea, then the law should treat a remarriage as invalid while a prior valid spouse lives. That way spouses can retreat, they can divorce, no fault divorce, but the state isn't condoning ongoing adultery. And I think that would probably be uh the sweet spot. So if you have more questions and more things that you'd like me to cover, put them in the comments below and I'll take a look. Get a copy of my book, Divorce Your Remarriage. Uh, make sure you subscribe, like, comment, do all the things, and I'll see you guys next time.