Transcript

Welcome back to Shameless Popery.

I'm Joe Heschmeyer.

I want to explore one of Jesus's most radical teachings today, a teaching that I think most Christians don't realize is nearly as radical as it actually is.

I mean here his teaching on marriage, and particularly his teaching on what marriage does, and on the possibility or impossibility of divorce and remarriage.

Now I understand this being, you know, the internet, podcasts, people like to exaggerate their claims because it's more clickable and all this.

I get all that.

But the teaching Jesus presents really is quite shocking, and we know that partly from reading it, and partly from seeing the reaction to it.

So in Matthew chapter 19, after Jesus presents his teaching on marriage, it's worth remembering what the disciples do in response.

They say to him, if such is the case of a man with his wife, it is not expedient to marry.

If marriage is going to be as extreme as you're presenting it, we don't want to do that.

We don't want marriage.

It doesn't make sense.

And I think it's worth keeping that reaction in mind, because for centuries now, Christians have watered down Jesus's teaching, particularly about divorce and remarriage, so that we no longer recognize it in its shocking, authentic, true gospel form.

So with that said, what is Jesus's radical teaching?

Well, I would argue that the best one-line summary of it actually comes from the Old Testament, in Malachi chapter 2, where God says, for I hate divorce.

So Malachi 2 of 16, right there, says it all.

God hates divorce.

Now, under the Mosaic law, divorce was still permitted in some cases.

And so Jesus is asked about this.

I want to walk through the conversation in Mark chapter 10. The Pharisees come up to test him.

And they ask, is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?

Now, notice, this is bracingly clear.

The question is straightforward.

We don't have to legalistically say, well, what do they really mean by that?

They just want to know, is it lawful to divorce your wife?

Because clearly, you've got these passages in the law of Moses that permit divorce in certain circumstances.

Now, different Jewish schools of thought disagreed about what those circumstances looked like.

But there was a widespread agreement that divorce was permitted.

Not so, says Jesus.

In verse 3, Jesus responds, what did Moses command you?

And they say, Moses allowed a man to write a certificate of divorce and to put her away.

Okay?

So there it is.

Under the old law, divorce was permitted.

They're in agreement on this point.

But Jesus says, that was because of your hardness of heart.

For your hardness of heart, he wrote you this commandment.

But from the beginning of creation, and then quoting Genesis 127, he says, God made them male and female.

And then he turns to Genesis chapter 2 and says, for this reason, a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one.

So they are no longer two, but one.

Now, just understand what he's done here.

He said, Moses gave you this moral standard.

That was because of your hardness of heart.

I'm giving you a higher one, but this higher one isn't some crazy new innovation.

This is a return to the original plan and design God has for marriage.

And then, Mark 10 verse 9, he says, what therefore God has joined together, let not man put asunder.

We'll get into whether there's a better way of understanding that, but that's what we're dealing with right now.

This is a shocking enough teaching that the disciples don't leave it alone.

In verse 10, we're told that in the house, the disciples asked him again about this matter.

Now, that's Mark's telling.

Matthew gives us more detail.

You know, if such is the case with marriage, it's not expedient to get married, right?

Like, they're not just saying, explain that a little more, but they're shocked.

And so, they privately go to him about it.

And Jesus says, being in verse 11, whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her.

And if she divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery.

So, three takeaways.

Number one, Jesus is explicitly going beyond the Mosaic law, calling us to a higher moral standard.

So, you can't respond by saying, well, look, the Old Testament has more permissiveness, because Jesus acknowledges that.

That's not for you.

Number two, this higher moral standard—you cannot get divorced and remarried—is part of God's original design, that in the plan of God, man and woman are to become one flesh.

And so, you can no more separate a married couple than you could separate your own body.

It's a sort of death.

Third, this means that divorce and remarriage is adultery.

Now, the fact that it's adultery is really significant, because what is adultery?

Adultery is extramarital sexual relations while you are still married.

Right?

Like, if you commit fornication because you're not yet married, that's one type of sin.

Adultery is a different type of sin.

To be guilty of the sin of adultery, one or the other of you have to be married.

And so, Jesus is saying, you still have a valid first marriage.

To call this adulterous is to say you, as a mere mortal, can't undo what God has done in joining the two together.

So, it's not just a moral question of, am I allowed to sleep with this person?

Am I allowed to go through a marriage ceremony?

It's not that.

At a deeper level, it's a question about the action of God.

Has he created this indissoluble union?

And are you trying to dissolve something that God has made indissoluble?

That's what Jesus is presenting here in Mark 10. And I hope you see how shocking that is.

Because it's one thing to just say, you're not allowed to get divorced and remarried.

It's another thing to say, you literally can't get divorced in a meaningful sense.

Like, if you have a true marriage, you cannot undo what God has done.

Now, he's done it with your consent, right?

Like, you said, I do at the altar, you're on board.

But something was formed here that only death can separate, no human power.

So, that's a critical kind of idea, what God has joined together.

So, as I mentioned before, the English rendering was pretty standard in the RSVCE. It says, God has joined together, let not man put asunder.

And I want to explore that a couple of ways.

First, this idea is very much a sacramental view of marriage.

That is, marriage isn't just a contract.

It's not just a human contract, the way entering a business, you know, making an alliance or something like this could be a human level contract.

