by Standerinfamilycourt

Does any one of you, when he has a case against his neighbor, dare to go to law before the unrighteous and not before the saints? 
Or do you not know that the saints will judge the world?  If the world is judged by you, are you not competent to  constitute the smallest law courts?   Do you not know that we will judge angels? How much more matters of this life?   So if you have law courts dealing with matters of this life,   do you appoint them as judges who are of no account in the church?   I say this to your shame.   Is it so, that there is not among you one wise man who will be able to decide between his brethren,  but brother goes to law with brother, and that before unbelievers?
– 1  Cor.  6: 1-6

 

He saith to them: Because Moses by reason of the hardness of your heart permitted you to put away your wives: but from the beginning it was not so.    –  Matthew 19:8

 

In November, 2014 quite an interdenominational debate broke out between between church leaders over a document called The Marriage Pledge, as reported in First Things magazine.   As of the date of the November article, 464 Lutheran, Presbyterian, Methodist, Anglican, Mennonite, Catholic, Baptist and Pentecostal leaders had agreed on paper that if marriage was redefined by the courts to include homosexual unions, these leaders would discontinue their agency role of signing their respective states’ marriage certificates, and henceforth would only issue ecclesiastical marriage certificates for weddings they perform.   If government benefits and state recognition of the marriage was additionally desired, the newlyweds would have a second stop to make down at the county courthouse.   Clearly this was aimed at protecting their right-of-conscience before God, and to provide a way to bear witness to their communities.    What was a bit less clear is the extent this measure, of itself, would shield these clergy folk or their churches from discrimination charges, given the homofascist bent toward coerced affirmation of homosexuality–regardless of any government-bestowed benefits they may claim to be pursuing from “marriage equality”.    Also unclear was where this would leave divorce in the absence of a state certificate, a function the church has never administered (with the brief exception of the pre-medieval Roman Church under two sets of Co-Emperors for approximately two generations before that empire fell).

Prominent  evangelical dissenters to this no-agency approach immediately protested that this is merely “grandstanding” and “sounding retreat” on the Church’s engagement in the public square, surrendering the moral influence over marriage definition without a fight.   Ryan Anderson, of the Heritage Foundation said that this retreat was “premature”.    Other Christian leaders, such as James Dobson of Focus on the Family, and Matt Staver, of the Liberty Counsel called for no retreat, but civil disobedience among the men of God, to the point of being jailed if need-be, to defend against the religious freedom violations that could be expected to accompany the judicially-mandated sodomization of civil marriage .

Standerinfamilycourt would like to suggest that a further motive underlies the dissent of the objectors to separating matrimony at the altar from the increasingly meaningless civil certificate available down at the courthouse.   One of the online commenters to the mildly dissenting First Things article dated November 22, 2014  put half a finger on it, as follows:

“And how are the bona fides of those seeking Holy Matrimony to be established?
Is there a proposal to establish a system of courts to give clarity on who can marry and how marriages can be annulled?  Is it proposed to offer Holy Matrimony to those who have been divorced?  Will there be a difference between those who have contracted a marriage in a religious context and those who had only a civil ceremony and what of those who have a religiously validated divorce?
Will there be some national register to help prevent bigamous marriages? Might clergy facilitating (unknowingly) bigamous marriages be seen as having a liability?”    – M. R.

 

It’s clear that if participating churches undertook such an initiative, there would be an administrative burden entailed, including some sort of secure central data base to detect potential bigamy or polygamy, something that would not be insurmountable to accomplish.    As a practical matter, though, it seems the dissenters realize that the larger issue is that churches cannot and will not be able to administer divorce and should not administer annulment.   Which brings us to the history of how and why the Church’s role marrying people got handed over to the civil authorities in the first place….

One of the impetuses of the Reformation, if honesty prevails, was a desire to find a way to provide for divorce, something the Roman Catholic Church, no longer wielding civil authority following the fall of Constantinople, returned to strictly prohibiting.   Annulments were administered by the Church, but were more difficult to obtain than they are today.    Martin Luther and the key figures of the Reformation including Calvin kept some corrupt company in the unsavory personage of one Desiderius Erasmus, a humanist who wrote  (ever so much like the serpent in the garden):

 “I record my pity for people who are loosely held together by an unhappy marriage and yet would have no hope of abstaining from fornication if they were released from it.  I want to secure their salvation by some means, nor have I any wish for this to happen without the consent of the church. I am no innovator.

But it is possible that the spirit of Christ may not have revealed the whole truth to the church all at once.  And while the church cannot make Christ’s decrees of no effect, she can none the less interpret them as may best tend to the salvation of men, relaxing here and drawing tighter there, as time and circumstance may require.

