A Simple Way to Understand Clergy Divorce
The Sixth Commandment and the Preaching Office: why shame is salutary for adulterous pastors.
Lutherans pride themselves on standing on the plain meaning of a text. Unfortunately, when it comes to issues of the Sixth Commandment, our pastoral reasoning very often slides from casuistry into evasion, rendering otherwise clear Scripture entirely opaque.
A pastor’s divorce1 is one example in which the Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod (LCMS) has something of a policy, but it is unevenly applied. There are cases, too many, where adulterous men persist in the preaching office despite Scripture forbidding it, even if the overseers are lax. It is amplified among the laity, where divorce and remarriage are not as rare as they should be. Likewise, there are too many examples of pastors defrocked for adultery still fringing pulpits as pseudo-shepherds because they believe they are too indispensable to the world to sit silently in the pew.
Without diminishing the traumatic impact of divorce on its victims, the Bible is clear that pastors (only biological males) may only have one wife (only biological females). Below is a flowsheet that should eliminate any confusion about the outcomes when a pastor’s marriage fails and ends in divorce.
Clergy divorce flowsheet
The salutary benefit of shame
One of the reasons for Missouri’s struggle with Sixth Commandment issues is the perilous antinomian line we tread when the doctrine of justification is abused. We are definitely too quick to forgive and forget; to apply the “soothing balm of the gospel” when the pastor who violates his marital vows is eventually exposed.
We should not rush into coddling adulterous pastors because it is an incentive to premeditated repentance. Of course, confession and absolution are to be available, but let the salutary benefits of shame work out, ideally at a very great distance from the family, friends, congregation, and institutions they have damaged in the scandal.
In our therapeutic culture, shame is viewed negatively. However, it yields constructive outcomes when exercised, Scripturally, for remorse, restitution, rehabilitation, and reform. That process should be managed in silence and out of sight over a long period. The last thing the church needs is performative communal processing of shame and the rapid reintegration that results from misguided and misapplied ‘gospelly’ empathy. Indeed, we should be highly suspicious of pastors who do not process their shame in distant, prolonged solitude. Not exiled, just managed extremely judiciously with equal doses of law and gospel.
The preaching office doesn’t require chaste behavior because of antiquarian moralism, but as the very mystery and witness that Christ’s Church remains His spotless bride.
Men tend to accuse wives of malicious abandonment (refusing conjugality), while women tend to accuse husbands of abuse (especially the “emotional” sort). Well, pastors, if you are suffering in your marriage, it is just one more burden of many that you vowed, at your ordination, to bear (1 Peter 2: 19-25). Wives, unless genuine danger is present, bear the cross faithfully and patiently. The vocation of marriage demands long-suffering from both husband and wife, as each endures the other’s weakness for Christ’s sake.