On Monday & Tuesday nights, October 12 & 13, I engaged in public debate with Patrick Donahue in Florence, Alabama. The first night Pat affirmed “The Bible teaches that if a man divorces his scriptural wife, for any reason other than fornication, and marries another, he commits adultery, and repentance would demand that he get out of that marriage.” I denied this proposition because, although the first statement is accurate to the text, the second statement, that he has to get out of that marriage, is not scriptural.
Through out the debate we found that Pat alters virtually every passage he refers to on this subject. He pretty much followed the same route as other traditionalists have in past debates. The first plank in their platform is to change Matthew 19:6 from “Let not man put asunder,” to “man cannot put asunder.” He tried to prove that the unscripturally put away person is still bound to their mate in God’s sight and forever will be. This was a bit weird in as much as he said, “they are not still married.” He insisted throughout that they are bound but not married. This seems a very strange idea to me. The bond between a man and a woman is the marriage bond. If one is not married,what kind of a bond does he have? Is he bound to a woman who is not his wife?
They also change Matthew 19:9, as Pat did. The text says “adultery,” is committed when one divorces and marries another. Pat changes that into a sex act. He admitted that a couple is “married” when the ceremony is finished but said that adultery is not committed until they cohabit sexually. He tried to illustrate this nonsense by saying that when one swallows food it is not digested until later. We never did find out what he saw as a connection between these two things.
On 1 Corinthians 7:2, “Let every man have his own wife and let every woman have her own husband,” he changes it to say, “Let each one have a mate who has not married before.”
On 1 Corinthians 7:10-11 he changed “depart” to “divorce.” Yet he agreed that “chordzo” means depart and does not mean divorce. But he said that when two people divorce they always depart, so the meaning here is divorce though the word does not mean that. Curious reasoning? Yes. All through the debate he presented rationalizations of this kind, not express Bible statements.
On verse 28, which says that if a man is put away by his wife he does not sin if he marries, he denied that “lelusai” means “having been put away” and revised the passage to say “If a man is scripturally released from his wife he can marry.”
In my negative material, I first presented Foy Wallace’s idea that this judgment of that sin is human legislation. The Lord did not give it. Jesus did not prescribe “a disciplinary procedure.” Then I presented the scriptures showing that God, Christ, Paul the apostle, and the Holy Spirit all disagree with Pat’s proposition, that “repentance demands that he get out of that marriage.”
“Exhibit A” was the case of David and Bathsheba. David committed adultery and murder in the course of taking another man’s wife. God’s prophet, Nathan, taught David about repentance but did not require that he get out of that marriage. Instead he said, “God has put away your sin.” That is a concept those brethren do not understand at all, a sin being put away, or pardoned. They are very certain that the only way this sin can be dealt with is to pay it all back, make restitution.
“Exhibit B” was John 8 where Jesus was asked to judge a case of adultery. His first step was to ask about their own sin. His statement to the woman was “Neither do I condemn you, go and sin no more.” “Exhibit C” was the way the apostle Paul dealt with this sin among the Corinthians. He said that some of them had been adulterers, among other things, but “you were washed, sanctified, justified, in the name of the Lord Jesus and by the Spirit of our God.” In other words God put away their sin also. Yes, they repented, did not repeat the sins, but they did not pay it all back. In the next chapter Paul said all of them must be allowed to marry. (7:2) The phrase “By the Spirit of our God” shows that the Holy Spirit also was in on this judgment. So God, Christ, Paul, and the Holy Spirit all disagreed with Pat’s proposition that marriage must be forbidden to all who have committed this kind of adultery.
On the second night I was in the affirmative on the proposition that “God approves marriage for every unmarried person, including those who have been divorced, regardless of the reason for the divorce.” I simply read my proposition in the Bible text. In 1 Corinthians 7:8-9 Paul said expressly “To the unmarried and widows….let them marry, for it is better to marry than to burn.” That this included the divorced is stated at verse 28 where he said concerning a man who had been put away by his wife, “If you marry you have not sinned and if a virgin marries she has not sinned.” The reason for his being put away is not mentioned, therefore is not relevant. So the Bible says let the unmarried marry, and it specifically includes the divorced.
In my final speech I pointed out that the people who are pushing this anti-marriage doctrine need to stop and realize that they are jeopardizing their own souls. When the Pharisees wanted to impose the maximum sentence on the woman taken in adultery, Jesus called attention to their own sin and asked, in effect, ” Are you qualified to judge and punish?”
I presented 1 Timothy 4:1-3,which predicts the falling away from the faith in the last days and indicates that “forbidding to marry is a doctrine of demons.” There the scripture says it is a departure from the faith, is hypocritical, and reflects a seared conscience, a lack of feeling. And I posed the question, “Are you sure you want to go before the judgment seat of Christ still standing on that position, you saying “Don’t let them marry” when God has said “Let them marry”? Do you want to leave it that way? These books will be opened at the judgment and we will all be judged by what is written there. They will still say the same thing then that they say now. Are you sure you want to go there with this situation still the way it is, you saying the opposite of what God has commanded? Then I cited James 2:13, “He shall have judgment without mercy that has showed no mercy.” No wonder Jesus asked “What about your own sins?” You had better look at this now instead of then.
I think Pat wanted to be non-hostile but he really doesn’t know how. He was very inconsistent and the manner of his delivery was a bit rude. If it were in a courtroom it would be called “badgering a witness.” On the football field it would be called “taunting” and a flag would be thrown. He comes from a background we usually refer to as “anti,” meaning against everything. Those brethren are accustomed to binding legislations for God about all sorts of things the Bible does not speak of. They are all based on theories and rationalizations. They bind laws that are not express Bible statements but human theories. I say again, I think they mean well. They want to dot every “I” and cross every “T” and get everything precisely correct. But they just have a very unsound hermeneutic. They do not recognize a human judgment when they see one, especially in their own viewpoints.
This debate will be circulated widely on DVD and it is my hope that it will make available for a lot of people an understanding of how the grace of God offers to everyone a new beginning, a release from all past sins.
Review written by Olan Hicks