Christ wished that all his people might be perfect, no question of divorce arising among them, and the church has endeavoured to secure this full rigour from everyone.  I am no supporter of divorce. But how can you be sure that the same church, in her zeal to find a way for the salvation even of weaker brethren, may not think that this is the place for some relaxation?  The Gospel is not superseded; it is adapted by those to whom its application is entrusted, so as to secure the salvation of all men.  My opinion is that we are misusing the interpretation of the gospel principles, with the result that the force of its teaching in our standards of behavior is fading away. To give an example, Christ so wished his people to abstain from murder that he did not permit men to be angry.  We interpret this as meaning angry without cause.  Likewise Christ so wished his people to abstain from perjury that he forbade an oath of any kind. This we interpret as meaning that we must not swear without just cause.  In the same way he so much wished them to abstain from divorce that he forbade it altogether.  What interpretation the church can put upon this, I do not decide. I wish she could interpret it so as to promote many men’s salvation. I do not make any final proposals on this point. I leave the right of decision to the church and content myself with drawing attention to the point.” (My Dear Erasmus, pp.110-111)

With that, Bro. E went slithering off into the night without so much as taking responsibility for his own deceitful rationalizations!  As a result of this corrupting influence, several heresies have been evident in the Protestant Church from its founding:

• that the standard Christ set was too high for men and women to attain (rejects the power of the Holy Spirit and true regeneration).
• that happiness is a much higher good than holiness.
• that lowering the moral standard will result in “more” salvation (ignores 1 Cor. 6:9-10 and Gal. 5:21 consequences of baptism without regeneration; fails to grasp that there’s actually no moral bottom to that strategy.)
• that Jesus did not abrogate all attempts to dissolve marriage for any cause in Matthew 5 and Matthew 19, Mark 10, and Luke 16.
• that identification with Christ’s death on the cross made salvation “secure” through “grace” regardless of the trajectory of one’s life afterward.

According to John Witte, Jr., Director of the Law and Religion Program, Emory University writing in the Journal of Law and Religion,  Martin Luther saw civil jurisdiction over marriage law as the panacea to several evils that had emerged in Europe after Catholic canon law proved inadequate to regulate marriage in society at large, including  prostitution, concubinage, clerics patronizing brothels, desertion, bigamy, incest, and the resulting backlash wherein parents were sending their sons and daughters into crowded monasteries and cloisters (“nunneries”) for escape.   When we seek a solution without first seeking God’s face, the chances are good that this “solution” will not be consistent with the biblical commandments left by Jesus and Paul, hence the idea that (as Erasmus put it),  “it is possible that the spirit of Christ may not have revealed the whole truth to the church all at once…….of weaker brethren, may not think that this is the place for some relaxation?“

The Church of today should have no problem following Christ in owning marriage only, for members only, and leaving marriage of the unregenerated to the state’s regulation.  God’s design created only marriage and made no provision whatsoever for its dissolution.    As the Manhattan Declaration (somewhat hypocritically) asserts,  marriage belongs to God, not Caesar.    As  Jesus Christ asserted….”from the beginning, it was not so.   What God has joined, let no man separate.”       There is, therefore, no scriptural reason for the Church to offer any form of marriage dissolution.

Indeed,  Luther handed marriage over to the legislation of the German state, and other Reformation figures did likewise in their own countries, because had they not done so, divorce would never have become available to satisfy this emerging Erasmean philosophy.   For the reverse reason, today’s dissenting voices to the Marriage Pledge are in no hurry to recover accountable stewardship of holy matrimony from the increasingly unaccountable hands of Caesar.    Most realize that to do so would necessitate Church acceptance that original marriage is indissoluble as Jesus Christ said it was, and that (therefore) remarriage where there is a living estranged spouse, is in all cases adultery, as Jesus made unquestionably clear was the case.   (The scriptural authority for this is beyond the scope of this blog, but can be read at this link. )

It would be immoral for the Church to get into the divorce business, and impractical to administer willful sinfulness that attempted marriage dissolution represents.   The Church would need to start teaching that if there is no civil marriage for the state to “dissolve”, the tax benefits should be less important than the generational and eternal benefits of rendering the secular state powerless to intrude on a marriage at the behest of only one spouse, and teach members to take seriously the threat to final salvation that unrepented remarriage adultery brings.

Further, the Church need not delve into or pass judgment on the circumstances behind any prior divorce in those who want an ecclesiastical wedding,  as the commenter suggested above, if she simply submits faithfully to the judgment of Christ,  repeated at least twice by Him:  whosoever marries a [person] who has been put away commits [ongoing] adultery.    Since the latter does not constitute a valid marriage in God’s eyes, taking back from the state her jurisdiction over only the marriage that God recognizes, is greatly simplified for the Church by obeying Him.   For the same reason, the only inquiry that need be made of prior civil marriages is whether or not the prior spouse on either side is deceased (easily verifiable through public civil records at the outset, and a central data base thereafter).   Weddings recorded under God’s law would simply no longer take place in the Church unless neither proposed spouse was still married in God’s eyes to anyone else.   This would immediately clear the Church of all related hypocrisy charges and restore her witness overnight.    The Church, after correcting heretical teaching concerning “biblical grounds” for divorce (i.e. neither adultery, nor dissertion, but solely and exclusively repentance from a biblically unlawful marriage according to Luke 16:18),  would then leave it to the Holy Spirit to convict individual members whether they should consider dissolving unbiblical remarriages undertaken ignorantly due to decades of widespread false teaching.   Churches should further emphasize ongoing celibacy after exiting the biblically-adulterous union or reconciliation with the true spouse for those who dissolve adulterous remarriages.

