“Haven’t you read,” he replied, “that at the beginning the Creator made them male and female, and said, ‘For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh’? So they are no longer two, but one. Note what is but a sampling of many biblical statements affirming this: It is self-deluding and sinful to enter marriage with any other thought in mind than to stay together until death. God has always intended marriage to last as long as both partners live, and it continues to be what He wants. The purpose of this booklet is to help sort out the Bible’s position regarding divorce and under what circumstance, if any, Christians may remarry without manifestly sinning against God and His family. The problem of failure of so many marriages with their tragic aftermath is huge and complex. He also found that while Christians stay with their marriages longer, they divorce anyway after putting up with considerably more pain. The primary reasons for divorce among the Christian population were adultery, abuse (substance, physical, verbal), and abandonment. He learned that the most prominent reason for divorce among the general population was incompatibility. Members of the more traditional, liturgical denominations had fewer divorces.Ī Philadelphia psychologist and counselor decided to focus on this disturbing information for his doctoral research. By the end of the twentieth century, a California-based polling and marketing group that specializes in religion, called the Barna Group, found that those who characterized themselves as fundamentalists had a slightly higher rate of divorce than did the general public.

Soon after World War II, however, the increasing divorce rate created a need for many churches to review their rigid condemnation of divorce followed by remarriage. Up to the early years of the twentieth century, divorce was almost unheard of in the Christian community.

Brave church divorce and remarriage