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A La Carte (5/29)
- 05/29/09
- 17
Divorcing Fact From Fiction
MacArthur does a good job answering the claim that divorce rates are no better among Christians than among others. “I don’t believe it, and in fact, I believe that is to dishonor the Lord, to say that the power of Christ is zero in a marriage—the power of the Holy Spirit in a marriage. I don’t believe that. I do not believe that true Christians get divorced at the same rate that non-Christians do.”
The Riskiest Search Terms on the Net
Here is a round-up of search terms that, if you search for them, are going to lead you into trouble. “Some of the riskiest searches on the Internet currently have to do with finding items for free, or looking for work that can be done from home, according to a new report from McAfee.”
Using Twitter During Church
Josh Harris writes about using Twitter in church. And don’t think that people aren’t doing it!
To The Sources!
Thirsty Theologian quotes Burk Parsons (who quotes somebody else—this is getting confusing): “We must be “Bible Calvinists” not “system Calvinists.” We can all too easily get sucked into what we feel is a neat system of thought, and forget that we ought to make everything that we believe compatible with Scripture, even if that means jettisoning ideas that flow well in a purely logical sense but are nonetheless incompatible with what the Bible teaches.”
Abortion Debate Changing
This is a rather interesting column in which a secular humanist explains why he has become pro-life. “As an atheist and a secular kinda guy, I practice moral relativism regularly. Still, I’ve always struggled mightily with the ethics and politics of abortion. Apparently, I’m not alone.”
MacArthur does a good job answering the claim that divorce rates are no better among Christians than among others. “I don’t believe it, and in fact, I believe that is to dishonor the Lord, to say that the power of Christ is zero in a marriage—the power of the Holy Spirit in a marriage. I don’t believe that. I do not believe that true Christians get divorced at the same rate that non-Christians do.”
The Riskiest Search Terms on the Net
Here is a round-up of search terms that, if you search for them, are going to lead you into trouble. “Some of the riskiest searches on the Internet currently have to do with finding items for free, or looking for work that can be done from home, according to a new report from McAfee.”
Using Twitter During Church
Josh Harris writes about using Twitter in church. And don’t think that people aren’t doing it!
To The Sources!
Thirsty Theologian quotes Burk Parsons (who quotes somebody else—this is getting confusing): “We must be “Bible Calvinists” not “system Calvinists.” We can all too easily get sucked into what we feel is a neat system of thought, and forget that we ought to make everything that we believe compatible with Scripture, even if that means jettisoning ideas that flow well in a purely logical sense but are nonetheless incompatible with what the Bible teaches.”
Abortion Debate Changing
This is a rather interesting column in which a secular humanist explains why he has become pro-life. “As an atheist and a secular kinda guy, I practice moral relativism regularly. Still, I’ve always struggled mightily with the ethics and politics of abortion. Apparently, I’m not alone.”
I am a follower of Jesus Christ, a husband to Aileen and a father to three young children. I worship and serve as a pastor at 
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Comments (17)
MacArthur doesn’t really answer the claim other than to say: “It’s not true.” I agree that the Holy Spirit has to make a difference in marriage, and I’ve experienced that he does in my own marriage. Still, we have to do better than to just say, “Well that survey is wrong.” Even if we don’t divorce at the same rate, I think it’s too easy to say, “A lot of those marriages aren’t between true Christians.” We need to deal with the reality that true Christians are divorcing too much, just like true Christians are looking at pornography too much. These kinds of thing should be a wake up call for us.
“That particular sin problem can’t exist among Christians to any large degree because it would mean the Holy Spirit was powerless” seems a flawed line of reasoning. Biblically, it doesn’t stack up to the big messes that were many of the NT churches. Discounting the Christian profession of those who commit that sin is both circular and unwise, and even given that, there’s still possibly one party to the divorce who “could still be Christian,” and that would STILL mean that the divorce happened “among Christians.”
I think there are good reasons to question the statistics, e.g., “Christians in romantic relationships are more likely to get married therefore the unwise relationships are more likely to end in divorce because they were married in the first place.” But simply refusing to deal with the possibility that divorce is a widespread problem because Christians are weak, sinful, too frequently poorly taught, and influenced by one of the particular besetting sins of our particular culture doesn’t seem like the pinnacle of pastoral wisdom.
