Divorce and Picking Cherries

Internet atheists often accuse us of cherry-picking. They are as right as they are wrong.

They are wrong in that they generally choose their cherry-picking examples from the Old testament law and tell us that if we believed what we are selling we’d still follow these laws, including the prescribed penalties, because, you know, not a jot or tittle. By this argument we should summarily execute a rebellious son, (Deut 21:18-21) but we don’t because, you see, we cherry-pick which verses we want to follow. The problem with their examples, of course, is that in their zeal to make us look bad they completely ignore the strong biblical support for the notion that many jots and many tittles from the Old Testament law (in fact all of them, although some have been reinstituted in the laws for New Testament believers) are null and void.

Where they really should attack us is on matters like divorce and behaviors that are discussed in the New Testament. There we do indeed cherry pick. Group A are the laws and rules we like. We say they are complete, universal and prescriptive. They are in effect exactly as written, nothing more nothing less, for the duration of the Christian dispensation. The ones we don’t like? That’s Group B. They are, we rationalize, descriptive, localized in time and space, and cultural, and just for the apostolic era. 

And nobody can agree on which are in Group A, and which are in Group B. The crazy theonomists put everything in Group A—which for me is good reason to believe that nothing belongs in Group A, given they get virtually everything wrong.

It is a system in which everyone loses because everyone wins.

Most likely since the rules have always been written by men, the passages on divorce are generally viewed as Group A, i.e., complete, universal, prescriptive, and will last until the end of history. In this line of fuzzy (and convenient) thinking, the only grounds for divorce are those stated explicitly: infidelity and abandonment. That leaves out: spousal rape, beating your spouse and children, being a criminal, being a drug addict, and a gazillion other horrible things. So ingrained is this “infidelity or abandonment only” inviolate law that those who in their guts recognize that there have to be other legitimate reasons for divorce will try to weasel their way out by saying that all manner of things (such as those mentioned) fall under the huge umbrella of the abandonment clause—sort of the way the Supreme Court uses the commerce clause to make law in areas that have nothing to do with commerce. In other words, they cheat.

A cleaner solution is to use the Great Hermeneutic: the bible is meant to be read intelligently. And what was given explicitly was meant to be in addition to what common sense dictates, such as the right to divorce a spouse who routinely uses the family grocery money to buy crack. Those who accept this explanation sometimes imagine the Holy Spirit saying: Seriously? I needed to inspire someone to write that you can get a divorce if you spouse regularly beats you and your kids, even if when he is done he asks for a beer and forgiveness? Do you guys use the brains that, well, I gave you?