The Catholic Church says that God, through the Bible, disapproves of a man and a woman who are not "equal" becoming married...in other words, both should be believers or unbelievers (for what fellowship hath righteousness with unrighteousness and what fellowship hath light with darkness).
But God is also said to be opposed to divorce. A Christian who finds himself or herself in a marriage with an unbeliever (whether both were unbelievers and one became Christian, or both were believers and one de-converted) does not have the option of divorcing their spouse. On the contrary, the Christian is obligated all the more to strengthen their faith and be a loving witness, etc.
For me, being the one to depart the Christian faith, this is an interesting situation to ponder. My marriage was initiated and generally sustained with a clearly religious foundation. We had conversations before we were even wed essentially agreeing that first and foremost, we were two people faithful to Christ who were choosing to love one another and pursue a marriage which would honor Christ. Our "pact" was that whatever situation or difficulty came our way, we could always tackle it and deal with it because of our unity in Christ. We never even sought to establish any sort of list of other ways in which we were united. In fact, we were quite different as it turned out. We had the physical attraction/intimacy from the beginning, but past that and our religious resolve, there wasn't a whole lot there and of course, that was never a concern because we had the foundational things covered....we thought.
Now that I am de-converting, the motivation behind the Christian principle of "equal yoking" keeps coming to my mind as something to ponder. It's still early days in this situation, but the appearance at present is that my wife really is going to turn up the heat in her faith in order to compensate for my lack of religion. She gives the impression that she is going to be tolerant of my non-belief, and I reciprocate the feeling by suggesting that I will be tolerant of her faith. But how does this really work out practically?
Wednesday, April 30, 2008
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3 comments:
It seems to me that it will come down to the strength of your friendship.
It seems to me that you are right. Its just difficult to even think in those terms because we have never been in a position to evaluate our "friendship" apart from our common "faith".
I'm not married so I can't be of help in that respect. But I can say that I don't believe in the unequally yoked doctrine as applying to marriage. After all, what is the difference between a couple consisting of a believer and unbeliever from that of parent/child, or siblings of the same make-up. My parents were both christians (dad was a preacher) but had a disastrous marriage which ended in divorce. I've also known of Christians in marriages with non-christians and it worked out fine. I personally don't believe that believer/unbeliever marriages are ideal. But, from what I've seen, they can work.
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