A few years ago, my wife and I attended a wedding in the Netherlands. A service was held in a church and then one was held in a government office. The first was to acknowledge the union before God; the second formalized it for the government.
At the time, we thought this was a rather sad commentary on Dutch society. Lately, I have come to see the wisdom in it.
While I teach the importance of separation of church and state in certain Bible studies, I am still in the minority on this subject. Hopefully, more folks will come to understand the importance of what Kyle Henderson is saying.
Tom Macy
Windsor, Colo.
‘True biblical understanding’ of marriage needed
It is interesting to see evangelicals in the United States struggling with issues of marriage and its connection to government authority.
Perhaps a true biblical understanding of how it functioned in Jesus’ very Jewish world can emerge. Protestants have been bound to the Roman Catholic understanding of marriage since the emergence of the wedding/marriage as one of the Roman Catholic sacraments in the second century AD.
Europeans in all of their diversity of practice recognized this many decades ago.
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Lorin L. Cranford
Miami, Fla.
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