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To: Springfield Reformer

Do you or your Church consider divorce and artificial contraception a sin?


72 posted on 06/08/2014 1:16:59 PM PDT by Wyrd bið ful aræd (Pope Calvin the 1st, defacto Leader of the FR Calvinist Protestant Brigades)
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To: Wyrd bið ful aræd

Sorry about the delay in responding, but I just noticed your post.

To answer your question, I do consider divorce a sin. I am also opposed to anything but natural birth control. However, on that there is no direct Scriptural statement, and the only basis for inference is the prohibition on murder, i.e., any “contraceptive” that kills a conceived human life would still be murder.

As for my fellowship, I have fellowshipped with many Baptistic and Reformed groups over the years and would characterize them all as consistently prolife, but with varying degrees of understanding the implications of various contraceptives technologies.

On divorce, some few of those groups were as strict as you could imagine, forbidding remarriage even if adultery was the basis, understanding the adultery exception as peculiar to a specific debate in Jewish law at the time under the Old Covenant, and thus not relevant to the New Covenant.

Without a strict statistical basis, I would hazard a guess that most of the rest I have known do see it as sin, but take the adultery exception as still valid. Probably the only basis for an annulment would be failure to consummate, as we have no such escape hatch as defect of form, as Catholicism does. But then we don’t see marriage as a sacrament per se, and so have no need to circumvent the “undeletable mark on the soul” alleged to be created by the matrimonial sacrament. The odd side effect of this is that the more conservative Reformed and/or Baptist groups I have known are actually stricter than Catholicism, as annulment for us doesn’t have the flexibility it does in Catholicism.

On the other hand the most pro-abortion folks I know are my Catholic relatives up near Chicago. Not only do they believe in it, they’ve participated in it. They’ve also linked it to their Mariology, as a validation of feminism. A wicked brew, I know, and certainly not representative of all Catholics. But that has been my experience. In any given room, I am the most conservative person on these topics. Except possibly here at FR. :)

Hope that helped.

Peace,

SR


78 posted on 06/08/2014 9:32:46 PM PDT by Springfield Reformer (Winston Churchill: No Peace Till Victory!)
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