Of divorce and church leadership
The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung featured an article dealing with the divorce of one of the highest protestant (Lutheran I think) bishops getting a divorce. I have a few comments about this article.
First, the article fails to mention even one biblical statement about divorce. This may very well be explained by its secular nature but is still rather surprising seeing as it deals with the divorce of a high ranking church bishop. The logical thing to do is to see what the bible says about such thing, which brings me to my second point.
The reason for the divorce is unknown. As far as I know there is one reason and one only that permits divorce scripturally, and that is adultery. Since I don’t know the details of the situation I will give her the benefit of the doubt and assume that was actually the case and the decision is a biblical one.
Thirdly, let’s look at three things the Scriptures tell us about bishops, women holding that office, and divorce in the context of being a bishop. In the New Testament, the first to hold the office of elder (or bishop, the words are used interchangeably) were the apostles. That was obviously a slightly different situation than today because there are no more apostles. But looking at the NT as a whole, the role of the elder was to lead a local church. Nowhere in Scripture do we see some kind of hierarchy as the Lutheran, Catholic, or Methodist churches -just to name a few examples- have. The local churches are meant to be autonomous.
What about women holding the office of elder? There are two very clear indicators that women cannot be elders. The first one is in 1 Timothy 2:12, where Paul does not “[...] allow a woman to teach or exercise authority over a man [...].” That has nothing to do with women being inferior; they are not. One needs to realize that women do have different functional roles than man. Elder is not one of those roles. The other passage is 1 Timothy 3:1-7. Notice verse 2: “the husband of one wife.” I think that makes it pretty clear that women cannot be elders. But, you scream, women could be the better choice as elder compared to some men! That’s true, but doesn’t change the fact that God said no. I think he has the right to pick. Besides, have you ever noticed that we always want to do what we cannot or shouldn’t? “You can’t have authority over men” – “Hm, I think I want to have authority over men!”; “You can eat of any tree, just not that one” – “Hm, I think I will eat of that one.” Another one of those passages is Leviticus 21:16-24 that deals with the qualification of a priest under the Mosaic Law and excludes those with physical defects. Again, a blind person might be more spiritual than all the seeing ones, but God said he cannot be priest and we should accept that decision.
Lastly, what about divorce? I already mentioned the only reason for a divorce, and that’s adultery. The criteria for elders are a little stricter. 1 Timothy 3:2, as quoted above, says “husband of one wife”, or literally a “one woman man.” There are several interpretations possible that are biblical and the question cannot be answered completely, unfortunately. Some say that it refers to only being married one time. Others say it means one woman at a time. That would mean one could be an elder after being divorced. The question is, how many times can one be divorced? One time? Two? What about 4? 6 times? The problem is drawing the line somewhere, but logically the number shouldn’t matter, making this interpretation a lot less likely in my opinion. Personally I tend towards one wife, period.
So should one be an elder after a divorce? Personally I would probably step back from the elder office because I would be too worried about the reputation of the church, the bride of Christ. Plus I wouldn’t be the hustband of one wife anymore. I would be single.
One interesting statement from the article was the following (translated), talking about the bishop not answering any interview questions. “It is of course nobody’s business if love just faded away.” Why is that interesting? Because it is such a worldly statement. Two people, in their right relationship with Jesus Christ individually and as a couple will never, ever, lose their love for each other. Yes there are problems, that’s not my point, but I have never heard of a couple losing their love for each other while both having a healthy relationship with Christ. On the contrary, I have met people happily married for 50+ years who say they love each other more now than they ever have before. This is certainly what I can say about my marriage. We’ve only been married three and a half years but I love the bride of my youth more now than I ever have before.
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