What the Church Should Have Said: Divorce, Remarriage, and Pastoral Silence

The no-fault divorce revolution swept through the American states beginning with California in 1969. Within fifteen years, every state in the union had some form of no-fault divorce on the books. For the first time in American legal history, a marriage could be ended by one party without any showing of fault, without the other party's consent, and without any meaningful legal standard to meet beyond the desire to be unmarried.

The church watched this happen. In most cases, it did nothing. In some cases, it helped.

What the Church Had

The church going into the 1970s had a clear body of teaching to work with. The texts were not ambiguous. Jesus in Matthew 19, Mark 10, and Luke 16 had stated plainly that divorce and remarriage, in most circumstances, constituted adultery. Paul in 1 Corinthians 7 had told the departing wife her options were to remain unmarried or be reconciled. Paul in Romans 7 had stated that a woman is bound to her husband as long as he lives. These are not obscure passages. They are among the most straightforward statements in the New Testament on the subject.

The church also had, at least in principle, a community of accountability. When members made decisions that the Scriptures described as covenant violation, the community had both the right and the responsibility to name what was happening and call people back to faithfulness. That structure was intact, at least formally, as the divorce revolution began.

What the Church Did Instead

What the church did, in most cases, was accommodate. Divorce rates inside the church began rising. Remarried couples began appearing in the pews, and then in the leadership. Pastors who had officiated first weddings began officiating second ones. The question of whether the previous covenant had been lawfully dissolved was not asked or was answered by checking whether a civil decree existed.

The accommodation followed a predictable logic. A pastor sits across from a woman whose husband left her. She is in real pain. She did not want the divorce. She has children and no income. Delivering a hard theological position in that moment feels cruel, even if it is accurate. So the pastor focuses on comfort. He tells her God understands. He tells her she can move forward. He does not tell her what Paul said her options were, because Paul's options are not comfortable to deliver to someone already suffering.

Multiply that conversation by millions of pastoral offices over fifty years, and the result is a church that has lost the ability to speak clearly on the subject at all.

The Cost of the Silence

The cost of that pastoral silence is measured in human lives. People who were never told what Jesus said made decisions based on what they were told instead. They divorced. They remarried. They were assured by the church that God approved. Some of them are now decades into second marriages, with children and grandchildren, living situations they cannot easily exit and which the text, read honestly, describes as ongoing adultery. The church that was supposed to protect them from their worst decisions instead blessed those decisions and moved on.

The shepherd who sees the wolf coming and says nothing is held accountable for the sheep the wolf takes. Ezekiel 33:6 is not a complicated passage: if the watchman sees the sword coming and does not blow the trumpet, he is responsible for the blood that is shed. The church saw the divorce revolution coming. It put down the trumpet.

What Should Have Been Said

What the church should have said is what Jesus said. A marriage is a covenant that does not dissolve because a court said it did. A woman who departs from her husband must remain unmarried or be reconciled. A man who remarries after divorce commits adultery. These statements are hard. They were hard when Jesus said them. The disciples who heard them said it would be better not to marry at all, which tells us exactly how hard the original audience understood the teaching to be.

Hard teaching delivered with genuine pastoral care is not cruelty. It is the highest form of faithfulness available to a pastor. The person who receives accurate information about their spiritual situation, even when it is hard, has been given something real to work with. The person who receives comfortable reassurance based on inaccurate teaching has been handed a false foundation, and when it fails them, the failure will be worse than if they had never been reassured at all.

The church still has the opportunity to say what it should have said. It is late. But it is not too late.