The cover story of October’s Christianity Today was titled “When to Separate What God has Joined: A Closer Reading on the Bible on Divorce.”
In the article, author and scholar David Instone-Brewer, radically reinterprets the passage regarding divorce in Matthew 19, arguing the New Testament Greek didn’t always contain quotation marks, and Christ’s interlocutors were not asking him whether there was any cause at all for divorce, but whether he supported something called “any-cause” divorce, a term a little bit like “no-fault” that allowed husbands to divorce wives for any reason at all. Instone-Brewer claims Jesus’ “no” was a response to this idea, and his “except for sexual indecency” condition was not a statement of the sole exemption from God’s blanket prohibition, but merely Christ’s reiteration of one of several divorce permissions in the Old Testament — one he felt the “any-time” advocates had exaggerated.
The essay appeared to be Christianity Today’s attempt to offer Evangelicals an escape from a classic dilemma that the “plain sense” of Jesus’ words without quotes seems inhumane: How could a loving God forbid divorce, even by omission, in cases of wife-beating, or of abandonment by a Christian spouse? However, the initial mail response to the Instone-Brewer essay was heavily negative. The most stinging broadside was a column by John Piper, a respected theological conservative, that called the essay not just weak but “tragic.”
Still, the controversy suggests Christians will search for a fresh understanding of Scripture when it seems unjust to them.
How do you deal with controversy within the church for your students?
Do you protect them from it, or talk about it?
Are there ways in which you help your students deal with seemingly contradictory or “inhumane” teachings within Scripture?