Something deeper is going on.

Because if I start a business and file all the paperwork, or if I enter into a business partnership with someone else, that maybe I really enjoy working with them, say, I want to work with you for a long time.

Maybe I form an alliance with another country.

Those are all human things.

We wouldn't say God has joined us together.

But marriage, while being fully human in one way, something deeper, something divine is at work.

God is doing the actual joining together, even though we don't see that element.

In Ephesians chapter 5, St. Paul quotes this passage from Genesis 2 that we just heard from from Jesus.

For this reason, a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one, or the two shall become one flesh.

And St. Paul is really clear that this is a pretty sacramental understanding of marriage.

He says, this is a great mystery.

The Greek word there is mysterion.

And I mean in reference to Christ in the church.

Now, we often just think of mystery as like, you know, a whodunit, Sherlock Holmes kind of thing.

But mystery in the biblical sense is really sacramental.

So, for instance, our English word sacrament derives from mysterion.

It comes from the Latin sacramentum sign, and ultimately from the Greek mystery, mysterion.

And in secular context, a mysterion was the religious right or oath that was used in military contexts.

So, if you joined the army, you would make an oath before the gods.

And this was called the mysterion.

So, in calling marriage mysterion, there is an element where Paul is describing it as a distinctly religious ritual.

And there's a reason this is happening in church, whereas other, you know, when you go to sign to become like a not-for-profit, you don't do that at the altar.

So, this is why we understand this to be sacramental.

But I'm not done with that verse yet.

What God is doing together, let not man put asunder.

What about that other part?

Specifically, is Jesus just wishing here, or is he commanding?

J.P. Meyer, in his famous book, A Marginal Jew, says that the traditional English translation, let not man put asunder, makes it sound like Jesus is just wishing, right?

I hope you don't undo what I've done here.

But in fact, the Greek is much stronger than that.

It's in the third person singular imperative.

And we don't really have that form in modern English.

And in fact, have that form in modern English.

And so, it's an actual command.

A bit later in that same page, he describes it as a sort of two-punch knockout blow to divorce.

Because in this passage, Jesus does two things.

Number one, he says divorce itself is prohibited as contrary to God's will, inscribed in the very structure of creation, the very structure of marriage.

And number two, therefore, anyone who divorces and remarries commits adultery.

So, he's not just saying, I really hope you don't do it.

He's ordering you not to.

This is not just saying, here's the Christian ideal, but no one's going to hit the ideal.

No, he's actually saying, this is what you're bound to.

Don't deviate from it.

There's a difference from saying, be great if you could do this, but no worries.

And saying, you're commanded not to do this.

And now, maybe that seems really obvious.

I mean, I think Mark 10 is a very clear passage.

I think Matthew 19 is pretty clear.

But I think if you look at the data, if you look at the evidence of Christianity, it's fair to say God hates divorce, but Christians seemingly don't. Again, God, I hate divorce, Malachi 2 verse 16. Contrast that with the sociological data.

The sociological data that the annual probability of divorce, and there's a lot of different ways of measuring divorce rates, and none of them are perfect.

But in any given marriage, a non-religious person or a person with a non-religious upbringing has about a 5% chance in a given year of getting divorced.

For Christians, it's like four point something.

And for evangelical Christians, it's very nearly five.

So, nobody's doing great.

Actually, the lowest rate are non-Christian religions.

Mormons, Muslims, Hindus actually do much better in terms of not getting divorced than the people whose scriptures say, I hate divorce.

That's a big red flag for us as Christians.

Now, there's a lot that could be said about this.

So, that data is from the Institute for Family Studies.

And one of the co-authors of that is a fairly famous researcher by the name of Brad Wilcox.

Back in 2004, he looked at the role of preaching in regards to this.

Now, I'll acknowledge at the outset, 2004 is not very recent data.

It's a little bit hard to find solid data in this area.

But this is, I think, good enough for our purposes, which is to give a feel for a general sense of what's being preached.

So, the data we're looking at here in terms of the charts is like 2017. But in terms of what's coming next, this book, Soft Patriarchs, New Men, that's from 2004. And he points out this strange feature within conservative Protestantism.

He says, given the clear and overwhelming opposition to homosexuality and abortion, conservative Protestant discourse regarding divorce and remarriage is characterized by a striking level of ambivalence and dissensus.

So, in other words, if you ask a conservative Protestant, what does God teach about homosexuality or abortion, you're likely to get a very clear answer.

But if you ask those same Protestants, especially Protestant clergy, when he's looking at Protestant preachers, what does God say about divorce and remarriage?

What's the Christian teaching on divorce and remarriage?

You're likely not to get a clear answer.

Or if you do get a clear answer, we don't know at the outset what clear answer you're going to get, because there's three major camps.

First, Wilcox says, a small minority of conservative Protestant leaders take the position that divorce is totally impermissible.

For instance, a 1980 poll of Southern Baptist clergy found that 16% believe that divorce should be avoided under any circumstance.

16%! This is not 16% of, like, your really radically liberal Christians.

This is 16% of Southern Baptist clergy.

So, among conservative Christians, fully 84% of them aren't willing to say Mark 10 is what Jesus teaches about divorce and remarriage.

That if you get divorced and remarry, you're committing adultery.

