Can anything be more important in this life than knowing God's will--and doing it? Nonetheless, large numbers of Christians are confused about this very thing. Why is this? You believe your Bible. You accept that it is the final authority on all matters pertaining to your life of faith. God's voice is certainly and surely there on every page. But, is God's voice also heard elsewhere? You fail to get into university despite several attempts; is God telling you something? You are invited to a meeting and the preacher speaks movingly about being a missionary, something that has been on your...

It can only be imagined that when the New Testament writers made their (albeit brief) comments on divorce and remarriage that they assumed they would be understood. So what has gone wrong?

In the years after the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE, when Graeco-Roman culture was at its height, the Jewish perspective of marriage and divorce, and thus the context of those brief New Testament comments was lost. The Christian church of that era was influenced by the neoplatonic ideas of the day, and an idealised concept of marriage developed from on Adam and Eve's marriage recorded in...