Abolitionists point out that pro-life laws often use unjust standards to accomplish the protection of children, and therefore we argue that such pro-life incrementalism should be opposed as inherently sinful. In reply, some incrementalists argue that because we see God regulating divorce in the law of Moses — and we know that God hates divorce — therefore God must support the creation of imperfect, sinful law when we don’t have the votes for perfect legislation.

For the biblical activist, the essential flaw in incrementalist thinking (at least regarding their use of mosaic law) is that one must claim that the law of Moses was fundamentally unjust when God gave it to Israel, which causes all kinds of biblical and theological problems. So we can assume at the outset that the Christian incrementalist is incorrect in his interpretation of scripture, and simply look for the point in his reasoning where he goes off-base.

God Regulating Divorce Through Certificates

The problem with God regulating divorce instead of abolishing it is that it looks very similar to pro-life legislators regulating abortion, rather than abolishing it. Because of this surface similarity, incrementalists can claim that the imperfection in Moses gives permission for imperfection in American law. A key passage that they cite is Jesus’ commentary on Jewish divorce law.

And Pharisees came up to him and tested him by asking, “Is it lawful to divorce one’s wife for any cause?”

He answered, “Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’? So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate.”

They said to him, “Why then did Moses command one to give a certificate of divorce and to send her away?”

He said to them, “Because of your hardness of heart Moses allowed you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it was not so. And I say to you: whoever divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality, and marries another, commits adultery.” (Mat 19:3-9)

Jesus tells us that the regulating of divorce in Moses occurred because of the hardness of Israel’s hearts, yet God’s perfect standard is to never divorce, except in the case of sexual immorality. The incrementalist rationale is that God created an imperfect law in Moses which contradicts true morality, and this increment is now being rectified by Jesus. This in turn justifies Gentile legislators in doing the same, if the hardness of the people’s hearts is sufficient to make a less perfect reflection of morality impossible to enact.

Was God Regulating Divorce From Legislative Difficulties?

Before we deal with the moral issue, it’s worth pointing out that while Israel gave Moses plenty of difficulty during the exodus, it would be ridiculous to claim that God was having any sort of problem getting his desired legislation passed. He literally wrapped himself in a column of flame and sent plagues among the people whenever they became too rebellious. Whatever is happening with divorce, incrementalists need to concede that the original law given through Moses is the law that God wanted Israel to have, not a compromised step toward his desired goal, because God “didn’t have the votes.” So if incrementalists believe the law is unjust, they need to explain why God wanted Israel to have an unjust law, and reconcile that with all of the scriptures where he vehemently opposes unjust legislation.

Is Divorce Sin?

Concerning the morality of divorce code in Moses, when we realize that the less perfect (i.e. incomplete) law is still morally perfect (i.e. just), we can see that this is not a true counterargument to the immediatists’ claim that justice and only justice must be written into civil law, regardless of how difficult it is to enact. We are not saying that civil law must address every form of sinful behavior in its criminal code. We are saying that whenever it does address an issue, it must do so justly, righteously.

The divorce code in Moses reads as follows:

When a man takes a wife and marries her, if then she finds no favor in his eyes because he has found some indecency in her, and he writes her a certificate of divorce and puts it in her hand and sends her out of his house, and she departs out of his house, and if she goes and becomes another man’s wife, and the latter man hates her and writes her a certificate of divorce and puts it in her hand and sends her out of his house, or if the latter man dies, who took her to be his wife, then her former husband, who sent her away, may not take her again to be his wife, after she has been defiled, for that is an abomination before the LORD. And you shall not bring sin upon the land that the LORD your God is giving you for an inheritance. (Deu 24:1-4)

While this law deals with a moral issue (divorce), it is fundamentally procedural in nature, not moral. By this I mean that it does not describe any sort of way to determine that a divorce is moral or immoral, and it doesn’t punish people for entering into an immoral divorce. Rather, it establishes restrictions on eligibility for future marriage that must be in place when any divorce (whether moral or immoral) occurs. These regulations would apply to divorce in the case of sexual immorality (ethical divorce), as much as they would to no-fault divorce (unethical divorce).

