At the CRC Synod of 1976 it was decided to “submit the report on Marriage Guidelines to the churches for one year for study and response.” This year’s Synod will therefore now be expected to make a decision on this crucial matter. Rev. John Elenbaas was a delegate from Classis Northcentral Iowa at the 1976 Synod. Of this report on Marriage Guidelines, he states in this article: “I believe this new study ends in disaster. The church is asked to bless the very thing most characteristically, called ‘adultery’ in the Bible—remarriage.” Rev. Elenbaas is pastor of the Second Christian Reformed Church of Wellsburg, Iowa.

The Christian Reformed Synod of 1917 will again be faced with one of the most emotional and recurrent issues of our time, and with the recommendation of a study committee to make a drastic turnabout in disciplinary policy.

• There are many good things about the report that can be appreciated, but these are thrown away by the questionable conclusions. There is a beautiful section on the Biblical teaching regarding marriage. But in the paragraph on Headship of the Husband (IC), it follows the popular line of evading the plainer teaching on the husband’s authority as head of the home in Ephesians 5:22ff by including it under the overriding theme of mutual subjection supposedly derived from Ephesians 5:21, “subjecting yourselves one to another in the fear of Christ.” Husbands must even merit the respect of their wives, and respect can only flourish where the husband lives in imitation of Christ—in contradiction of I Peter 3:1.

If Synod should adopt this section as requested, a section which wasn’t even in the mandate originally given to the committee, then it will also have decided prematurely one of the chief problems in the women-in-office issue and also give implied orders to the Liturgical Committee to leave the wife’s obligation to obey her husband out of the new form for marriage being prepared.

• The report can be commended also for its intensive study of the Biblical teaching on divorce, which lays the groundwork for its recommendation to reaffirm the long held position of the Christian Reformed Church that persistent, unrepented fornication is a Biblically permissible ground for divorce and frees for remarriage. I expect this will face opposition from two sides—from those who would recognize almost any divorce, and from those who by a line of reasoning I cannot grasp insist that the Bible allows no ground for divorce at all.

In this connection, I wonder why it is necessary for the committee to spend so much effort arguing that the exceptive clause of Matthew 19:9, “Except for fornication,” was really the word of Jesus. This report is addressed, after all, to the Synod of a church that confesses that all the words ascribed to Jesus in the Bible have full authority. The problem for us is. how to interpret them and obey them, not to decide whether Jesus really said them.

• After arguing for the church‘s historic position on divorce, the committee doesn’t follow its own conclusions when it discusses what other actions might be equivalent to fornication. The final recommendations appear to limit the equivalents to certain sex-related acts and to willful and prolonged desertion (in itself a great change), but the discussion on page 476 (1976 Acts of Synod) which Synod is being asked to approve as Biblical, leaves the whole matter wide open for consistories to judge for themselves.

In my opinion, the most drastic change being asked—and with the flimsiest Scriptural “evidence”—is the discussion and recommendations on remarriage (Section III). Here counsel is being given to disobey the ordinance of Christ by even blessing remarriages when certain conditions are met. These conditions are whether over a “reasonable period of time” a sincere effort has been made toward reconciliation, or where repentance has been demonstrated by a Biblical attitude toward the permanency of marriage.

• What does the committee do with all the Scripture passages which make remarriage the crowning act of adultery (Matthew 19:9, Mark 10:11, Luke 16:18a)? It simply dissolves the thrust of these verses in a fog of guesses on how they could mean some· thing else. On page 480 we find this amazing statement, “In the light of the above evidence, the committee concludes that each consistory must make an individual judgment with reference to those seeking remarriage after a divorce granted on grounds not considered legitimate in the Bible.” And what is this terrific “evidence” that allows the committee to advise departure from 100 years of Synodical stands?

Listen to this profound reason! Speaking of Matthew 19:9, Mark 10:11, and Luke 16:18a, they say, “this close connection of divorce and remarriage suggests that Jesus is speaking specifically against people dissolving their present marriage with a view to remarriage.” This insertion of intention is pure invention in my opinion, especially when even a third party is warned it will be adultery for him to marry the divorced person.

• Then note how the committee evades the command of Paul in I Corinthians 7:10, 11, “Let her remain unmarried or else be reconciled to her husband.” “There is some evidence in this text that the advice to remain unmarried should not be regarded as a principle of universal application.” That “evidence” is that Paul is known to have a preference for the Single state. If such a preference were operating in his mind here, how could he have said in the words immediately following the command to remain single, “or else be reconciled to her husband”?

“Evidence” in the committee‘s mind is being able to come up with some suggestion backed up by a commentator somewhere which will weaken our certainty as to what the text really means. Can you imagine scrapping a position held as Biblical by the Christian Reformed Church for over 100 years, and which endured through many careful studies by reputable scholars because someone somewhere can come up with some other possible meaning of the text? Is not this in conflict with Church Order Article 30?

• The committee has not studied sufficiently the matter of how improperly divorced people stand before God. Are they still married in God‘s Sight or not? Does a mere pieec of paper granted by the state dissolve what God has joined together?

The committee fails to study or apply one of the most important passages of all on remarriage—I Corinthians 7:39, “A wife is bound for so long time as her husband liveth; but if the husband be dead, she is free to be married to whom she will; only in the Lord.” If in God‘s sight they are still married, no church has the right to set time limits on this or to say when it becomes too much of a hardship not to marry someone else. If in God’s sight they are married no longer, then no church has the right to require certain conditions to be met before they can marry Others. To do either is to presume an unwarranted authority for the church more like papalism than Reformed ethics.

One condition that must be met before a consistory can judge that a remarriage can not only be permitted, but even encouraged and blessed by the church is a repentance that has been accepted by the church and demonstrated by the new couple‘s attitude toward the permanency of their marriage. “If a person does not regard the new marriage as a permanent union, then it is sinful.” But this could be said of any marriage, first or second! It completely misses the point of when a remarriage is sinful It is not just a matter of attitudes, but where any old obligations are being repudiated, whether the duty to seek reconciliation is being spurned, whether hope in God’s grace to remedy the disaffection is being abandoned.

The seriousness with which we view the permanence of marriage will be proved by whether we permit remarriage to those divorced for reasons not recognized as legitimate in the Bible. We will not encourage our repentant divorcees to add a new sin by closing the door to reconciliation by marrying someone else.

• In spite of a good beginning, and an attempt to state more carefully the meaning and Scriptural foundation for our traditional stand on grounds for divorce, I believe this new study ends in disaster. The church is asked to bless the very thing most characteristically called “adultery” in the Bible—remarriage.

The 1973 Marriage Guidelines Report insisted that there are no grounds for divorce at all, but then threw it all away by the idea of a “dead marriage” which ought to be recognized by allowing divorce and remarriage.

The 1976 Marriage Guidelines Report began on a more purposely Biblical note. But it too throws it all away by introducing equivalents to fornication and allowing for remarriage under conditions specified by the church. So we are really no further along than in 1973. I hope Synod will have the courage to reject this report as unscriptural and self-contradictory.

The gospel first entered a world with a very corrupt moral climate. It didn‘t win over that world by accommodation, but by offering forgiveness, fellowship, and the power of God’s grace to live holy and without blemish in the world.