Real Live Preacher on the biggest doctrinal issue facing Christian churches in the US (and elsewhere).
You want to know how it happened? I’ll tell you how it happened. I got tired. I couldn’t do it anymore. I fought an inward battle with orthodoxy for years and tried to figure out what the Bible has to say about this. I took six years of Greek, hoping the original language of the New Testament might shed some light. I got a Bachelor’s degree in religious studies and a Master of Divinity. I read everything I could find and talked to everyone I respected. But in the end, it all came down to this – I could not be orthodox in this matter. I could not. So I gave up and gave in. And the minute I did I felt a flood of cool relief, like water after forty days in the desert.
The moment of choice came, and I chose to stand with my friends. That’s the deal. That’s the way it happened. I wish I could tell you that my rigorous study finally unlocked the secrets of the New Testament’s scant witness on this matter, but it never did. For twenty years I asked this question of the Bible and never got a clear answer. Finally, I realized that I could wait on the Bible no longer.
I had to choose my place in the middle of uncertainty, ambiguity, and doubt. I had to make a choice. I had to stand on one side or the other. The bottom line is, I don’t give a damn what you think the Bible says. I’m not going to stand against my friends on this. I can’t. I cannot. I am unable to stand against them and not collapse from sorrow and despair.
And the (very good) Lewes Smedes interview that swayed him.
On the table that day was the church’s long standing policy of excluding a certain class of Christian people from its inner circle. These were people who confessed their love for God and their faith in Jesus as their Savior and lived exemplary Christian lives in every way. Except one. And that one exception was serious enough to disqualify them for membership. It had to do with their marriages. They had been married once, then divorced, married again to someone else, and were committed to keeping their covenant with each other this time. That was the rub. Odd as it may have seemed to an outsider, precisely because these people stayed faithful to their marriages, they were, in the church’s eyes, implicitly committed to sin and for that reason alone were excluded from the circle of grace.
The church believed that by excluding them it was simply obeying the word of the Lord. For the Lord had said, in terms that seemed as clear as mineral water, that people who stayed married to anyone other than their first spouse (if, to be sure, he or she were still living) were devoted to a life of continuous adultery.
Very good stuff.