Ann and her husband were members of the church I was serving. She began attending a mid-morning Bible study at our church. One day while doing her homework, she came across some difficult words in the Sermon on the Mount that troubled and confused her.
That is why she came to see me with tears in her eyes. “There’s something I have to tell you, and I don’t know what it will do to our friendship.”
“Go on … ,” I said.
“I was married previously,” she blurted out. “It was a terrible mistake. We got a divorce.”
“Is that what’s bothering you, that you’ve been divorced? Ann, I know many people who are divorced, including several of my best friends. Why would this news jeopardize our friendship?”
“Because of this,” she said as she opened a small Bible, turned to one of two places she had bookmarked and read these words of Jesus from the fifth chapter of Matthew’s Gospel:
“But I say to you that anyone who divorces his wife, except on the grounds of unchastity, causes her to commit adultery; and whoever marries a divorced woman commits adultery.” (Matthew 5:32)
Then she added, “I had hoped that the other Gospels were less harsh. Instead, I found these words in Mark’s Gospel which are even more disturbing … ”
Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her; and if she divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery. (Mark 10:11-12)
“Is that what I am?” asked Ann. “Am I an adulteress in the eyes of Jesus? Can you see why I’m worried about our friendship? You’re a Christian minister, after all. You follow Jesus. You teach what he taught. Does that mean that you also think that I am an adulteress?”
I paused before giving an answer, a long, drawn-out pause in which I said to myself, “I guess I missed class the day they discussed this in seminary!” After collecting my thoughts, I decided that I could answer in one of several ways.
For one thing, I could have dismissed the text. I could have said, “Aw, Ann, Jesus didn’t really mean it. Maybe he was just having a bad day. He doesn’t really mean to call you an adulteress because you divorced and later married another man. So don’t worry about it, Ann. Just pretend that this text doesn’t apply to you. It was written a long time ago; it is no longer relevant.”
But if I had said that I would have been untrue to my own ordination. When I was ordained as a minister, and when others were ordained as elders or deacons, we had to answer this question:
Do you accept the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments to be, by the Holy Spirit, the unique and authoritative witness to Jesus Christ in the Church universal and God’s word to you? (Book of Order, W-4.4003b)
To simply dismiss this text as hopelessly irrelevant would be like forsaking my ordination.
On the other hand, I could have said, “Ann, I’m sorry to tell you this but every sentence of the Bible is true, literally true, and we need to believe it and live by it. We are people of the Book, after all, and we simply need to bow down to its literal word.” But that answer didn’t feel right either. Even Christians who do proclaim the literal truth of the Bible, do not take everything literally. Frankly, I wish they’d be honest about that when considering passages like Deuteronomy, chapter 22:
If there is a young woman, a virgin already engaged to be married, and a man meets her in the town and lies with her, you shall bring both of them to the gate of the town and stone them to death. (Deuteronomy 22:23-24)
Can’t say that I know anyone who takes that text literally! Or recall this text from the Book of Leviticus:
When an alien resides with you in your land, you shall not oppress the alien. The alien who resides with you shall be to you as a citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God. (Leviticus 19:33-34)
If we took that verse literally, we wouldn’t be holding debates in Richmond and Washington and Arizona and elsewhere about illegal aliens!
So how did I answer Ann in a way that neither dismissed the text as hopelessly archaic nor treated it with a wooden literalism?
I chose a third approach and decided to tell Ann a bit about Presbyterian history. I began like this: As recently as the early 1950s, the Presbyterian Church wondered how best to minister to its divorced members. Unfortunately, divorce was becoming more and more common in society and divorced members were going to their ministers and saying, “I’ve met someone new. I’m in love. I’d like to be married. This time I am convinced it will work.”
But back then, Presbyterian ministers had their hands tied. Church law prevented them from marrying those who were guilty of failing at a previous marriage. Adultery, desertion and the like were reasons which would disqualify a person from being married again. What should the Church do? The moderator of the General Assembly of the so-called Northern Presbyterian Church appointed a national committee on marriage and divorce to study this issue and report back to the next meeting of the General Assembly. (The Southern Church followed a similar strategy about a year or so later.) The moderator named as chairman of that committee a minister from Buffalo, N.Y., named Albert Butzer, my grandfather. For more than a year, the committee met and considered all options and then prayerfully recommended that the constitution of the Presbyterian church be changed so that our clergy could remarry divorced persons, even those who were guilty for the failure of a previous marriage.
When the news of this proposed change became public, objections arose from all across the church. One very prominent conservative minister, Clarence Macartney of the First Presbyterian Church of Pittsburgh, Pa., wrote a lengthy critique which appeared in Presbyterian Life. Among other things, Macartney wrote:
“I never thought I would see the day when such un-Scriptural revisions of the standards of our church should be proposed.”
The Scriptures he had in mind were the very passages that Ann read to me from her devotional Bible.
The Committee on Marriage and Divorce issued a quick rebuttal and made a number of points, including:
1. “Why should the Church interpret this teaching of Jesus literally when it does not insist on a literal interpretation of other passages, such as, ‘Turn the other cheek,’ ‘If your eye causes you to sin, tear it out’ and ‘Sell all that you own and give the money to the poor’? Why single out the divorce statements as unyielding absolutes yet ignore these other difficult and equally demanding statements of Jesus?”
2. “Every statement by our Lord must be taken not as a thing apart by itself but as an inseparable element of the whole gospel of Christ. And the bedrock foundations of that gospel are assuredly forgiveness, abundant pardon to the truly penitent, and an opportunity by the grace of God through Christ to redeem past failures, yes, to transform them even in marriage.” Quoting an editorial from The Presbyterian Outlook, the committee added, “It is a bit strange, don’t you think, that the church has to be reminded in this connection, or any other, of its gospel of forgiveness for the repentant sinner?”
In the end, the Presbyterian Church voted to change its constitution, thereby allowing its ministers to marry those previously divorced, even those who admitted guilt for the failure of a previous marriage.
“Ann,” I said, “What do you think about all of this?” She thought about it for a minute and then she gave this answer. She said, “For one thing, I no longer feel like a total failure over my previous marriage, cheap, dirty and unworthy. Quite the opposite. Knowing how the church really struggled with this issue, now I actually feel forgiven! And for another thing,” she said, “I feel incredibly proud to be a Presbyterian.”
“Proud to be Presbyterian?” I asked. “Why proud?”
She said, “I’m so glad to be part of a church that takes the Bible so seriously that we are willing to struggle with difficult texts to try to understand what they mean; not just what they meant when first spoken way back then, but also what they mean for us today.”
ALBERT G. BUTZER III is pastor of First Church, Virginia Beach, Va.