That, in a way, speaks to how shocking Jesus's teaching is that more than four out of five Southern Baptist preachers aren't preaching the truth of the gospel here because it's too hard.

So, that's the first camp.

But, Wilcox says, most leaders cluster around two more permissive positions.

So, the second camp, which is actually the one we're going to look at today, the more conservative of these permissive positions, we'll just call it the second position because calling it the conservative permissive position of conservative Protestants is a unwieldy and confusing name.

So, the second position, adopted by figures like Dr. James Dobson, folks on the family, attempts to hew closely to the guidance, notice it's not command now, it's guidance, regarding divorce and remarriage found in specific biblical texts.

It holds that Christ's condemnation of divorce means that divorce and remarriage are not permissible for Christians except for the biblical grounds of adultery in Matthew 19.9 or the desertion of an unbelieving spouse, 1 Corinthians 7.15. We're going to unpack mostly the first of those two alleged grounds, but we'll get to that.

Nevertheless, many proponents in this second camp perform elaborate hermeneutical maneuvers to apply the desertion exception.

So, in 1 Corinthians 7, St. Paul says that if you're not a baptized believer, you become a believer, and your unbelieving spouse abandons you, you are free to get married.

Many of the more conservative Protestants will say, well, basically anyone who abandons you is acting as an unbeliever, so it just becomes almost tautological.

So, it's no longer you're abandoned by an unbelieving spouse, if you're abandoned for any reason by anybody.

So, it changes the biblical exception, which isn't really an exception when you understand what's going on, but I'll get there.

And then you have the third position, again, among conservative Protestant clergy, held by, in Wilcox's term, a sizable minority of conservative Protestant leaders, which dispenses entirely with the effort to follow the letter of New Testament teachings on divorce.

It just says, yeah, we're not going to listen to what Jesus says here.

This position views divorce as sinful, but much like the mainline Protestant position, invokes the spirit of Christianity to argue that remarriage should be open to divorced Christians, regardless of the reason they divorced.

So, this is just, you can divorce and remarry for any reason.

And yeah, maybe it's a sin, but it's not going to keep you from going to heaven, it's not going to stop you from being a member of the church, it's not going to stop you from having your remarriage ceremony in the church.

We'll bless this thing that Jesus calls sinful, that he calls adultery, we'll call it marriage.

So, as I said, I'm going to focus on that middle position, because I agree with the first position.

The third position seems so out there that it's pretty obvious that it's wrong.

The second position that says generally divorce and remarriage is bad, but there are these exceptional cases that the Bible gives us outs on.

So, here's Alan Parr giving an example of this middle position.

He said, I believe that the Bible provides four grounds for divorce with the assumption that the person would get remarried.

The first is adultery.

Jesus says that if a spouse commits adultery, then the other spouse has the option to divorce and remarry.

However, we must always remember that reconciliation is always preferred if the offending spouse is truly repentant.

So, hopefully you see why I started with J.P. Meyer's thing about how Jesus isn't just giving an ideal set of circumstances, he's actually giving a commandment.

Because Protestants looking for escape passages talk as if Jesus is describing some impossible ideal.

You know, this is your first choice, this is plan A. It's to be preferred that you don't get divorced.

That's like saying, you know, Jesus prefers if you don't murder people.

No, he commands you not to murder people.

So, this is not just a matter of divine preference, but of divine command.

Jesus isn't just wishing, he's commanding.

And so, when we disobey him, we're not just like falling short of his wishes, we're not just like disappointing his aspirations, we're sinning against him.

In any case, notice two things from part of reading of Matthew 19. And again, he's just an example of this very common position.

Number one, he claims that Jesus is creating an exception for adultery.

Number two, this alleged adultery exception applies only to the cheated-upon spouse, not to the spouse who does the cheating.

Now, we're going to look through biblical evidence, and you'll see Protestants have simply made this up.

Literally, you won't find this anywhere.

Now, to be sure, in 1 Corinthians, if you're abandoned as the believing spouse, there is an exception there between the one doing the abandoning and the abandoned.

But there's two distinctions.

One, the one doing the abandoning is not Christian, and two, they're abandoning.

In adultery, you don't have any kind of language like that.

It doesn't say, if you're cheated on, you're allowed to get remarried.

But if you cheat on someone else, you're not.

That's just nowhere.

That is completely made up by Protestants.

And if you don't believe me, find a chapter or verse.

It doesn't exist.

And the people who say these things never point to them.

I'll get into why they have to make these extra-biblical, non-biblical kind of legal distinctions, because it shows the impossibility of their position.

But before I get there, the big question we're dealing with here is, does Jesus make an adultery exception or not?

I want you to put yourself in the position of someone in the first century.

Let's say you're living in an era before the Bible is all bound together, but maybe you haven't heard Jesus preach, or you're just relying on the New Testament documents.

This could be first century, second century, third century.

And so, you want to answer this question.

Does Jesus allow me to get divorced and remarried if my spouse cheats on me?

And so, you open the scroll, the Gospel of Mark, and you read that whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her.

Okay, very clear answer.

I'm not allowed to.

There's no exception for adultery.

Then maybe you are fortunate enough to have the scroll of Luke as well.

Luke 16, verse 18. Everyone who divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery.

Okay, very fair, equally clear.