There are some churches already experimenting with the reform of  finding alternatives to civil marriage who were earlier motivated by the abusive unilateral divorce system which is (or should be considered) wholly incompatible with faithful church doctrine.   They advise people on matters such as property holding alternatives and other alternative means of leveraging their marital status without a civil marriage license.    These marriages are likely to be treated as common law marriages for state purposes including child welfare.  As mentioned earlier, it is unclear whether such an approach would provide any cover from LGBT activists who might potentially sue or bring discrimination charges attacking a thoroughly biblical definition of marriage according to Matt. 19:4-6.   The reliance in that regard would be on the Lord’s protection, resulting from prayer and obedience.

[disclaimer:  In providing the link reference above, SIFC does not endorse  Pastor Matt Trewhella’s assertion:   “God intended the State to have jurisdiction over a marriage for two reasons – 1). in the case of divorce, and 2). when crimes are committed i.e., adultery, bigamy. etc.”   There is  actually no biblical  support for the secular state to have any  jurisdiction over holy matrimony or to dissolve what He forbids to be dissolved – render unto God what is God’s. ]

The solutions suggested above are for reforming and purifying holy matrimony among the spiritually regenerated within the Church.   Just as marriage is a covenant, it relies on the New Covenant in Christ’s blood, where He told us that His law would be written in our hearts.   One irony of the Reformation is that few of its leaders truly served Christ and were regenerated in that way.    Some endorsed polygamy by letter to the royal family when the occasion arose,  and Luther was terribly anti-Semitic, later inspiring Hitler.   As can be readily seen from the major writings,  they thought that dismissing the moral law as seemed necessary for inclusion of sinners into the church (sound familiar?) would save them.   Holding them to an “appearance” of morality without the Holy Spirit actually changing their hearts was imagined to be redemptive.    The Catholic canon law was ineffective in bringing morality to the unregenerated largely because the Roman Church had a history since the days of the Emperor Constantine of taking almost the same approach, deeming people to earn salvation once included, and be sanctified by Church rites.    Yet historical tracking of the results of Luther’s family law “reforms” show they yielded only a further slide in public morality.

The evils Martin Luther was seeking to address are very real and very likely to recur when the civil law is inherently immoral, both in its structure and in its delivery system.   One could argue that the majority of those evils prevail under today’s “no-fault” regime (with the possible exception of shipping our youth off to monastic life to escape the resulting prevalence of societal immorality).

Civil law is therefore needed for the larger unregenerated segment of society who are not under grace, who cannot claim inclusion in the New Covenant whereby God’s law is written on the heart.   However,  civil law that discriminates between the Petitioner and the Respondent in protecting fundamental rights is as corrosive as anarchy.   The Bill of Rights should protect the non-offending Respondent to the full extent that the system gives preference to the Petitioner regardless of the latter’s own hostile acts against the marriage.   Enormous taxpayer burden results from the current failure of most state divorce laws to hold the at-fault party financially responsible.   Liberal interests lately are eager to point to statistics that imply that the divorce rate is slowing or levelling off, and this is likely to be used to rationalize continued non-reform.   However,  a careful analysis of the data shows that unilateral divorce is growing most among couples married more than 30 years, and this is unexpectedly threating the retirement security of many due to the unconscionable features of the “no-fault” regime.   Unilateral divorce also continues to drag down the marriage rates in many countries in favor of unmarried cohabitation, which has been proven to be very dangerous to the safety of any children involved.

The demand for homosexual “marriage” would simply not exist if the law held heterosexual marriage commitments binding merely to the extent that it protects business partnerships or commercial contracts.   The fact that none of the political activism by the Christian Right over the past 30 years has been directed toward ending such an immoral and unconstitutional travesty is very telling, as contrasted with the massive efforts exerted to oppose abortion and “Wave Two” of marriage redefinition.   If the U.S. Supreme Court does unilaterally impose homosexual marriage on all 50 states, a shift of focus to this neglected accountability could provide the silver lining that might restore God’s full definition of marriage a generation from now.    If so, demand for deviant forms of marriage that cannot be easily and cheaply escaped would dry up in due time.

The banana in the jar represents a fallacious claim to a pseudo-biblical “exception clause” that is easily and overwhelmingly disproven by  the application of disciplined, widely accepted principles of basic hermeneutics, which for some odd reason, tend to be suspended for this particular topic by evangelical Pharisees so hopelessly infatuated with Matthew 19:9.   Will the monkey let go of the banana and break free of the jar when worldly persecution sets in– or shamelessly hold on tighter?

 

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