Divorce and the scandal of particularity: how do you deal with a God incarnate who lived in a different time and place?

Posted by Sappho on August 21st, 2005 filed in Marriage

In Hugo’s latest thread on divorce, Chris writes:

When we speak about the bible, we must first understand that it was written in a particular place and time that is foreign to us. We might have to say that we might not be understanding what Jesus is saying at particular point and i think that is the case in divorce.

This raises a question that has broader implications than divorce. If I admire, say, the rabbi Hillel (who was close to being a contemporary of Jesus), and I find that he has said something I don’t care for about women, I may well conclude that, after all, even Hillel, admirable as he is, is bound by his culture. Since then, men’s and women’s roles have shifted in ways that, on the whole, I consider an advance. And, after all, the past gets a vote, but not a veto.

But what do you do when your theology says that one particular man, born in one particular place and time, was unique in being the one and only man to actually be God made man? Say that, after all, the guy was still a creature of his time, and didn’t know any better? What, after all, does it mean to be fully God and fully man? Can you not know things, which we now know today? Can you be wrong about something? And if so, just how far can you really be ignorant or wrong, given that you’re also God?

In fact, what some very liberal Christians do is not actually to believe that Jesus was uniquely God incarnate. Jesus was, perhaps, an especially wise teacher, perhaps one who was in touch with God in a way that most of us are not, but he wasn’t, in fact

… the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For by him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities …

At this point, liberal Christianity starts to converge with a respectful look at Jesus by an outsider a non-Christian (such as Geza Vermes’ books about Jesus the Jew); the difference is simply that those who still define themselves as Christian are saying that they particularly follow the teachings of Jesus (but not what they see as the later distortions of Paul). I won’t do more than nod to this view, though, for two reasons: The first is that this isn’t, after all, the stated view of even liberal denominations (and the question under consideration is why Christian denominations would condone divorce, not why scattered unusually theologically liberal Christians would). The second is that, after careful thought, I don’t myself take this position.

Now, it seems to me that there are certain implications to being fully human, being tempted even as we are, and being one who

… being in very nature with God,
did not consider equality with God something to be grasped,
but made himself nothing,
taking the very nature of a servant,
being made in human likeness.

And one of those implications, it seems to me, is that you don’t in fact walk around always knowing everything. You don’t know Latin unless you’ve actually learned it, and, absent such learning, Pontius Pilate may need an interpreter to talk to you. You probably don’t know, centuries ahead of your time, about the theory of evolution or the general theory of relativity. If you did know all these things, you’d hardly be emptying yourself and taking the nature of a servant, would you? Because that’s just not what a human likeness actually is.

On the other hand, if you are, after all, truly God, and, moreover, the one special man who is tempted but never, ever sins, it’s hard to argue that you’re gravely morally mistaken about something important. This kind of knocks a hole in one possible version of the “it was long ago and far away” argument.

On the other hand, it actually was long ago and far away, and Jesus was answering questions put to him by particular people in a particular time and place. Is there any reason to believe that the particular time and place may have shaped his answers about marriage and divorce?

To some degree, I would say yes. Because if you look at what was different in that time and place, well, family life was very different. The roles of men and women were very different. The laws governing divorce, the practical consequences of divorce, all these things were different. And one difference in particular strikes me as significant (and would be accepted by many others among at least the more theologically liberal Christian denominations), given the glaring omission of domestic violence as a possible ground for divorce.

Jesus is addressing men, in the context of a debate about when men are entitled to initiate divorce, in the context of a legal system where men can initiate a divorce by issuing a get, while women’s option for getting out of a marriage is to try to get someone to pressure the husband to issue a get. And, given that back then, as now, men were still stronger than women, and that the culture was surely no less patriarchal then than now, it seems likely that, then as now, wives were more likely to be battered and injured by husbands than husbands by wives. If the question put to Jesus was, as it seems to have been, when husbands should divorce, being battered probably wasn’t an example at the top of anyone’s mind. Rather, they wanted to know whether Jesus sided with Hillel – it’s OK for men to leave their wives even for small faults – or with Shammai. I don’t think we’re obliged to take the answer so literally, and hew so closely to the particular circumstances in which the question was raised, as to say that domestic violence hasn’t itself already breached the marital bond.

That said, there are still problems of how far we get to take this kind of argument. Jesus is quoted by Matthew as appealing back to Adam and Eve:

“Haven’t you read,” he replied, “that at the beginning the Creator ‘made them male and female,’ and said, ‘For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh’? So they are no longer two, but one. Therefore what God has joined together, let man not separate.”

It appears that Jesus himself sees his teaching on marriage as expressing something inherently true, and not culture bound. So how far can Christians actually legitimately qualify “what God has joined together, let man not separate”?

In my next post, I turn to the main Biblical justification used by Protestants (the church of no divorce obviously takes a different tack) to justify divorce in circumstances other than adultery: 1 Corinthians 10-16 and the “Pauline privilege.”