Divorce and Remarriage: Finding Guidance for Personal Decisions

Book Overview

Divorce. No one likes it, but it doesn't go away. Even among Christians, the divorce rate continues to climb. How should Christians approach this issue? May Christians ever legitimately divorce? If they divorce legitimately, may they remarry?

Not everyone who appeals to Scripture agrees on how we should understand what it says about divorce and remarriage. In this Spectrum Multiview volume, four authors present their distinct perspectives...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0830812830
• ISBN13: 9780830812837
• Release Date: April 1990
• Publisher: IVP Academic
• Length: 269 Pages
• Weight: 0.65 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.5" x 8.2"

Customer Reviews

Interesting to note:

Good book. It's interesting to note that Heth has actually reversed his position to actually allow for re-marriage under select circumstances. see three views on divorce and remarriage. so, the second author would by and large disagree with most of his own essay in this book.

Explains Different Views Well

This book explains four major views of divorce and remarriage within a narrow stream of evangelicalism. Not only are the four views explained, but the authors of opposing viewpoints are allowed to reply and respond. This book will help Christian leaders, particularly those serving as volunteer leaders, determine their position on these issues.

An exegetical wrestling match - not for the faint of heart

The Rev. Fr. Johann W. Vanderbijl III My mother divorced her first husband because he beat her repeatedly and severely. (He evidently did the same thing to his second wife, allegedly attempting to strangle her in front of my older half-brother.) She was excommunicated by the Church of England for doing so, an act that caused her to lose her faith for a long period of time. Nonetheless, she did get remarried to my father and I am the second of their two children. All this to say that I must admit that I approach any book on divorce and remarriage with a certain presupposition firmly in place - just like the four different writers. Perhaps it is best to be up front about the myth of total objectivity and at least be honest with regard to one's particular slant. Having said that, I agree with all of the writers that the Scriptures must be allowed to speak for themselves and in trying to find a solution to this very emotional and difficult subject one must strive to be as objective as possible, however hard that may be. Some of the basic principles of biblical interpretation that I was taught at seminary involve: 1) a determination to use the whole of God's revelation (and to avoid like the plague the temptation to use only texts that support your particular view or, worse, to use one part of Scripture to contradict another - there are many forms of this, one of which is to assign the offending portion to a later redactor or editor and another is to repeat ad nauseum that this is the ONLY place that the "exception" is to be found, giving the impression that the "exception" may be explained away in one or other fashion) in an attempt to present a studied and balanced conclusion of all the biblical data (Edgar makes an excellent case in his reply to Laney's chapter on page 62: "Any adequate analysis of Scripture on this subject must be based on all the passages. All the passages must be allowed to speak and must speak in harmony with all the others. To interpret some as if the others did not exist, and to then use the resulting interpretation as the basis to deny the explicit statements (exceptions) of those not originally taken into consideration is not really basing one's view on Scripture. It is instead a selection of passages which, taken by themselves, seem to fit the interpreter's presuppositions and then using these to get rid of those passages containing specific statements contrary to the interpreter's presuppositions."); 2) a determination to interpret a passage within the larger and more immediate context within it's own historical sitz-im-leben; 3) a determination to prefer the most obvious interpretation rather than to perform amazing feats of mental and exegetical gymnastics to prove that some obscure meaning at the far end of the semantic range of the word in question is really what the author meant to say. and 4) a determination not to base one's argument on silence. In other words, the fact that text does not s

A fascinating book covering many beliefs about divorce

This book contains a debade among four leading Evangelical Christian theologians on the topic of divorce and subsequent remarriage. They are between a rock and a hard place, because they all believe that the Bible is inerrant and is the Word of God. Thus, it must be internally consistent, and error free. Yet the Bible clearly says different things about if and when divorce is permitted. In some cases, the Bible instructs some couples to divorce. In other cases, passages say that divorce is optional. In still other cases, it says that divorce is not permitted. Watching these four intelligent, devout, thougtful theologians try to harmonize the Bible's passages on divorce is impressive. Unfortunately, they do not deal with the obvious explination: that the Bible describes an evolution of religous and cultural thought over a little more than a millennium, and we must seek our own answers today.

Four conservative Christian views

A well written book in which four sincere, intelligent conservative Christians extract biblical passages in support of four completely different views on divorce and remarriage. No consensus appears to be possible on this topic. Each of the authors's cases appear quite strong. A frustrating book if the reader is looking for a single belief concerning divorce and remarriage. An excellent review of the ambiguity of the Bible on these two topics.