Dr. Judith Gerhart, CFP
Certified Divorce Financial Analyst 
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Things You Didn’t Know: Part 5
August 17, 2009
Divorce is a product of the Protestant Reformation
The last thing you didn’t know about divorce is who to blame for making it all possible in the first place.
Prior to Martin Luther’s Protestant Reformation, Western society’s attitudes about marriage were guided strictly by Catholic marriage doctrine and its only out — an annulment. Reformers rejected that doctrine, first by citing shaky New Testament scripture and then by claiming that annulments were so widespread and so easy to get that they were pretty much the same thing as divorces. The arguments were so weak that not even King Henry VIII — arguably history’s first serial divorcer — stopped persecuting Reformers, even after splitting his country with the Roman Catholic Church.
Still, the end consequence is that, although marriage has retained ties to its sacred past (i.e. weddings in churches, officiated by the clergy), divorce has developed into a purely secular affair.
By: Ross Bonander
Posted by Judith Gerhart on August 17, 2009 | Permalink | Post a comment
Topics: Divorce |
