Far too many Christians have made peace with divorce. They are making peace with what is essentially a form of sexual license: serial monogamy (see Mary Stewart Van Leeuwen, Oct 4, 1999 Christianity Today, p51). Seldom does church discipline occur even for divorce that is clearly sinful (for instance, when persons initiate divorce because of an adulterous affair which they want to continue).

It is wrong and inconsistent for the church to make peace with one sin and not with another.

However, there are two short and simple reasons why the church tends to feel able forgive and get beyond the sin of persons who are divorced and remarried (and to eventually extend membership to them):

1. A remarried couple seldom stands up in church and says "our divorces were acceptable to God."

2. The church generally believes that the remarried couple is not continually recommitting the sin of adultery. For instance, Howard H. Charles (study paper presented to Indiana-Michigan Mennonite Conference in 1955) and J.C. Wenger (Dealing Redemptively with Those Involved in Divorce and Remarriage Problems [Herald Press 1965]) taught that the consummation of the second marriage was also an act which destroyed the validity of the first marriage.

John Martin's personal approach to divorce: when a couple's marriage is broken, they should not seek divorce, but counseling. If counseling fails and if staying together is injurious, they may choose separation -- though their failure to keep their covenant must be faced as sin needing forgiveness. If they choose divorce, now there is the (additional) sin of breaking their covenant. Can they be forgiven? Martin says yes. Can they remarry new partners? Martin again says yes, and adds: "Sexual relations would not be an act of continual sin." --John R. Martin, Divorce and Remarriage: A Perspective for Counseling (Herald Press 1974 & 1976) p40

Deut 24:1-4 clearly shows that after a remarriage the first marriage is not still in effect: it gives an absolute prohibition against resuming the first marriage. In Matt 5:32 and 19:9, when there is "marital unfaithfulness," one can divorce without committing additional sin...which implies that the marriage bond can be dissolved--that "marital unfaithfulness" can have the same effect on the marriage bond as death has. In 1 Cor 7:15 one whose unbelieving spouse has left is "not bound." So it is tenuous to say that both the homosexual couple and the remarried couple are "living in sin."

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