Or Romans 7, maybe you're fortunate enough to have that letter as well.

A married woman is bound by law to her husband as long as he lives.

If her husband dies, she is discharged from the law concerning her husband.

Accordingly, she will be called an adulteress if she lives with another man while her husband is alive.

All right, one clear teaching after another after another.

So, what is going on here?

Why do Protestant, conservative Protestants tend to say that the answer is actually adultery is permissible biblical grounds to get divorced and remarried?

Well, largely by ignoring all three of the texts I just cited, and instead focusing exclusively on one place, the Gospel of Matthew.

Because there are two lines that are in the Gospel of Matthew that are distorted.

The first one is in Matthew 5. This is Sermon on the Mount.

Jesus says, it was said to you, whoever divorces his wife, let him give her a certificate of divorce.

But I say to you that everyone who divorces his wife, and then there's a clause here that isn't in any of the other sources, except on the ground of, and it's translated here, unchastity.

Other translations are going to say fornication.

But the Greek word is porneia.

It's where the word pornography comes from.

Porneia, except on the ground of porneia, makes her an adulteress.

Okay, so something is going on here, except for porneia.

That's what we're going to call this from now on.

Because in Matthew 19, verse 9, he says the same thing.

Whoever divorces his wife, except for porneia, and marries another commits adultery.

So, on the basis of this, many Protestants have claimed, okay, this porneia thing is an exception for adultery.

So, for instance, here's Dr. Thomas Schreiner making just that argument and making the point correctly that this is the standard Protestant view historically.

The third view, which is the traditional Protestant view, is that divorce and remarriage, they're never the ideal.

And even when sin is committed, we try to keep marriages together, right?

We don't say, if there's sexual sin, then you must divorce, do we?

We work at trying to keep marriages together.

But the third view says, if there's sexual sin, divorce and remarriage are permitted.

In fact, this even leaves Dr. Schreiner to say, but I think we stick with what Jesus said.

And I think Jesus said, yes, it is not sin.

It is not sin, in some cases, to be divorced and to remarry.

Okay, great.

So, you've got in Mark's gospel, in Luke's gospel, and in the writings of St. Paul, very clearly, Jesus saying divorce and remarriage is sinful.

And then you have Protestants who say, it's not sinful, as long as there are certain conditions, like adultery.

There's going to be several problems with this view.

So, here are five major problems with the adultery exception view.

Before I get there, I will just say this.

In Dr. Schreiner's defense, he is right.

Martin Luther is on his side.

John Calvin is on his side.

He should know that with one exception, Ambrosiaster, none of the early Christians are on his side.

They don't take the Protestant view.

They have a much higher moral standard, much more shocking, much more biblical.

So, I don't want to pick on this too much, because I think a lot of English-speaking Christians say, look, it says except for fornication or except for unchastity.

Doesn't that mean exactly what these Protestants are saying it means?

No. Here are five reasons why red flags should be going off.

First, as I've already alluded, it creates a biblical contradiction, because Jesus and Mark and Luke forbids divorce and in Romans, while Jesus and Matthew's gospel permits divorce and remarriage under the exact same circumstances.

That someone saying, I got cheated on, can I get divorced and remarried?

According to the Protestant view, it depends which book they happen to read, which is why Protestants of this view always point them to Matthew and then just are silent about Mark and Luke and Romans, because Mark, Luke, and Romans contradict the idea that you can get divorced and remarried.

We can put the problem a little bit differently.

Imagine for a second that Jesus was a Protestant.

Imagine he actually meant, I'm fine with people getting divorced and remarried if they've been cheated on.

Why doesn't Mark know that?

Why doesn't Luke know that?

Why doesn't St. Paul know that?

Wouldn't you think they would write those things?

Okay, so that's the first major problem.

It's a stunning thing to say Jesus had this exception clause, and three of the four authors who described his teaching on marriage in this direct way didn't know about it or didn't write about it, even when they're directly on point writing what his teaching is about divorce and remarriage.

Second, there literally isn't an adultery exception, even in Matthew.

And I know that sounds very strange, because you hear about an adultery exception all the time, but it's not the word for adultery.

So, moikai, my Greek pronunciation is not great.

Moikai is the word for adultery in Greek, and that's not the word Jesus uses.

As I mentioned, he uses porneia.

And he uses moikai twice in Matthew 19. So, in Matthew 19, verse 9, he says that if you get divorced except for porneia and marry another, you commit adultery.

Moikai.

So, adultery is mentioned, but it's not the grounds.

It's not the exception clause.

It doesn't say, if you get divorced except for adultery and marry someone else, you commit adultery.

No, it says except for porneia.

And likewise, if she divorces you and marries another, she commits adultery.

But notice the exception clause doesn't use the same word that's used for adultery in this verse, in Matthew 19, verse 9. There's a Greek word for adultery, very clear Greek word for adultery, that is not the word used here.

And to make this, and that's the same thing in Matthew 5 as well, that except for porneia, you commit adultery.

So, porneia, does that mean the same thing as moikai?

It does not.

And this is very clear, even in the Gospel of Matthew, Matthew 15, verse 19, Jesus is talking about the sins that come out from within, and he mentions both moikai, adultery, and porneia.

So, whatever you think porneia is, the one thing we know it isn't, is adultery.

