REACT: Dr. Hershael York on Civilly Unrecognized Marriages

Dr. Hershael York of Southern Seminary on the Pastor Well podcast ( https://youtu.be/athpYa7A6bE?si=3Bmk5HxIXKmArTSK ) provided pastors with advice regarding an unusual question: How should a pastor respond to an older couple who want to cohabitate and call it marriage?  In this scenario, the older couple is often incentivized by pension rules to forgo legally remarrying.  To keep the pension money and cohabitate, the couple wonders if they can be validly remarried (and have sex) without getting a marriage license. Dr. York provides his advice and I react to his comments.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Is it okay for two older people to cohabitate and not get married because they're trying to save money? This is a question recently posed to Dr. Herschel York, who is at Southern Seminary, because it's a question that comes up a bunch lately. And so he is going to go ahead and address it. Dr. Herschel York has served as the 11th Dean at the Southern Baptist Convention, Southern Seminary School of Theology. He's been there since 2018. Dr. York has served as pastor for decades before taking this position. And uh he hosts the Pastor Well Podcast. Now, I like the Pastor Well podcast. I'm not a pastor. I have no desire to become a pastor. But the Pastor Well podcast is really interesting for those of us who aren't pastors because it helps us to really sympathize with what pastors are going through. I think I've listened to probably every episode of the Pastor Well Podcast, minus maybe five or six. So I kind of like Dr. Herschel York. I've never met him before, but just from his podcast, uh, I don't know, I just kind of like him. Uh so we're gonna hear the soothing sounds of his voice, and he's gonna tell us about what the problem is and what his advice is to pastors who are faced with this question.

SPEAKER_00 1:11

Pastors are now having to deal with not young people moving in together without benefit or marriage, but older saints, people who have been members of the church and perhaps previously married, now widowed. And in their golden years, they move in together and they want to retain their church membership. They want to be, they want the blessing of God, but they don't want to be legally married.

SPEAKER_01 1:40

This is gonna be awfully surprising to a pastor if they're not familiar with this problem. The pressure a pastor is gonna face here is different than the pressure they might face if it's a young person who's gonna move in with somebody else. And the reason for that is just organizationally, the way the church works, you're usually, we'll say, investing in younger people, and you're usually getting more of your financial resources, more of your volunteer time, usually from middle-age people and older people. So you're more spending on the younger people and uh getting from the older people. A lot of churches are not mega churches. They're, I don't know, 70 people or whatever. So if you have, you know, two, three families that defect, it's gonna be getting kind of difficult to keep the lights on. So there's just more of a risk if you're gonna tell them, no, you can't do this thing you really want to do, they might want to leave and go do it anyway. So a pastor is gonna have a real challenge here trying to thread the needle.

SPEAKER_00 2:35

And I've had it happen in my church. I've talked to a lot of people about it. What do you do when uh an older saint wants you to come bless their union? They say, Oh, we we want to have, we want to say our vows to one another before God, but we don't want to do it legally because usually it's because there'll be the loss of a pension. Let's say here's a woman, her husband was a member of a union, and that union will pay her, his pension benefit uh until she dies, unless she remarries. Now, I'm gonna tell you, I think that's wrong. I think that's unfair. I think her marital status has nothing to do with whether or not she deserves his pension, but I can change that. I uh I understand the financial pressures that a lot of older people are under.

SPEAKER_01 3:27

So Dr. York, I think, is not as concerned with a pastor giving a doctrinally precise answer here. What he wants to do is he wants to help pastors. I think I'm assuming this is the case, maybe I'm wrong, but I think he wants them to respond in a way where they tell the older folks who want to move into with each other the answer is no. But he wants and he wants them to not cohabitate and he wants to keep them in the church. But now, doctrinally, this is actually a very simple question. The question is this what are the necessary conditions for a biblically valid marriage? Even though this is a simple question, in my experience, people don't ask this question, they don't answer this question, they don't know how to answer it. And so when they're faced with a scenario like this, they're susceptible to rationalizations. Listen, if we can find a way to avoid having to register our marriage with the state, we can keep our money. Is there a way we can rationalize this? So the necessary conditions for a biblically valid marriage are these: one man and one woman, they have to consent. There's approval by the civil authority, and it's not incestuous and it's not adulterous. Now, since the government in America requires you to register your marriage with the state, then two people are not married unless they get a marriage license in the United States. So if they cohabitate without the marriage license, they are living in sin. They are not married. And so that's a very simple question once you understand that.