Yeah, this kind of thing is tricky. On one hand, many people who do commit sin, divorce, pornography, whatever, who say they are Christians arent actually. But many actually are. Not saying many specifically to divorce but rather in general. I dont know, and no one but God knows, how many professed Christians who get a divorce truly were Christians. So just saying that kind of blanket statement, while true in part, isnt enough to work towards fixing the very real problem of real Christians stuck in sin of all sorts. However, it may be worth making this kind of statement if public opinion is being heavily influenced negatively towards God because of this type of issue.
This made a lot more sense in my head before I started typing so if its confusing, I’m sorry, hope at least something can be taken from it.
Funny MacArthur should comment on the divorce issue considering he recently took Driscoll to task about his Song of Solomon series. If he had listened to Driscoll’ series, he would have learned that Driscoll hired a sociology professor from the University of Virginia to do a study on marriages and specifically Christian marriages. The study debunked the view that there is no difference in the divorce rates. In fact, once the definition of who is and is not a Christian was fine tuned to weed out nominal Christians, the divorce rate amongst true Christians plummeted.
I’m with that — I thought Mr. MacArthur would cut right to the definition of “Christian” assumed by the survey. A survey that was somehow able to define “Christian” with a biblical definition (with definitions of what you believe and how you live) would get different results from a survey that allowed a person to classify themselves as a Christian. To answer the survey, just ask, “Who do they say a Christian is?” and then go from there to how the definition of a Christian can influence the results. I’m convinced the divorce rates of true born-again believers are lower, but the argument should be to get them to define “Christian” biblically.
I’m with that — I thought Mr. MacArthur would cut right to the definition of “Christian” assumed by the survey. A survey that was somehow able to define “Christian” with a biblical definition (with definitions of what you believe and how you live) would get different results from a survey that allowed a person to classify themselves as a Christian. To answer the reporter, just ask, “Who do they say a Christian is?” and then go from there to how the definition of a Christian can influence the results. The reporter might get a little eye-opener, too. I’m convinced the divorce rates of true born-again believers are lower, but the argument should be to get them to define “Christian” biblically.
I twitter in church. I see it as a way of taking notes and sharing my notes with others to have a “conversation” on my FB/twitter later on.
I see the negative things, but there are also positive aspects to it as well. That being said, I don’t twitter often anymore because I don’t wish to distract others and because people are expected to at least look like they are paying attention in church. For me, paying attention is to be taking notes, be it on my iphone, twitter or on a sheet of paper. Unfortunately the only “acceptable” means of taking notes is on paper.
Regarding the divorce rate among Christians vs. Non-Christians:
No body seems to be taking into account that a SIGNIFICANT number of secular people don’t even get married anymore. They just live together, then break up, then live with someone else, etc. Since they never officially marry, their ‘break-up’ statistics aren’t accounted for. I work with 45 people. I’d say 6-7 are true believers, from what I can tell. Of the true believers, one is divorced. I don’t know if he considered himself a true believer when he got divorced. Of all the other people I work with, I can think of eight who are either living with someone currently, or have lived with someone in the past. There are probably more. Of those eight people, there are probably at least a couple that have lived with multiple people.
So, in my very small sample of a pretty average cross section of people, there has been ONE true Christian divorce. On the other hand, I would guess there have been at least SIX ‘break-ups’ of people living together, with more to come, probably.
If you add those six breakups to the ‘non-christian’ divorce statistics, they they are way different than what most studies show.
The most publicized study regarding Christian divorce rates is probably the Barna one. In it, he compares the “Born Again” category to “everybody else”. The BA folks divorce at approximately the same rate. However, when you look at “Evangelicals” (which are a subset of the “Born Again” group) their divorce rate is lower. Catholics also divorce at a lower-than-normal rate, as do asians and adults with a college degree and annual income in excess of $75k/yr.
To put people in categories like “Born Again” and “Evangelical”, Barna uses a person’s respones to a set of questions about theological beliefs and religious practice. The “born again” group are defined as:
“people who said they have made a personal commitment to Jesus Christ that is still important in their life today and who also indicated they believe that when they die they will go to Heaven because they had confessed their sins and had accepted Jesus Christ as their savior.”
To be in the evangelical group you have to meet the criteria for “born again” plus:
“include saying their faith is very important in their life today; believing they have a personal responsibility to share their religious beliefs about Christ with non-Christians; believing that Satan exists; believing that eternal salvation is possible only through grace, not works; believing that Jesus Christ lived a sinless life on earth; asserting that the Bible is accurate in all that it teaches; and describing God as the all-knowing, all-powerful, perfect deity who created the universe and still rules it today.”
