Til Death Do Us Part, Or Not

I have been wanting to address this issue for quite some time (actually since Nov. 2007) in response to an article posted at Time.com.

I have no intention here to rehash the entire article (You can read it here) but I think the most disturbing thing about it was the title "An Evangelical Rethink On Divorce?" That's the part that caught my attention; the idea that evangelicals can be flexible on issues about which God has been firm.

The final paragraph makes this stunning statement about American evangelical Christians: "...even the country's most rule-bound Christians will search for a fresh understanding of scripture when it seems unjust to them."

That explains a lot about why Christians seem to have no credibility in the culture wars. With the contemporary swing away from expository, Christ-centered preaching and teaching to a man-centered theology that insists on "relationships, not rules," or "deeds, not creeds," Christians are not equipped to defend their positions with scripture and so they shape their beliefs with their emotions.  Why should the world take us seriously? 

Last week the heretic, Pat Robertson, reinterpreted "until death do us part" to mean "until sick do us part."

Well, as I was thinking about how I was going to vent on this subject, another blogger, "Spherical AT THE CENTER," beat me to it and, frankly, I couldn't have said it better:

"Isn't Pat just stating what our itching ears want to hear? Isn't he just stating what most of us practice in some form or another? Isn't he just stating our truth? When the going gets tough, the tough find a loophole or a justification for their actions."

"We make vows to our spouses. We tell them we love them. But when that beauty fades or they are no longer of service to us, we cast them aside. Was not the person we loved really ourselves? As long as we get what we want, we love and stay together. Was that the vow we took?"

The Time article (in 2007) summarized the problem with this prophetic speculation about evangelical Christians:

Flexibility on divorce may mean that evangelicals could also rethink their position on such things as gay marriage, as a generation of Christians far more accepting of homosexuality begins to move into power.  (The ever-active Barna folks have found that 57% of "born-again" Christians age 16-29 criticize their own church for being "anti-homosexual").