Because it's distinguished in 1519 from adultery, and it's frankly distinguished in Matthew 5 and in Matthew 19 from adultery.

Because when you look at each of those things, Jesus is using two separate words to describe two separate realities.

To say those mean the same thing makes all three of those passages redundant.

That's a problem, right?

And I'll get into what porneia actually means, but for now, it's enough to know whatever it means, it isn't that.

Third problem, the exception swallows the rule.

Like, if you really believe in a sexual sin exception or an adultery exception, that's unworkable.

Here's what I mean.

In Matthew 5, in verse 32, Jesus said that divorce and remarriage is adulterous, except on the grounds of porneia, or porneias, in that case, it's because of convocation.

But like three or four verses earlier, Jesus says, everyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart.

So, in there, unlike in Matthew verse 32, where it uses porneia, in Matthew 5 verse 28, it actually uses, like, hi, it actually uses the word for adultery.

There he actually is talking about adultery, not porneia.

So, if you think that there's an adultery exception, and because of Matthew 5, and Matthew 5 tells you that you commit adultery every time you look lustfully, this is going to create something of a problem, right?

You can't get divorced and remarried unless your spouse struggles with lust.

Do you know the sheer number of marriages that would be annulable or avoidable, or you'd be able to divorce and remarry?

That's an absurd exception clause.

I mean, remember the reaction of the apostles.

Jesus' teaching is a high enough standard that they balk and say, if such is the case of a man with his wife, it is not expedient to marry, because you're in it for the long haul, right?

That's the point of Matthew 19 verse 10, that this is something far beyond the Mosaic law, where you could get divorced for basically any reason.

But under this interpretation, Protestants have brought us back to the Mosaic law, where you can get divorced for basically any reason, because how many marriages could one person not point to sexual sins in the other one?

Now, that raises the question, then, how serious is sexual sin?

Well, we've already seen it isn't actually the word for adultery.

It's not moikai.

So, is it adultery by lust and in your heart?

Is pornography?

Is what exactly, on this biblical interpretation, are grounds for divorce and remarriage?

Because whatever that exception clause you're drawing is, it looks pretty huge.

The fourth problem, this creates a weird adultery out, and this gets into the legalism I cited before, and I'll explain what I mean in a second.

The bizarre result of this interpretation of Matthew 19 is that it means you're not allowed to leave your wife and get married to another woman, unless you cheat on her first.

If you cheat on her first, then there's adultery.

So, then the marriage is dissolved, and now you can get remarried.

It's a very perverse set of incentive structures, where you get to have a new Christian marriage, but only if you commit the sin of adultery first.

Does that make any sense?

It does not.

And so, many Protestants, realizing this, invent these totally unbiblical rules about how the offended party gets to get remarried, but the offending party doesn't, because they realize, like, you don't want to read the Bible in such a way that you give incentives to people to commit adultery, and yet their reading of Matthew 19 gives incentives to people to commit adultery.

And so, they have to say, no, no, no, this exception for adultery only applies if you're the victim.

Now, that's literally not found in the text.

It just says, except for porneia, and it also doesn't make any sense.

I mean, it makes sense on a logistical level why they don't want to encourage adultery, but think about it for a second.

John and Jane are married.

John cheats on Jane.

This means, from the Protestant view, again, this middle Protestant view, Jane can view her marriage as dissolved, and she's free to get divorced and remarried.

John can't, because he's still considered married to Jane, but Jane's married to somebody else.

So, it doesn't make sense, right?

Unless you're just going to say, as punishment, John's not allowed to get remarried.

But none of that is in the scriptures at all.

All of that is entirely disfabricated, like layer upon layer of made-up teaching, because you've misinterpreted Matthew 19. And then the fifth and final problem is, well, why just sexual sin?

If Jesus is really saying, you know, adultery is so gross that if you commit adultery, your marriage is done, and so divorce and remarriage is okay there, what about all the other serious problems in a marriage?

What about things like abuse?

You're going to tell me that the woman who's a victim of domestic abuse can't get divorced and remarried, but the woman who's been cheated on can?

On what consistency, what coherence kind of explains any of that?

So, so far there, I've only been tearing down, just showing this popular imagination adultery exception is a terrible interpretation of the biblical text that doesn't make any sense when you actually try to make sense of it.

But let me build up.

What's the actual exception for porneia?

And as we're going to see, it's not really an exception at all.

And as a second question, why do we only find the porneia clause in the Gospel of Matthew?

I think it'll become very clear when you understand what porneia is.

But first, Fitzmyer's response is to 101 question on the Dead Sea Scrolls.

He asked the question, what is meant by porneia?

And he says, it occurs elsewhere in Matthew, only in 1519, that the only time we see the word porneia are the three times I've mentioned, the two times where he says, except for porneia, and the third time when he distinguishes murder, adultery, porneia.

And so you've got my chi adultery, and it's clearly not that, right?

So we've already seen that part.

But etymologically, Fitzmyer says, it means something like fornication, prostitution, or harlotry.

It comes from porne, harlot, or the verb to fornicate or to act as harlot.

So you can see, again, where words like pornography come from in English.

But just as Fitzmyer points out that historically, this word porneia was used of every kind of unlawful sexual intercourse.

That word unlawful doesn't just mean immoral.

