sakrilege

I've been invited to a wedding of two people who are both divorced. It is going to be a church wedding and I have to wonder how they justify their church marriage based on what Jesus says about remarriage after a divorce,

Mar 10:11-12
And he saith unto them, Whosoever shall put away his wife, and marry another, committeth adultery against her. And if a woman shall put away her husband, and be married to another, she committeth adultery.


Personally I don't care because I don't believe, but I find it amusing that the church is allowing it and the bride and groom decided it must be okay. But how do they justify it? :huh:

WCH

Well, under what circumstances were the divorces in question? Having divorced in the past would of course come up in the series of interviews with the priest prior to the wedding, but ultimately it's his decision whether or not the marry them, and if he refused then they'd just find someone who's willing. If it's a case of "The sex got boring so we split up," then the priest would probably require counselling and "family values" teaching before marrying them, but if we're talking about an instance of abuse or other justified divorce, I don't think anyone would object.

Pyrrho

It is difficult to find a Christian who really takes the Bible as seriously as they generally pretend to take it. They typically ignore whatever they don't like, but still say that it is the inspired Word of God that should guide everyone's life. Hypocrisy and religion often go hand in hand.

sakrilege

Just some guy named Jesus, I guess he doesn't count!


BTW, I do know of a couple that are married but haven't lived together or spoken to each other in over 20 years. They take Jesus seriously.

Joshua Adams

The Church gets around this with "annulments". You see, they just declare that the marriage never really happened. In order to have a "real" marriage, they have a short list of conditions which are impossible to measure prenuptially, like willingness to have and raise Christian kids, commitment... stuff like that. When you file for an annulment, they just say, "Well, if you wanted a divorce you must not have been really married in the first place."

Chili

The point here is that a true marriage is arranged in heaven and cannot be wrong . . . which is a necessary truth if no impediments are added by our faculty of reason, wherefore love is blind from our human perspective.

In our modern society friendship has replaced love as a prerequisite for two people to get married and friendship is just opposite to love in that friends have things in common without the opposites wherein love finds the attraction. So the basis for the annulment would be that such a marriage was not arranged in heaven and therefore not God's will but was just an economic adventure that had abused the goodwill of the Church.

WCH

See, we have this whole "three times of asking" thing where we ask if anyone has any reasons why the couple could not marry. Funny thing about fictional characters is that they have trouble being there for any of the three... I suppose that if he did manage to show up for one of them that he would be taken very seriously and his objection weighed.

IrishGuy

That's a good point.

Most Christians would say that divorce is far too casual and trivial in our society.

Bright Life

Heck, I'm an atheist, and I think the same thing.

BL

sakrilege

20 years and 3 children and it's not a marriage? :rolling: