If nothing else this shows a couple of different methods of scholarship.
What God Has Joined by David Instone-Brewer in Christianity Today
Response:
Tragically Widening the Grounds of Legitimate Divorce by John Piper
Related Scripture:
Malachi 2:13-16, Matthew 5:32, Matthew 19:9-11, Mark 10:11-12, Luke 16:18, Romans 7:2, 1 Corinthians 7:15
Thanks for highlighting this. There is lots more, including a response to Piper here.
Thanks for your reply. I’ll add this to the mix just so people know it’s really you:
More from David Instone-Brewer on divorce
Here is another rebuttal:
Dr. David Instone-Brewer’s Divorce and Remarriage in the Bible A Critical Review
Here is David-Instone-Brewer’s response to the above article:
Thank you for this careful and detailed review.
You have correctly understood the main thrust of what I have found. That is, in the first century the Jews were debating whether “a matter of indecency” in Deut.24.1 meant that you could get divorced for two grounds (”indecency” and “any matter”) or just for one ground. Jesus was asked about this “divorce for any matter” and he rejected it, with the same words which the critics of this theory used in the first century. They said that there is no other ground for divorce in Deut.24.1 “except for indecency”.
However, you have misunderstood some of what I have said in my books. In particular:
1) When I unpack the abbreviated account of Jesus’ teaching on divorce in the Gospels, I am not trying to reconstruct what he said, but I am merely trying to explain what how his original hearers understood him. He used phrases which are not immediately obvious to us, and we need to complete the translation process by unpacking them. Consider the phrase “The speaker made an altar call”. This would be misunderstood by someone from another culture – they might think this was some kind of ventriloquism by which an altar was made to call out! We would need to unpack it by saying “The speaker [a church evangelist] called [to the congregation to give their lives to God and come to the] alter [rail at the front of the church to signify their commitment].” Although this is a considerable expansion, it says no more than is implied by the phrase.
2) When I point out that Jesus agreed with some Jewish teachers of the time, I am not saying that he said nothing new. Out of the two views on Deut.24.1, he had to agree with one and disagree with the other. As well as this, he taught that marriage is made up of two people, thereby disagreeing with most Jews who believed in polygamy, though agreeing with Qumran Jews who taught monogamy. Also he taught that one was allowed to be a eunuch for the kingdom, which disagreed with all Jews (so far as we know) because they taught that the command to “go forth and multiply” applies to all men. And Jesus disagreed with those Pharisees who taught that adultery was a compulsory ground for divorce, because he said that Moses did not “command” divorce for sexual indecency, but he “allowed” it.
3) The insight that Jesus was responding to a debate which was well known to first century Jews is not a new one. Every serious commentary from about 1850 has pointed this out. It is true that this insight comes from outside Scripture, but this is equally true for other insights by which we interpret the Bible. For example, we know that first century culture considered it indecent for women to wear their hair loose in public and for men to have long hair, so we understand that Paul was forbidding indecent dress rather than making theological statements about hair fashion. If we do not allow insights from history to educate us, we will have very few tools with which to understand or even translate the Bible.
4) The ethics of the Bible are timeless, and do not conform to culture. God does not change, and the way that he wishes humanity to behave does not change. But this does not mean that the specific laws given to people in a specific culture in order to achieve this behaviour will also achieve the same behaviour in another culture. The law of levirate marriage in ancient Israel was part of the care for the poor widow, who needed a son to look after her and to inherit the family land. The law against loose hair was concerned with preventing the appearance of loose morals in Corinth. We should obey these laws by giving practical support for widows and avoiding anything which implies an immoral lifestyle. This kind of cultural insight does not mean that ethics change with time, though specific ways of carrying out those ethics may change.
5) It is true that I do not think divorcees should be judged or told what to do by a minister or by a church, but this does not mean that a pastor does not have an important role to play. A pastor should always aim to support a marriage, helping the wronged partner find the strength to forgive and helping the other to stop breaking their marriage vows. Jesus taught that divorce should only occur when a partner was sinning ‘hardheartedly’ – a word which occurs only twice in the OT. Jesus was presumably alluding to the occurance in Jer.4.4 which deals with God’s divorce from Israel after she sinned ‘hardheartedly’ by repeatedly committing adultery and refusing to repent despite many pleas. I do not think that someone outside the marriage can determine when the point of no return has been reached, where forgiveness will merely lead to more sin without any chance that repentance will occur. So I do not regard it as the role of the church to decide when a marriage should end.
I am pleased that you have taken my findings as seriously as you have. Clearly you disagree with some of the conclusions based on these findings but, as you can see from the above, we do not disagree on as quite many points as appears to be the case.
Best wishes
David IB
/// Dr David Instone-Brewer
dib http://www.DivorceRemarriage.com
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