Regulating Divorce Does Not Justify Regulating Murder

Here we see the main flaw in the parallel that incrementalists wish to draw between Moses regulating divorce and pro-lifers regulating abortion. Divorce is not inherently immoral; there are just and unjust variations of it. The intentional murder of a child is always immoral, because the concept of “murder” refers exclusively to immoral variations of killing. It is killing with malice aforethought, etc. Because it is always wrong to murder a child, pro-life laws that regulate the murder of children are always unjust laws (specifying when, where, why, and how they can be murdered with impunity).

To be clear, laws that regulate the circumstances around a murder or other death (e.g. crime scene preservation, autopsy procedures, standards of evidence in court, etc.) are perfectly fine. A legitimate procedural law related to murder might say that when one occurs, family members of the deceased may not privately speak with anyone related to an accused party, out of a desire to prevent unethical vengeance from family members. Such a law doesn’t punishes murder. Rather, it regulates and restricts the interactions of circumstances around the murder, to prevent future immoral behavior that may otherwise likely occur.

Such procedural measures are what we see in the laws regulating divorce in Moses (certificates, restrictions on remarriage, etc.). God did not regulate when, where, why, and how a man may divorce his faithful wife, such as prohibiting it in the priestly class, but tolerating it among the people because of the hardness of their hearts. Rather, he simply didn’t penalize unjust divorce, in the same way that he didn’t penalize ignoring a person dying on the side of the road (Luk 10:25-37). Both actions are sinful, but human law codes are limited in their capacity to reliably penalize sinful conduct. God punishes all sin in the final judgement, and he uses human authorities to punish some forms of severe sin in the interim, to preserve life on the earth (Gen 9:5-6, Ecc 8:11).

Simply put, Moses is not required to punish unjust divorce. He is allowed to create an imperfect (incomplete) set of laws and penalties, as long as he does not create an imperfect (unjust) set of laws or penalties. It would be morally wrong if God created a law granting couples the right to divorce for any cause (no-fault divorce) when certain regulations were met. But there is no problem with God merely creating a law to regulate the process of all divorce, without attempting to speak to the question of whether or not particular divorces were moral or immoral.

Therefore in regulating divorce, Moses is not compromising with sin as the pro-lifers are. He is leaving the problem of unjust divorce to God’s greater judgement at the end of the history, and merely regulating the circumstances around divorce to encourage more ethical conduct. Centuries later, Jesus’ explanation of why God let no-fault divorce go unpunished (the hardness of Israel’s heart) answers the disciples’ question about God’s motives, but his continual focus on ultimate morality causes him to turn the subject to God’s higher moral standard, rather than Moses’ lower civil code (cf. Mat 5)

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Regulating Divorce

Understanding Abolition

The pro-life movement is not a biblical movement, and their leaders often work against the ending of abortion. Tap into the principles below to learn the difference between abolitionist and pro-life efforts against abortion.

Abolition Is:

The great theme of the Bible is God's work to abolish evil and its effects from the human condition and environment. As Christians who believe that the Bible is true and divinely inspired, abolitionists participate in God's work by establishing our movement on the word of God, and using its principles to effect positive change in the world.

In contrast, the pro-life movement incorporates Christians and non-Christians together in a Secular work to oppose abortion in various ways. While Christian pro-lifers will quote Bible verses against abortion in superficial ways, the movement itself defines its goals and methods according to principles that fundamentally oppose biblical teaching on how to remove evil and bring genuine healing.

The pro-life movement regularly opposes legislation that would grant equal protection to pre-born humans by criminalizing abortion. In some cases, pro-life lobbyists and legislators are the primary reason that this legislation does not pass.

This is because the pro-life movement believes that the woman who willfully kills her child is a victim in the process, rather than a perpetrator. Therefore they turn to unjust forms of discriminatory legislation in an attempt to pragmatically, rather than ethically, reduce the amount of abortions performed.

While there is a great deal of false information propagated to support the universal victimhood of women, and such false information should be refuted, the biblical standard is clear regardless. Anyone who conspires to kill an innocent human being is guilty of murder, thus the homicide code should reflect that reality.

We do not grant mothers permission to murder their three-year-olds with impunity, even when the mothers are facing difficult situations. In the same way, we should not grant mothers permission to murder their pre-born children, even when the mothers are facing difficult situations. All human beings are created in the image of God, and are therefore equally valuable before God, regardless of their age.

