Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her;
and if she divorces her husband and marries another she [also] commits
adultery. (Mark 10:11)
There it was, the Lord’s Word, simple, uncompromising, absolute, with no
casuist’s accommodation to special cases or extenuating circumstances. People
who divorced one person and then married another are really, in the Lord’s
sight, not married at all, but are only having an adulterous affair. And that was
that. True, Jesus did not expressly say that, once wed, they went on living in sin
every day of their married lives. But the church had long inferred , and with a
certain logical necessity, that if divorcees commit adultery by marrying another
person, they must be recommitting adultery every time they have carnal
knowledge.
Harsh as it seemed, the church believed that its exclusion of such people was
nothing else but obedience to the clear teaching of the Bible. The Bible said that
adulterers cannot be members of the Kingdom of God. Jesus said that divorced
and remarried people are adulterers. And so any Bible believing church had to
exclude the remarried from the Kingdom of God and the Body of Christ.
The only way they could clean their slate with God and the church, then, was to
break up their marriages. The ideal solution would be for them to have gone
back to their previous spouses. But in the event that their previous spouses had
also remarried, maybe bred a nest full of young ones, and had no intention of
breaking up their families, the next best thing was to live as celibates. Either
way, go back to their first spouses or stay celibate, their only entree into the
church’s inner life was to break up their present marriage.
What their exclusion always came down to, outwardly, was banishment from the
Lord’s Supper. They may have been welcomed at its Sunday services, invited to
its scalloped potato suppers, permitted to put money in the offering plates, and
quite possibly been well liked by everyone in the congregation. But banishment
from the Supper signed and sealed the church’s judgment that they were
banished from the circle of grace and the fellowship of Christ. While some
churches may construe the supper to be a public dispensary of Gods grace, for
mine it was a private meal for certified Christians. And when such a church
turned you away from the Lord’s Supper, it was saying that, no matter how