Is the Pope Catholic?

Growing up in a nominally Roman Catholic extended family, that snarky response to a question where the answer was obviously yes was an alternative to the fecal habits of bears in the woods. If you come from an ethnic Catholic Polish family, you have almost certainly heard that response.

These days that question might not be quite as tongue and cheek as it once was. Each day Jorge Bergoglio seems to be turning Catholic orthodoxy on it's head. Whether it is vaguely approving sounding language about homosexuality or railing against the "evils" of capitalism, the economic system that has done more than any pontiff to lift people out of poverty, it has to be bewildering and troubling for more traditional Roman Catholics because it sure is to me (bewildering anyway).

Today brings big news on the marriage front. In an unprecedented move, Jorge is making it even easier for married Catholic couples to get an annulment. Now annulment is a nice way of saying divorce accomplished by declaring that the marriage the church approved turned out to be a mess from the beginning. I don't know of many divorced couples who think their marriage was a swell idea in retrospective. By making it easier for people to ditch a marriage and go back to partaking of the Mass and remarrying, Jorge is talking out of both sides of his mouth, convening a summit on the family on one hand and installing a "6 marriages or fewer" express lane to end marriages on the other.

An analyst I was listening to on the BBC World News suggested that this was a compromise, Rome will go this far but no further. The problem with that logic is it never goes the other way. Every move to compromise, every move to placate progressives is permanent. You never come back, with the singular exception of the Southern Baptist Convention which managed to pull itself back from the brink before it went too far. Progressives will never compromise because they are ideologically driven rather than capital "T" Truth driven. That is why they denigrate Scripture and twist it for their own purposes. I don't think Jorge got snookered here, I think he is doing exactly what he plans to do in remaking the Roman Catholic religion in his own image. I have to wonder what the former "pope", Joseph Ratzinger, a very rare living former pope, thinks of what his successor to the "Chair of Peter" is up to. I imagine he might be regretting his decision to step down, at least privately.

The issue of divorce and remarriage, which led to the split with England and the formation of the Anglican church, has long been a non-negotiable with Rome, and rightly so. The Bible is crystal clear on this issue, even if one divorces for cause, i.e. fornication on the part of one party in the marriage, remarriage is forbidden. Compromise with the completely unBiblical and anti-Biblical "annulment" was bad enough but now the dam is is open and you can expect the Vatican to get a flood of annulments very soon. Make no mistake, it doesn't end there. Winning this one major concession will embolden those who are pushing for married priests, female priests and normalization of homosexuality. Rome is going to learn the lesson of her wayward former subjects in the Anglican communion, compromise to stem the loss of membership always has the result of speeding it up instead. This sort of stuff makes me glad that my source of authority is not some guy who gets elected in a religious political contest whenever a pope dies but the revealed and preserved Word of God.

Book Review: Except for Fornication

There are few issues that are as vitally important and yet rarely addressed in the church as divorce and remarriage. It is one of those topics that is given a wide berth, even by many otherwise bold Christian leaders, because it is tragically so commonplace in the church.

Dr. H. Van Dyke Parunak has put together a very detailed little book on this topic that addresses many of the common questions surrounding divorce (are Christians permitted to divorce in the case of fornication, can a divorced Christian remarry if the divorce was the result of fornication, etc.). His work, Except for Fornication: The Teaching of the Lord Jesus on Divorce and Remarriage is the latest release from Energion Press in the Areopagus Critical Christian Issues series and few topics are more critical and in need of serious study than the issue of divorce and remarriage. As an added bonus, I actually know Van Parunak and have spent some time with him and his delightful wife Anita on a couple of occassions and also know his son and daughter-in-law. So it is especially nice to be able to read, thoroughly review and unreservedly recommend Except for Fornication.

It isn't a very long book like most of the Areopagus series but it is also very narrowly focused on a single topic. Van does a wonderful job in drawing the connection between the brief statements of Jesus on divorce and remarriage and the Old Testament Law teachings that He was addressing and His Jewish audience would have been familiar with. This is one of those places in the teaching ministry of Christ where understanding the Old Testament makes a crucial difference in understanding what Jesus was teaching and how it would be understood by His audience.

If there is one caution it is that for a book this size, the material is quite weighty and some of the material is pretty technical. I am fairly familiar with a lot of what Van is talking about but some of it was quite frankly beyond me in a technical sense. That is not to say that this book is not accessible, it is, but there are places where it is deep material. I should also point out that if you are looking for a simplistic defense of our contemporary ambivalence toward divorce and remarriage in the church, you will not find it here.

When faced with the question of the teaching of Scripture, especially the explicit teaching of the Lord regarding divorce and remarriage, the church is in desperate need of renewed focus and fidelity to the Bible. Too often this issue is dealt with pragmatically or culturally but something as fundamental as breaking the marriage covenant deserves better. Van Parunak's work in studying this issue is critical at this juncture in the church and I hope it leads to additional scholarly and practical treatment of this tragic issue. A lot of pastors and elders who find themselves dealing with this uncomfortable topic would benefit from owning and referencing this work.

(I received Except For Fornication as a free review copy from Energion Press in return for an unbiased review)