We live in a culture that is filled with post-abortive fathers and mothers. From a merely practical standpoint, the only way to effect national repentance will be to share with our people the bad news of God's judgement on sin, together with the good news that God forgives and redeems repentant murderers, when we are honest with him about our sin.

With that said, this personal message alone does not do justice to the whole gospel presented in scripture. It is true that Jesus came to redeem individual sinners from an eternity in Hell. But his work on the cross was done to redeem the whole of creation, and therefore has implications in the present day for any sinful aspect of human society. This means that it is appropriate to speak of gospel-centered politics, gospel-centered economics, and gospel-centered activism, etc., in contradiction to humanistic and other man-centered approaches to these disciplines.

Abolition is therefore a holistic gospel-centered movement in that it addresses the needs of individuals, and of nations, as we grapple with the impact of sin on our personal and corporate lives.

In the work to end slavery, two schools of thought competed for dominance in anti-slavery legislation. The colonizationists and their predecessors in Britain pursued various degrees of compromise with the slavers that would gradually reduce slavery until it was finally ended. The abolitionists instead sought legislation that would immediately bring an end to the practice without exception or compromise, and they were ultimately the group that succeeded. These two schools of thought became known as gradualism and immediatism respectively, and have been applied to various human rights conflicts since that time.

The pro-life movement is like the colonization society in that it pursues gradualist legislation that compromises with abortion, rather than seek its immediate end. it does this under the belief that compromising legislation is more practical than uncompromising legislation.

In many cases it is truly practical to compromise with opponents. However, when dealing with an issue of sin, compromise has the side effect of further embedding the sinful activity into one's life or society. When a pornography addict compromises with his addiction, for example, his seeking to reduce consumption rather than completely and immediately cut it off will ultimately make him more complacent and enslaved to it.

Scripture teaches us to take a radical, no-compromise approach to the abolition of sin in our personal lives, and the same principles apply to legislation in our national life. As such, while the pro-life / gradualist approach may sound pragmatic, it is ultimately impractical and self-defeating, due to the nature of sin.

Abortion is sin, and the only answer to sin is the gospel. Because the Christian Church is the institution that was commissioned by Jesus to spread the gospel message, this means that she should be at the center of the war against abortion and other destructive evils in society.

Unfortunately, due to various bad theologies and general complacency, the Church has largely abandoned the fight against national evils like abortion. Abolitionist societies and other parachurch ministries have risen up to fill the gap and organize Christian responses to evil, but these fail to provide the holistic, unified community that Jesus designed to serve as salt and light in a dying culture. Parachurch ministries have a role to play in organizing local churches to particular tasks, but they should always be supplemental, with the institutional Church driving Christianity's response to both personal and social evils.

Thus historic and modern abolition includes a message of repentance to Christians and to churches who fail to give a biblical, comprehensive response to the rise of sin in our dying culture. Individual Christians must repent of our failure to know and act upon the duties that God gives us to stand against evil. Churches need to repent of believing false and unbiblical ideas that reduce the gospel to only the personal salvation of souls, and their general failure to teach Christians what God expects of us in response to social evils like child sacrifice.

One of the unique features of Christianity is its reliance on the providence of God over the pragmatism of man to bring about its desired results. When Jesus went to the cross, this contradicted all of the worldly wisdom of his time on how to establish political power to advance one's own agenda. Instead of compromise with the religious and political leaders of his day, Jesus rebuked them, held them accountable to the higher standard of God, and trusted that God would deliver him through the persecution they would bring upon his head.

More importantly, Jesus trusted that God would establish his kingdom through his faithful obedience rather than pragmatic compromise. Because God truly does rule over the world, the most practical, pragmatic thing a person can do is to align himself with God's will, even when it contradicts the flawed logic of rebellious man. Thus abolitionists rely on the providence of God rather than the worldly wisdom of man, measuring our lives and our movement against his word, even when obedience to it seems counterintuitive.

Work in the pro-life movement is often separated into those who offer assistance to women in need, and those who agitate for public change. Abolitionism holds that Christians are required to participate in both kinds of activity, speaking the truth in love. Uniting these two modes in every abolitionist prevents love from devolving into a false, untruthful form, and truth from being delivered in a cold and arrogant way.

Abolitionists Bring: