Jesus and Divorce
Posted by Sappho on August 20th, 2005 filed in Bible study, Marriage
Mythago (not a Christian) asks a good question, in the comments to a post by Hugo about the “good divorce”:
Jesus flat-out stated that the only acceptable reason for divorce is adultery. I don’t quite understand how Christians can argue that divorce is OK under other circumstances (although one of Hugo’s occasional posters once made a very strong Scriptural argument that domestic violence is an irreparable breach of the marital bond).
The passages to which Mythago is referring are, first, Matthew 5:31-32:
“It has been said, ‘Anyone who divorces his wife must give her a certificate of divorce.’ But I tell you that anyone who divorces his wife, except for marital unfaithfulness, causes her to become an adulteress, and anyone who marries the divorced woman commits adultery.
and, second, Matthew 19:3-9:
Some Pharisees came to him to test him. They asked, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any and every reason?”
“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.”
“Why then,” they asked, “did Moses command that a man give his wife a certificate of divorce and send her away?”
Jesus replied, “Moses permitted you to divorce your wives because your hearts were hard. But it was not this way from the beginning. I tell you that anyone who divorces his wife, except for marital unfaithfulness, and marries another woman commits adultery.”
Parallel passages are found in Mark 10:2 and in Luke 16:18 (which loses the exception for adultery). Also relevant is 1 Corinthians 10-16, which introduces a different exception:
To the married I give this command (not I, but the Lord): A wife must not separate from her husband. But if she does, she must remain unmarried or else be reconciled to her husband. And a husband must not divorce his wife.
To the rest I say this (I, not the Lord): If any brother has a wife who is not a believer and she is willing to live with him, he must not divorce her. And if a woman has a husband who is not a believer and he is willing to live with her, she must not divorce him. For the unbelieving husband has been sanctified through his wife, and the unbelieving wife has been sanctified through her believing husband. Otherwise your children would be unclean, but as it is, they are holy.
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?
A couple of points are relevant to interpreting these passages. First, notice that Paul makes a clear distinction between what he, Paul, says, and what “the Lord” has said. The usual interpretation here is that Paul is familiar with a statement about divorce that goes back to Jesus (whom Paul refers to as “the Lord”), and then that Paul, on his own authority, but acknowledging that he doesn’t have any specific word from Jesus, discusses a situation that Jesus hadn’t addressed. So, we have both Paul and the synoptic gospels (that means the three out of four gospels that seem to know about each other and share sources) agreeing that Jesus strongly discouraged divorce.
Second, we also know that two major rabbis, Hillel and Shammai, who lived at around the same time as Jesus (see this timeline), and each of whom had a school of followers, had a dispute about divorce. The Babylonian Talmud quotes Hillel, Shammai, and Akiba (the third of whom came shortly after Jesus) on the matter of divorce. Shammai says that a man may divorce his wife in the case of adultery. Hillel says that a man may divorce his wife even if she spoils his dinner (that is, even for a trivial fault). Akiba says that a man may divorce his wife even if he simply finds another woman prettier (that is, for no fault at all). Jesus, apparently, in Matthew 5:31-32 and Matthew 19:3-9, is siding with Shammai. Notice that none of the four men is addressing directly when a woman may divorce her husband; divorce law was set up at the time so that men generally initiated a divorce, and it was easier for a man to divorce than a woman.
There’s a method of Bible study that’s become popular among Quakers, that I’m going to try with these passages, before I proceed to discussing how various Christians have interpreted Jesus’ teaching on divorce, and what are the strengths and weaknesses of those Christian responses. But it’s Saturday morning, and I have one other blog topic I want to raise before I get away from my keyboard and do other stuff. So, I’ll leave you with the questions (and the expectation of two further posts to come on divorce).
1. What is the author’s main point in this passage? (MAIN POINT)
2. What new light do I find in this particular reading of this passage of the text? (NEW LIGHT)
3. Is this passage true to my experience? (TRUTH)
4. What are the implications of this passage for my life? (IMPLICATIONS)
5. What problems do I have with this passage? (PROBLEMS)
Feel free to respond to these questions in the comments, if you care to.
August 20th, 2005 at 8:49 pm
Well, darn, I still want to know where modern Christian denominations believe they can depart from Jesus’s word. 🙂
Jewish law never allowed a woman to divorce her husband. Only the husband can initiate a divorce. There is a huge theological and social problem with agunot–“anchored” women–whose husbands refuse to religiously divorce them.
August 21st, 2005 at 11:26 am
To tell you the truth, mythago, I suspect the answer might turn out to be that we Christians are basically lame, and know we need divorce because our hearts are still hard :-).
