Paul and Divorce: 1 Corinthians 7:10-16 and the “Pauline privilege”

Posted by Sappho on August 22nd, 2005 filed in Bible study, Marriage

Like Matthew, Mark, and Luke, Paul is on record as saying that Jesus really doesn’t want us getting divorced. But Paul introduces a qualification, and some of the internal debate among Christians (particularly theologically conservative Christians) as to when divorce should be allowed stems from differences in interpretation of this passage:

But if the unbeliever leaves, let him do so. A believing man or woman is not bound in such circumstances; God has called us to live in peace. How do you know, wife, whether you will save your husband? Or, how do you know, husband, whether you will save your wife?

This is what’s known as the “Pauline privilege,” and most Christians, reasonably enough, interpret it to mean, at least, that if your non-Christian spouse divorces you, you aren’t bound to consider yourself still married. Weirdly, a few Christians go (in my opinion) quite out of their way to come up with an interpretation which would obliged Christians to consider themselves still married, no matter what, after they’ve been divorced; this turns on a strange reading of “not bound” to mean that, if your non-Christian spouse is threatening to leave you if you don’t abjure your Christian faith, you’re not bound to do so. Huh? Where did that come from? This passage shows up when Paul is talking about whether divorce is permitted, and nothing anywhere in the passage suggests that anyone is trying to force Christians to renounce their faith.

However, interpreting this passage in the more reasonable way, the one that actually allows you to consider yourself divorced after your nonbelieving spouse has, in fact, divorced you, there are still two questions on which differences in Christian interpretation turn. First, who actually can be considered to be an unbelieving spouse? Second, what can be considered to be leaving the marriage?

The Catholic Church interprets “unbeliever” to mean only a spouse who was never, at any time during the marriage, baptized. So, for example, if Joel were to leave me, although he currently doesn’t consider himself Christian, he wouldn’t be an unbelieving spouse. He was baptized as a Catholic, and no matter how lapsed a Catholic he may be, he doesn’t count as an unbeliever for the purpose of this rule. Similarly, I was baptized as an Episcopalian, and so, were I to leave Joel, no matter what the personal state of my faith at the time I left him, I wouldn’t count as an unbelieving spouse.

Protestants interpret “unbelieving spouse” variably. I’ve seen some conservative Protestant commentary which allows “unbelieving spouse” to apply to someone who is acting as an unbeliever, regardless of whether that person claims to be Christian.

More interesting, to me, is the question of what it means to depart the marriage. If one were to read the passage to refer, for example, only to civil divorce, then an “unbelieving spouse” could up and leave, head off to another country and not be heard from for years, and you’d still be bound. This would leave the abandoned spouse in the position of those “anchored women” that Mythago mentions, whose husbands refuse to religiously divorce them. In fact, departing the marriage is often given a broader interpretation. It could mean leaving by divorce, or abandonment, or “constructive desertion,” where the spouse has abandoned the marriage by making it intolerable to remain.

Understanding departing the marriage to include making it intolerable to remain in the marriage has a major advantage; it removes you from the obligation to tell people to suck up and stick it out in blatantly unsafe and abusive situations. Given the evidence that the murder rate has been cut by women’s greater willingness to walk out of violent relationships, it seems to me that a compelling case can be made that violence in itself counts as having already breached the marriage, and that the battered spouse is not bound in such a case.

On the other hand, there are some aspects of evangelical Protestant interpretation of this passage that I wonder at. Making the marriage intolerable is not limited to making it unsafe; it can be applied to various circumstances (various depending on who’s doing the interpreting) that could be seen to make marriage intolerable: verbal abuse, failing drastically in your obligations to each other in some way, etc. And this raises a question for me: who exactly decides what’s making a marriage intolerable? Is it someone else, looking from outside the marriage, and working from a set of assumptions about husbands’ and wives’ roles that perhaps neither of the couple ever shared or intended to commit to? Because if the criteria get made broad enough (e.g. the husband has departed the marriage if he fails to financially support the wife), then it looks to me as if a huge exception has been created, and it’s hard to justify why the application of that exception should be judged by anyone other than the people who actually live in the marriage. On the other hand, if it’s the people living in the marriage who are making the judgment, then aren’t we back to Hillel’s view of divorce, since any fault may subjectively make continued marriage intolerable? And Jesus seems to have deliberately rejected Hillel’s view of divorce.

At any rate, a reading that at least lets people rescue themselves from danger seems to me entirely fair.