Reading through this thread with interest, since I am a Christian and was at the time my husband divorced me, twelve years ago, and am also now remarried.
First of all, about the Roman Catholics: doctrine and practice are often separated by a gulf of varying wideness and depth! Divorce is not OK, but annulments they are famous for. As was already mentioned about men and mistresses etc., the Catholic church is extraordinarily accomodating to the world, to the extent of allowing pagan rituals on the steps of its churches in South America. And while the doctrine says you cannot sin over and over again and then go just confess it and get absolution, that is exactly what a good many Catholics do, because they have been taught that if they play the game they are saved. Because Catholicism is not the only game in town for a number of them, they are more than willing to play two games...
OK, now about divorce and remarriage. I was married for 20 years to a man who had a series of affairs for the vast majority of those years. Because he was a contractor and had to have evening meetings with clients and prospective clients, I was pretty clueless. All I knew was that, as a wife, as mother of his children, as his business partner -- I could never please him, no matter how hard I tried. For about the first 12 or 13 years I tried desperately to do everything and be perfect. The last years I had given up the perfection part and was busy raising our children, who could never please him either. And I remember them trying so hard...
July of 1991 he left with one of his other women. He walked out on all of us. He told me, at first, that he was going to get a room for himself so he could have time alone with the Lord. In other words, this man who was head usher in the church was trying to get me to approve of his leaving right up to the very last minute! But he never looked back and, a year later when the divorce he filed for was final, he was remarried to his new woman in just a few weeks.
Me? I cried for a year and then the kids and I came together as a team and somehow made it. He never visited, never cared how the kids were doing.
I swore I would never marry again. I was quite sure that no matter if he broke his promise about marriage to me, I would keep mine to him. And that is the way it was for at least seven years. I would not even talk to a man if the situation was such that I might cause even a shadow of doubt in his wife or lady friend, because I never wanted anyone to go anywhere near the hell I had been through.
During those years, after almost 30 years of teaching, I resigned. Within a year I had sort of fallen into science editing, which I still enjoy on a freelance basis. One of the men who asked me to review a paper for him was in a field I had no knowledge of: physics. So I refused him. He kept after me, as he wanted to know if someone who was basically scientifically literate but not in physics could understand it. We ended up working on that paper together and became friends. We both had talked about the belief that neither one of us was marriage material: him because he was caretaker for his autistic sister and me because I was divorced.
But gradually the friendship deepened. I totally resisted what was happening, but that couldn't go on forever. And so we both started digging into the situation of a woman divorced by an unfaithful husband. Was she or was she not free to remarry? We knew God's ideal was one marriage for life. Man, however, rarely lives by God's ideal.
We talked to a number of pastors, individually (we had to, since he was Australian and I was American and the Pacific was usually between us!). My brother is an elder in his church and he spent time talking with me, too. At first I was simply determined that remarriage was wrong. There were no if's, and's, or but's for me.
But among the different pastors and my brother, the following emerged:
1. In ancient Israel, if a spouse was unfaithful, that person would be stoned to death, thus leaving the innocent party a widow or widower and totally free to remarry. We don't stone adulterers today. Does that then mean the innocent party is not free to remarry if the unfaithful person leaves?
A week or so after my husband had left, the Lord had directed my Bible study to Proverbs. At that time I read something which had caused me to almost scream at God, "NO! He's my HUSBAND!" But God meant what He had had Solomon write. Here is what I had read:
It [wisdom] will save you also from the adulteress,
from the wayward wife with her seductive words,
who has left the partner of her youth [which was the case with my husband's other woman]
and ignored the covenant she made before God.
For her house leads down to death
and her paths to the spirits of the dead.
None who go to her return
or attain the paths of life.
Prov. 2:16-19
It was God's Word to me that my husband was lost to me forever. And I cried out in agony. I really did. I had loved that man and commited to him entirely.
But God's Word was and is right. He had gone and that was that. But it also told me something else in that last phrase: in God's eyes, he was dead. Permanently. It did not occur to me until years later that this meant I was in the same position as a widow in God's eyes.
2. In Matthew 19:9, Jesus is talking about divorce and remarriage, and He says,
"I tell you that anyone who divorces his wife, except for marital unfaithfulness, and married another woman, commits adultery."
Here Jesus is presuming the man will remarry, and it is the circumstances around that He is referring to. Is it to be considered different for a woman? Do Jesus' words differentiate between a man who is married to an unfaithful woman and a woman who may be married to an unfaithful man? No, they don't. Because He treated men and women equally. The lesson was given in terms of a man because that is the way the custom was. It had nothing to do with a separation of the situations between men and women. And if that were even to be considered, then Proverbs 2 evened it out.
3. In 1 Cor. 7 -- the treatise on marriage -- verse 15 reads:
But if the unbeliever leaves, let him do so. A believing man or woman is not bound in such circumstances; God has called us to live in peace.
"Is not bound." To what? To the marriage. To be not bound is to be free. Free for what? Free for all the options any single person has, including remarriage.
I had the clear option to remain single or to be remarried.
Barry Setterfield and I were married on October 21, 2000. We have been married now for 2 1/2 years. I never knew marriage could be like this. I never knew what it was to be loved like this. To have a godly husband who prays for me and with me consistently, who leads family Bible studies, who always has time for me no matter how busy he is, who loves to help around the house, who has served the Lord his entire adult life, who is causing our adult children to blossom, even this late, in the light of a father's love and acceptance....
I have been blessed over and above anything I ever expected to happen in this life.
One of the pictures taken at our wedding is at the bottom of his net bio here:
http://www.setterfield.org/bio.html
That is also the day my picture here was taken.
I know we are in God's will. I know that as surely as I have ever known anything in my life, and the joy and peace that has come with it are indescribable.