SPEAKER_00 4:59

And the argument usually goes like, well, Isaac just took Rebecca into his tent and he knew her, she became his wife. And if they covenant to each with each other privately, that's all that matters. I'm I'm really gonna disagree with that stridently. And I want to do so respectfully, but here's how I would walk someone through that.

SPEAKER_01 5:24

Okay, so I'm gonna respond to this argument. Humanity is social, and we form governments. So we form families and tribes and then city states and then nation states, and that is a natural part of our biology. So now during the patriarchs, we are what we're seeing is marriage is governed at the family and tribe level. So there is government approval required for marriage at the family-tribe level, because that's what the government is at that point in time. So Laban had to approve the marriage of Jacob to his daughter. Jacob can't just marry her, he has to be given government approval, and that would be Laban in that situation. And then if you fast forward to Moses, the government is larger. It's a different kind of government now. It's larger, it's bigger. And so it naturally develops uh to have rules in law that are more like abstractly expressed and codified and then more equally applied. And those laws presuppose a requirement of government approval for marriage to be valid. So there's restrictions on slave wives in Exodus 21. There's incestuous marriages are now forbidden in Leviticus 18. There's restrictions on the wives that priests can have in Leviticus 21. There's restrictions on marrying outside of a tribe in Numbers 36. There's a bunch of these different laws, and that presupposes the idea that the government has to approve your marriage or it's not a marriage. So these laws presuppose that a marriage that does not have civil authority is not a valid marriage. And that's why Ezra had the executory power of the government in his time, and he could require divorces of marriages to idolaters in Ezra chapter 10, because that broke the mosaic governmental law. And that's because those marriages uh violated uh Allah in Deuteronomy chapter seven. So let's go ahead and continue to hear uh Dr. York.

SPEAKER_00 7:13

I understand that this has put you in an unfair position. I'd be as pastoral and as loving as I could be. But I would say, what would you want me to do? Like two college students in their 20s came to me and said, Hey, we we want to move in together and we want to have sex, but we don't want to lose our scholarship. We've got scholarships that are just for single people. So would you just sort of pronounce a blessing over us so we can keep our scholarships and live together and have sex? I I really don't know any pastors that would do that. And I would say the age difference doesn't change it. And frankly, as kindly as I can say this, the minute you put money together with sexual relationship, there's a word for that.

SPEAKER_01 8:10

Okay. This was an entertaining part of his uh video here. So Dr. York makes three arguments here that I think go from you know the strongest argument to the weaker argument. He argues from analogy to college students. Who can argue with that? No, of course we're not gonna let college students move in with each other so they can save money. He argues from normative pastoral practice. He says, Well, I don't know anybody who's doing that. Okay, okay. And then he argues from opposition to prostitution. Of course, we're all against prostitution. I don't know, that's the strongest argument here. Um, I agree with his conclusion. I don't think you know, your widow is a prostitute argument really fits. Um, there's a difference between transactionally paying for sex and avoiding marriage to avoid financial injury. You know, with a prostitute, a guy has less money afterward, but avoiding marriage, they have more money. So there's no, there's no way to construe this as like paying for sex since if they cohabitate, they have sex and money. Where's there's no payment? Where's the payment? So I don't think that that analogy works real well. But I suspect with Dr. York, his moral intuition, I think, is saying something like that they just need to choose two uh out of the three, right? There's God, money, and relationship. And you can have two, but you can't have three. So you can have God and money and no relationship, but you can keep keep the pension, right? You can have God and the relationship and no money for forego the pension, or you can have no God, you're not gonna appear as though you're saved. Okay, so no God, and then you have money and your relationship. So you got sex and money, but you're living in disobedience. So grandpa wants God and gold and grandma, and he can have two out of the three, but you can't have all three. You're gonna have to pick two.