It actually means contrary to the Mosaic law.

We see this very, very clearly in Acts chapter 15. This is a passage where a lot of people don't understand when they read it, because it seems totally arbitrary.

So remember, Acts 15, the controversy is, what happens with Gentile believers?

Do they have to follow the Mosaic law?

Do they have to get circumcised?

And the Council of Jerusalem says no, in verse 28, it has seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us to lay upon you no greater burden than these necessary things.

Number one, that you abstain from what has been sacrificed to idols.

Two, and from blood and from what is strangled.

And three, from porneia.

So the Gentiles are told to abstain from food sacrificed to idols, from food with the blood in it or it's been strangled.

So an unlawful method of food preparation.

And third, from porneia.

And you're just like, wait a second.

Are they saying, be careful how you eat your burger and also don't commit adultery?

I mean, because under the Mosaic law, yeah, sure, you can't commit adultery.

But Gentiles weren't supposed to be committing adultery in the first place, whereas they could eat food that had been sacrificed to idols, they could have rare steak.

Those are not part of natural law, but the sin of adultery is.

So this interpretation, if you read porneia here to mean adultery, even if you read it to mean fornication, you've completely misread the text.

And it doesn't make any sense of why would the Gentiles be receiving this as a new burden, right?

All Christians, Jewish or Gentile, should know don't be having sex outside of marriage.

So what is being imposed on the Gentiles, that was a debatable point, right?

Because the other two are debatable points.

You could see that maybe they would be allowed to eat food sacrificed to idols.

In the context St. Paul is dealing with, he deals with Christians who are allowed to eat food sacrificed to idols in places like Corinth.

Or you can imagine eating food with the blood in it.

In fact, Christians do that all the time.

Again, rare steak.

So you've got two things that are very clearly not part of the universally binding moral law.

And then this third thing is porneia.

So what is going on here?

Well, to make sense of this, you don't just need to know the etymology of the Greek word.

You need to know how the Jews use the word.

And it referred to unlawful relationships, like relationships that were contrary to the Mosaic law.

Now, if you want to see this very clearly, I'd encourage you to pull up Leviticus 17 and 18. Now, if you're fortunate, you can just see the headers.

So in the RSV and RSVCE, the headers in Leviticus 17 and 18 go in this order.

The slaughtering of animals, where it talks about you can't eat food sacrificed to idols.

Then halfway through 17, eating blood prohibited, where you can't eat animals that have been strangled or filled with blood in them because that's forbidden as well.

And then third, just says sexual relations.

And so what Acts 15 is talking about, what the Council of Jerusalem is telling the Gentiles, is they're not under the general Mosaic law.

But there are these three provisions in Leviticus 17 and 18 that they are still expected to keep.

And if we understand that, we'll understand what Porneia is all about.

So in Leviticus 17, verse 7, we're told that they shall no more slay their sacrifices for tatters after whom they play the harlot.

This shall be a statute forever to them throughout their generations.

And in verse 8, this law against food sacrificed to idols is explicitly applied not only to the house of Israel, but also the strangers that sojourn among them.

That's the first one.

The second, verse 12, no person among you shall eat blood, neither shall any stranger who sojourns among you eat blood.

Now I'm mentioning this to say one of the reasons in Acts 15 that's given for why these three things can be imposed on the Gentile believers is that they'd already heard the Mosaic law because it's been proclaimed on the Sabbath in every synagogue.

So if you were a Greek in Corinth or wherever, even if you weren't in Jerusalem, you should know what the Jewish law is on these points because you were expected, if you were living in a Jewish area, to keep it as well.

There were plenty of things in the Mosaic law that were only on the house of Israel.

And if you were a sojourner, you weren't expected to keep those things.

But in Matthew 17 and 18, these things are applicable not only to the house of Israel, but also to those living within their borders.

So if you're going to live in this area, you're expected to follow these things.

I looked at the two food ones.

This is to prepare you.

We're getting to porneia because that's the third one.

Leviticus 18, verse 6, none of you shall approach anyone near of kin to him to uncover nakedness.

The porneia in this particular context focuses on prohibitions against marriage because of close kinship.

So you can't have relations with a parent, with a child, with a grandchild, with an aunt, with an uncle.

But fascinatingly, you also can't have relations with your stepmom.

Leviticus 18, verse 8, you shall not uncover the nakedness of your father's wife.

It is your father's nakedness.

This is described by the Jews as porneia.

In 1 Corinthians 5, we see St. Paul doing just that.

He deals with exactly this case and says, it is actually reported that there is porneia among you and of a kind that is not tolerated even among pagans for a man has his father's wife.

So that's the exception.

There's this whole realm of sexual sin of you can't legally be married to that person.

You can imagine a culture in which people did get married to their stepparents.

As far as I know, it's totally legal here in America.

I don't have any cases of it, but I think it's actually legal.

It's still gross and wrong.

So this points to why the porneia exception isn't really an exception.

This leads us to a harmony between Matthew, Mark, Luke, and Paul, because the background for the porneia rules is described very explicitly in Leviticus 18. In verse 3, God says, you shall not do as they do in the land of Egypt, where you dwelt, and you shall not do as they do in the land of Canaan, to which I am bringing you.

You shall not walk in their statutes.

