This study is available as a free download online.The advice the book gives is the typical compromising that modern churches do. For a correct exegesis listen to the Issues Etc broadcast on Evangelical Compromise on Divorce & How Does the Story of Sodom Apply to Homosexuality? – Dr. Robert Gagnon, 4/4/13
Basically, if you get divorced and then decide to remarry, you are committing adultery. No exceptions made. Hosea married a faithless woman, named Gomer, but he never divorced her. What God has joined together man is not to separate.
This little pamphlet attempts to justify the practice because so many parishioners are divorced and remarried. The LCMS tolerates it because they need money and can't afford to lose dues payers. While there appears to be an escape clause in the case of adultery, this book is just an excuse to tolerate an ubiquitous practice: our churches are filled with unrepentant sinners who walked out on their partners in quest of a better mate. Alas, it isn't important to find the right person. It is only important to be the right person. Of course you will never learn this in Church.
The adultery excuse is particularly laughable in the case of baby boomers. They are the generation who ushered in the sexual revolution and the churches stood by and approved. The most egregious example was Chuck Smith of Calvary Chapel and his homosexual right hand man Lonnie Frisbee. At any rate, the baby boomers like to live like barnyard animals, mating promiscuously. For sure not all of them do but it is a characteristic of that generation.
Interesringly,
Dr. Albert Mohler, of the southern Baptist Seminary notes that the moral majority had positions on posting the ten commandments, prayer in schools, nativity scenes on government land, gays in the military, abortion, same sex marriage and a host of other issues. One position they didn't talk about was divorce by church members. That is because so many church members were divorced and remarried. You know what Dr. Mohler had to say? He said "... the inclusion of divorce on the agenda of the Christian right would have risked a massive alienation of members. In summary, evangelicals allowed culture to trump Scripture."
That is precisely what this little whitewash of a pamphlet does. It trumps scripture.
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