SPEAKER_00 9:53

We don't want to be anywhere near that. That that should not enter into our thinking about marriage. And furthermore, we just simply have to have the attitude always in every situation that I'm gonna do the right thing, whatever it costs. I can't put a price on doing the right thing. I don't think we can separate legal marriage and some kind of spiritual commitment. These things go together that to be to enter into the union of a husband and a wife is to do so in the eyes of everyone. In this country, especially, uh, it should be clear legally, it should be clear morally, spiritually. And I would just say if you really value the sanctity of marriage, if you value your reputation as a believer, as you if you value your integrity in your walk with the Lord, you're just gonna say, okay, then I have a decision to make. What matters the most to me? And if I really love this person, I mean, I I I just can't even imagine that I would put a price tag on whether or not I love my wife. I mean, whatever it costs me to be married to my wife, I'd pay it. Amen to that. Uh, and if I have to live in poverty to be married to her, I'm gonna live in poverty because that's what love requires of me. That's what holiness requires of me. There's I can't put a price tag on that. And so I would simply say to this person, and it's usually it's the woman who would lose the pension. Again, horribly unfair. But the reality of the situation, I would I would say to her, look, we're willing to walk through this with you as you make the right decision. But what I I can't pretend that this is okay. I can't pronounce some blessing over you. I mean, this is simply not what we do. We want everything we do to be above board. And in one sense, you're seeking a workaround. Well, that marriage can't be a workaround.

SPEAKER_01 12:05

Now, you know, imagine how this would work. If a pastor pronounced a blessing to their family and church, people would regard them as married. On their taxes and pension, they would say they're single. Right now, does that seem right? Proverbs 20, 14, bad, bad, says the buyer, but then he goes away and he boasts. And, you know, changing one's characterization of something for financial gain is kind of the commonality there. Because when it's talking about the buyer, like the buyer went to go haggle and he goes, I can't, I'm not going to pay that much money. This thing's not worth that. It's look at look at this thing. You're lucky I came here to buy anything at all. He's like degrading the value of the thing in the eyes of the seller. And the seller goes, Okay, okay, I'll sell it to you for less money, less money. And then he buys the thing and he goes and tells his friend, look at this great deal I got. Isn't it great how I ripped off this other person? And so he misrepresents, you know, kind of what's going on uh for financial gain. And that's what this would be. This would be a misrepresentation on taxes and pension and all that stuff for financial gains. You go to your church, you go, hey, hey, we're married. You go to your pension, go, oh no, no, I'm single, I'm single, and uh doing that for financial gain. It reminded me of that proverb.

SPEAKER_00 13:16

I you know, I I one time said to a couple that were wanting to do this, I said, Let me ask you, if I told you that I will make I'll take care of you, if you will be legally married, whatever it costs you, but I'll make up the difference. Sort of stunned and looked at each other and they said, Well, I mean, if you if you told us that you'd take care of us, you'd make up the difference. Would we get married? I said, Yeah. And they said, I guess we would. I said, Wow, that's astounding that you would trust me, a simple man just like you, but you won't trust the Lord to take care of you. You won't trust the Lord to make up the difference. This is really what you're faced with. Are we going to trust the Lord to whom we can really entrust our eternal souls to take care of us, even in giving up this income?

SPEAKER_01 14:22

I have to tell you, that little sample conversation he gave would be effective with a lot of people. It really would really make them like re-reframe the whole thing in a different kind of way. So this is what he's really good at.

SPEAKER_00 14:34

And I'm I'm just convinced that it is that significant and that important. We don't want marriage to be cheapened or lessened in any way.

SPEAKER_01 14:43

You can see how Dr. York is very good at giving this kind of advice. What's interesting to me is that he views the kind of the typical Southern Baptist approach, or like this, what Southern Seminary would say about divorce and remarriage, to be uh elevating marriage very highly. Whereas my view would be that they're not doing that. But I do appreciate this particular message because and I agree with him here that you can't let people cohabitate for uh financial gain. I remember when I wrote my book, Divorce Your Remarriage, I hesitated to put in what are the necessary conditions for marriage. But I talked to a friend of mine and he persuaded me to put in those necessary conditions because he said, Chris, people are gonna people are gonna ask about various scenarios, and you're gonna need to know what the answer is, and you're not even gonna be able to predict all the things people are gonna come up with. And so you need to have kind of the first principles laid out. And he convinced me that that would eventually happen. And so we may as well figure out what those necessary conditions are. And that was actually helpful for me as I developed uh my book and and my view on divorce and remarriage. Here's a great example. I would never have come up with this uh problem where the pension and all that kind of stuff that the woman faces there. And so she wants to cohabitate. This is why you have to we have to really kind of nail down these first principles that it's you know, it's one man and one woman. They have to consent, approval from the government, not incestuous, not adulterous. Those are the conditions for a valid marriage. So go ahead, subscribe, like, comment, let me know what you think. And I'll see you guys next time.