But, actually, there are several different tacks that different varieties of Christians take, and I’m going to cover them in later posts in this series. So, after one post which you may just want to ignore (answering the Bible study questions, and setting up the conflict between our culture and Jesus’ words), I’m going to cover three different approaches by which different Christian denominations have added flexibility: 1) looking at the ways times have changed and marriage differs in our time, 2) extending what’s called “the Pauline privilege,” where you’re not bound if your unbelieving spouse leaves the marriage, and 3) Jesus does indeed prohibit divorce, but if you look closely, you may find that you weren’t married to begin with (annulment). And there’s also a couple of ways that some Christians actually interpret the New Testament to make the rules even harder than the text appears to read on the face of it (divorce may not be allowed even in the event of adultery, and “the Pauline privilege” may not exist after all).
August 22nd, 2005 at 4:42 pm
Hi Sappho: thanks for the little lesson. This has bothered me too. As far as I know Jesus never talks about all the big moral issues championed by the Christian right: abortion, gay marriage, euthenasia. The only “bedroom” issue he does talk about (and probably because it was seen as primarily a social structure issue) is divorce.
Coming from a psychologically-abusive family I completely understand the need for divorce–my mother should have left my father twenty years before she did, whatever Jesus might have said about it. But it seems that self-professing Christians are way too easy divorce. There’s certainly more than one Christian who’s followed Akiba’s rules and left his wife for someone younger and prettier. I once dated a woman who explained that she left her first husband because of a dispute over who would use the car one night; this was supposed to be symbolic of a lot of things but it seemed mostly symbolic of an unwillingness to live through even minor hassles and ranks up there with “spoils his dinner” (for the record: the dating never ended up in marriage, whew!).
I wish my wife Julie were here at the moment. There’s something about the Matthew quote having been translated differently by Protestants & Catholics. I don’t remember the details though I did look it up in the Oxford Commentary once which confirmed there’s different interpreations for what Jesus meant by “adultery.”
August 23rd, 2005 at 4:59 am
Here’s the thing I don’t get: Let’s take Jesus at his word, that it is indeed a sin to divorce for reasons other than unfaithfulness (setting aside a discussion of whether there’s a difference between unfaithfulness and adultry that might legitimize a lot more divorces) and a Christian divorces anyway and remarries. So what? He or she’s a sinner. What else is new?
Wouldn’t continuing an abusive or destructive marriage also be sinful? Isn’t that its own kind of unfaithfulness? Are we to ban all sinners from our congregations and meetings? Gosh, I’d be awful lonely there all by myself . . . .
No, we accept sinners, but expect them to have repented of their sin. But what does it mean to repent of divorce? How can you turn away from it? Do you have to go back to the former spouse? Isn’t divorce is one of those sins where you can’t unring the bell? If so, then the perspective has to be forward looking: have you repented of whatever it was that caused you to be unfaithful to your vows? And how does the innocent victim repent, anyway? Does he or she have to remain celebate because of someone else’s weakness and error?
I agree with Martin that much of the Christian church, including my own Quaker corner of it, does not have a rigorousness enough theology of marriage or divorce and doesn’t consider the moral consequences of divorce — as contrasted with its emotional and psychological aspectes — as seriously as it should; in practice, we’ve largely adopted the World’s self-fulfillment ethos of marriage in contrast to a covenential understanding of marriage. The result is that we’re too easy on divorce — perhaps as a consequence of our being too easy on marriage in the first place? So we can agree with Jesus that it’s not “OK” to divorce, perhaps.
But for the divorced individual, what then? Though we could take Jesus at his word and refuse to sanction the re-marriage of a divorced person as if it is a life-long taint of some sort, but that seems inconsistent with Jesus’s other behavior towards sinners. He forgives the taint of the woman caught in adultry — though he does so with the command to “go and sin no more”. I understand that the lack of the “and remain celebate for the rest of your life” in the text doesn’t mean that it wasn’t implied, but I do think it’s significant that in that episode Jesus’s focus was on caring for the woman as a victim of sin and not her sinfulness itself.
So I think the answer is, we don’t disagree with Jesus that breaking the marital covenant is permissible (unless for adultry). But we’d also agree with him even the sin of divorce can be forgive.
Disclaimer: I have been divorced, though was not the instigator, and I have remarried. My life is incomparably better now than it was then, and if I knew then what I knew now, I might well have ended it sooner on my own. But it’s still a problem I ponder.
September 13th, 2005 at 3:27 pm
I am actually working with marriage healing, we have a ministry. We have a fierce discussion going on, because the leader of the ministry, who remained single for 19 years(her husband left and divorced her for another woman) is now remarrying her youth sweetheart.
I have communicated with other ministries who stand on no divorce, if divorce no remarriage. This sounds quite harsh. But if we look behind the scenes, in a lot of cases, the appoach makes sence, particularly then if we see a potential for healing for both partners. And I see a lot of healing potential for both partners, because a lot of marriages break down because of woundedness in both partners, because of lack of understanding of the necessity to be the sort of man and woman that God wnats us to be in a marriage. There have been tremendous successes in reunion in cases where one(or both) partner have decided to pray for and forgive their spouse and then work on changing themselves and not the spouse. I truly believe it is a blessing from God when a first marriage comes back again and is healed, The consequences of remarriage can be uite severe, step parents and children issues, woundedness that continues and is not healed etc. etc. rebecca