So, basically you have to affirm some pretty basic protestant doctrine. What Barna doesn’t give us, though, is an in depth statistical analysis. For instance, he talks about how the divorce rate is lower among “evangelicals”, and also among “adults with a college degree who earn more than $75k/yr”. Well, what’s the overlap? Is it possible rich and educated adults are overrepresented among the group of evangelicals, and that explains the lower divorce rate? We don’t know, because he doesn’t tell us.
Bradley Wright, a sociologist and blogger, also refutes the notion that Christians divorce at the same rate. His research suggests that someone’s church attendance (which could be roughly viewed as a barometer of the “seriousness” of their religious belief) greatly impacts divorce rates, with “frequent attenders” divorcing at a much lower rate than the entire group of people who self-identify as “christian”. His site is here:
http://brewright.blogspot.com/2006/12/christian-divorce-rates.html
Okay, that’s a fair point — self-identification isn’t a good way to determine whether someone’s a Christian, especially in this society where the definition has been made such hash of.
I’m just leery of going straight to “Christians don’t do this therefore the people who do this aren’t Christians.” But I guess MacArthur wasn’t quite doing that, after all.
FWIW, Alfie, there have been studies done to account for the difference between marriage rates, and they bear you out. The likelihood of members of a group be getting divorced has a lot to do with the likelihood of its members getting married. Oddly enough.
“When divorces occur in our church [approximately 10,000 members] and they occur occasionally here—very often it is because somebody in the marriage who professed Christ—didn’t know Him.”
So….what MacArthur is saying is that if you have been divorced, you were probably not a true Christian after all….I don’t buy that.
While it is true that in the Barna survey, Evangelicals faired better than other groups (including “Born Again” camp), the numbers were still terrible with 25% ending in divorce (BA had 33%).
Also, the Holy Spirit convicts us for our sin and transforms us into the image of Christ. The Holy Spirit does NOT make us sinless, immediately. Divorce being sinful, and Christians being NOT Sinless means that the Holy Spirit could be working in them and YET their marriage still ends in divorce.
Challies writes: “MacArthur does a good job answering the claim that divorce rates are no better among Christians than among others.”
A good job? As far as I can tell, MacArthur can’t muster much more than crying “it can’t be true!” Well, statistics disagree with MacArthur — Christians have a divorce rate equivalent to, and sometimes higher than, the general population. Of course, MacArthur can attempt the hat trick of claiming that anybody who’s divorced must not be a Christian, but is anybody falling for that? Anybody intelligent, I mean?
While I do not put too much stock in statistics and even less in how one reads them , even those who are Christians are still sinners in need of a savior. Things go bad even to true believers. They sin , they fall , they repent , they stand again but their assurance has to be in the righteousness of Christ . Yes our marriages should reflect a difference in areas like divorce and a divorce should only be carried out following the biblical guidelines for one but it can still happen among true believers. Often times even though MacArthur holds to a reformed view of salvation , sometimes he says things that at surface level seems to indicate he holds a works righteousness view. Saying people who divorce weren’t really Christians or couldn’t be true believers, borders on that type of statement.
So, given that the divorce rate for Christians IS equivalent to the general population, would this not mean that Christ/Holy Spirit has zero positive effect on a marriage?
I don’t think that’s been adequately demonstrated, beatrice.
I wonder if ANYONE here (of Pastor MacArthur) is considers and of the following:
1. How many become Christians and their spouses divorce them? This was enough of an issue the Paul had to specifically address it (1 Cor. 7). It’s not infrequent that a reprobate will desert their newly saved spouse who refuses to live like the world.
2. How many Christians who “report divorce” were Christians at the time of divorce? There is no filter in place for that, but they’re forever stigmatized as THE symbol of how ineffective the church is. Geeee… way to welcome the new brothers and sister.
Using the mere presence of divorced persons in church as a barometer is just bad science at best and extreme prejudice at worst.
Pastor L. E. Galist: “I’m so proud to say that there’s hardly anyone at my church who is divorced!”Pastor: G R. Ace: “Really? Wow. My church ministers to tons of them”Pastor L. E. Galist: “Gee, I wonder HOW that came to be?!?”Pastor: G R. Ace: “They came from your church.”