So the whole point of Leviticus 18 is don't follow the sexual morality of the Gentiles.

Now, do you see why in Acts 15, the sexual morality of the Gentiles is directly at issue?

That, yeah, you've got one set of sexual mores.

We're going to have to have you follow a higher one if you're going to be a Christian.

And particularly, this includes how we approach marriage.

And we see this reflected as well in 1 Corinthians 5. We already heard the verse, but notice Paul says that there's a kind of porneia that's not even tolerated among pagans.

So it's not that there is a sexual free-for-all in Egyptian or in Greek or Canaanite culture.

It's just that they had a lower sexual morality, and they were expected to have a higher one.

Now, this explains exactly what the issue is.

Someone who'd come from a Greek background, who'd come from a Gentile background, pagan background, might say, okay, here's my problem.

I've become a Christian now, and I know Jesus says I cannot get divorced and remarried.

But the woman I'm married to is a close relative.

It's a cousin.

It's an aunt.

It's whatever.

What do I do?

And the exception clause in Matthew says, the divorce and remarriage teaching of Jesus is not meant to force you into unlawful marriage.

Unlawful marriage.

You're not forced to remain married to someone you never should have been married to in the first place, right?

If you've gotten married to your stepmom, and then you become a Christian, you can divorce and remarry.

In fact, you have to get divorced, right?

You can't just continue in that relationship, because that relationship isn't God joining the two of you together.

It is fornication.

You are unmarried, because here's a distinction.

Adultery is sex in which one or more of the persons is married to someone else.

Fornication is when you're not married.

And so, in describing one category of marriages as porneia, the Jews were calling these Greek marriages not marriage.

They're calling it harlotry, not real marriage.

So, I ask, could you imagine such a case today?

Well, let's say you've got someone who's in a civil, same-sex marriage, and then they convert, and they say, I know I'm not supposed to get divorced and remarried in Christianity.

It's adultery.

Should I stay with this person of the same sex?

If you asked those 18% of Baptist pastors who know that divorce and remarriage is never allowed, if God would want them to get divorced and remarried in this case, I bet 100% of them would say, yeah, this is not what we mean when we say divorce and remarriage is never allowed, because this was never a marriage in the first place.

This gets to the heart of why the sexual morality of Israel was different than the sexual morality of the Gentiles or of the Egyptians or the Canaanites.

And it's not just God said so, because there's a reason God said so.

It's going to lead us right back to where we began.

In Leviticus 18.8, we saw that you couldn't sleep with your stepmother, your father's wife.

And it says why?

It is your father's nakedness.

What does that mean?

What means your father is married to this woman or was married to this woman.

The two have become one flesh.

And so to have relations with her would be like having relations with your own father, because the two are one flesh.

The Egyptians and the Canaanites have no concept of this because they don't believe the two become one.

But as Jews and as Christians, if you take seriously the idea of the two become one flesh, then you can see why that's going to invalidate certain marriages like marrying an in-law.

Now, how one interprets that has been controversial throughout Christian history.

Can-in-law used to be much more restrictive for, let's say, your brother married a woman.

You couldn't marry your sister-in-law, even though neither of your blood relatives at all.

That was kind of following the porneia system in Leviticus.

Now, that no longer happens.

But the point there is there was an entire category of invalid marriages.

And they're invalid because we believe God didn't join you to that other person.

Now, why didn't he join you to that other person?

Maybe because they were already joined to somebody else, maybe for whatever other reason.

The point here is that porneia, although the particular context of Leviticus 18 is about porneia because of incest or close family relations, in a broader sense, it just means a marriage that's contrary to the law.

So, go back to Mark chapter 10, verse 9. Jesus says, what therefore God has joined together.

And then, again, the translation is, let not man put asunder, but it's really like you're prohibited from putting asunder.

And we could even go beyond that and say it's impossible to put it asunder.

You can't undo what God has done.

You're not stronger than God.

And so, we're left with exactly one question.

If you're in a complicated marital situation, the question is, well, did God join you and your spouse or whoever together?

Did God join that union?

Did he make that union?

Or is it an unmarried sexual relationship?

Because if you're not validly married to one another, then it's porneia.

If you are validly married to each other, then it's impossible to get divorced and remarried.

So, once you understand it that way, you realize that the exception clause in Matthew is not really an exception at all, because it's saying, yeah, the teaching on divorce and remarriage doesn't apply to people who aren't married, which someone who is coming from a Gentile background is not going to be even asking that question in the same way because the whole porneia system is a very Jewish understanding of marriage.

So, this hopefully explains why you find it in Matthew, because Matthew knows his readers who are Jewish are going to be more likely to ask, what about these complicated legal cases of porneia?

And his point there, including this clause, is it doesn't apply to those, which again, everybody else I think can just take that for granted, that when we say divorce and remarriage is not permitted, we mean when there's a valid marriage.

We don't mean when there's not a valid marriage.

So, if you've forced someone at gunpoint to marry you, that's not a valid marriage.

They're not bound to stick it out with you.

God didn't join the two of you together.

You tried to at gunpoint, right?

Those things are not valid marriages, and therefore, you are free to get remarried in quotation marks because you're really just free to get married for the first time.

This, by the way, explains this very controversial part of Catholic practice that's very confusing to many Protestants, the idea of an annulment.

