1980 Statement – PCUS, 1980, pp. 182, 185-186
2. Is divorce legitimate?
. . . Christians, who are also sinners, do divorce, and the church must deal both with those whose marriages are breaking and with its own role and task.
The church is to be a community of healing, and it should seek the healing of marriages. The church is to be a community of forgiveness, and it should mediate forgiveness in the brokenness of divorce among its members. The church is to be a community of fidelity, and it should demonstrate fidelity to those in whose marriages fidelity has been lost. The church may foster the forging of new forms of fidelity in the midst of divorce–fidelity to children and to others who lives have been involved in the marriage . . .
8. Must both partners be Christians?
The theological understanding of Christian marriage presented here includes several elements, but central to it is seeing marriage as a covenant to which God is significantly present and is recognized to be present by the wife and the husband. That element cannot be neglected or ignored by the Church in its teaching and counseling functions.
Yet we are not the judges finally of the human heart. God chooses and enters into covenant. God’s terms are not ours. God is present and active even where no one acknowledges God to be. So God may be in a marriage where one or even both partners make no open commitment to Christian faith.
Still, to stand in the midst of the Christian community and to seek the blessing of God is no small thing. Paul saw clearly that marriage is a context for the consecration of spouses and children (I Corinthians 7:12-16). We ought not to despise that insight, while we seek for open Christian commitment as involved in the reality of Christian marriage.
Conclusion
. . . Through reflection on the Bible and the history of the church, we can see that while marriage involves the free consent of a woman and a man to live with each other, it also involves the community as the context and support of that relation. Above all Christians make marriage covenants before God and with the expectation of the living presence and activity of the Faithful One . .