An annulment is not a declaration.

There used to be a marriage here, and now there isn't. An annulment is a church trying to answer the question, is there a valid marriage?

Has God joined the two of them together?

Because if so, there's nothing we can do about it.

Or was there a human attempt at coming together that wasn't sanctioned by God for a variety of reasons?

The person was psychologically incapacitated or under duress, or they're the same sex, or they're related, or one of them's already married, or any of these other reasons that could invalidate a marriage.

And so, in the Catechism, in paragraph 1629, it explains what an annulment is and isn't, that if you have a reason that renders the marriage null and void, the church, after an examination of the situation by the competent ecclesiastical tribunal, can declare the nullity of a marriage, i.e. that the marriage never existed.

So, an annulment is not, it was good and now it's not.

It never existed in the first place.

And of course, in that case, you are free to get married, provided any natural obligations of a previous union are discharged.

You may be in a situation where you need to take care of children you have with this person.

And so, it might be a more complicated situation there, but you don't have some kind of marital union with them if God didn't join the two of you together, even if the state says you do.

That's what an annulment is asking.

And so, that's how it differs.

So, Caesar can say two people are together.

That is not the question we're asking about.

The question is, did God join the two of you together?

Now, I present this radical teaching because I think it's vital that we do so.

Jesus thought it was important that we do so.

And it's discouraging to see many Christians divorcing at very nearly the same rate as everybody else, partly because you've got preachers who are constantly downplaying, watering down, distorting, and denying what Jesus has said.

But I want to close with a couple of things.

Number one, kind of a word to those who are already divorced or separated, because this is not a particularly pastoral kind of approach here.

I'm just telling you the truth about what Jesus said, but I know marital situations can be complicated.

So, a few things.

Number one, as canon law acknowledges, there can be valid reasons where your mental or physical health are seriously in danger.

And in those cases, you might need to leave.

You might need to separate.

You might even need to get a civil divorce for the protection of you, your kids, family well-being in general.

That is possible.

That is not undoing what God has done.

That might be undoing what Caesar has done, right?

You might be creating a legal separation where the human law had created a union.

But in that, you're not separating the bond that God has created.

And as long as you know that and know what you are and aren't doing, there may be grounds where that's the appropriate course of action.

And second, that maybe isn't always, maybe a sign that there was never a union in the first place.

If the person you're married to is, you know, abusive and controlling, it often happens they were abusive and controlling beforehand in such a way that you may not have been as free as you should have been to say yes in marriage.

Marital cases are complicated.

So, I just want to say that, like, Jesus' teaching is quite radical, that if you're validly married, you are in it for life until one of you dies.

You cannot get divorced and remarried.

Jesus is not there settling the often more complicated question of, how do I know if I'm validly married?

For many of us, this can be very clear.

We are validly married.

Other people have found themselves in complicated, messy situations, maybe especially if you have, like, a conversion in your own story.

It happens.

Those things are difficult.

The second piece of maybe more pastoral advice.

In 1 Corinthians 7, St. Paul says, to the married I give charge, not I, but the Lord.

So, this is from God, that the wife should not separate from her husband, but if she does, let her remain single or else be reconciled to her husband, and that the husband should not divorce his wife.

So, if for some other reason you found yourself separated, found yourself even divorced, the Greek word there just can mean divorced, then St. Paul says, you've got two options.

You can either try to restore the original marriage, or you can stay single.

And that's pretty clear, right?

He doesn't say, well, since you've separated from your husband, therefore he's an abandoned party, and therefore he can divorce and remarry.

None of that exists.

None of that's true.

That's not what he says.

And he explains why as well in verse 16. He says, wife, how do you know whether you will save your husband?

Husband, how do you know whether you will save your wife?

Because I think people can often hear this and say, what in the world are you guys talking about as Christians?

You've got to stay married in your own mind to someone who maybe has already moved on to somebody else?

And the answer is, yeah, you do.

In the same way that, you know, maybe your kids have disowned you and claim that they've got another set of parents.

They really like their friends, mom and dad, and they say, these are my real mom and dad.

The reality is they're still your kids.

That's a family relationship that can never be undone, no matter how much you failed them or they failed you or whatever.

And you still have an obligation to them.

That obligation might simply be praying for them, but there's a bond there that existed, that's God given and can't be destroyed.

Well, just like the parent-child bond, the husband and wife bond can't just be destroyed.

It's dissolved by one thing only, death.

And so, maybe the other person has run off and they're living a totally different life.

They've got another family somewhere.

Maybe that just means that you're praying for them.

But you have some sort of relationship to them that you're honoring by not creating a second marriage, right?

Because the two of you have become one flesh.

I know that's a hard teaching.

I've also known people who've lived it and that there's a great holiness in pursuing that path.

So, I give that just as encouragement.

Next week, I want to shift ever so slightly and say, okay, Jesus has some really shocking things to say about the church and really shocking things to say about marriage.

And I don't know if you've ever noticed this, but quite frequently, when you see a conversation about one, it turns out to be a conversation about the other.

And I find this fascinating and I want to explore it with you.

So, I hope you'll come back and listen to see what's this connection between Jesus's radical teaching on marriage and his radical teaching about the church.

For Shameless Potpourri, I'm Joe Heschmeyer.

God bless you.