The journey to remarriage following a divorce is necessarily a painful one. Although it is now something of a trope (with increasing divorce rates and newspapers reporting on more and more celebrities and politicians who are on their third or fourth marriage) that marriage is beginning to be seen as something temporary, something small, something to be discarded, nevertheless it has not been my experience when meeting prospective marriage couples in my vicarage study to note any such nonchalance. Neither have I seen it, or felt it, in encounters with Christians who experience the trauma of divorce. Having lived through such a time myself, I know well the depths of pain and feeling which come from the reality of the marriage bond when it is broken.
I can appreciate how this pain, and the associated joy which comes for those who move past it into healing and fulfilment, can be seen to be analogous to other forms of grief and contentment that accompany other forms of relational distress such as unrequited love, the death of a spouse—or as is commonly articulated, same sex marriage.
Only today I saw an article in a leading newspaper exploring the issues of justice in the willingness of the Church of England to remarry divorcees, but not to offer same sex marriage. I can see how the two issues might feel closely related. Both once illegal, both once a source of shame; both condemned by the church, both now almost universally accepted in the UK.
But the issue is not whether or not the desires and longings experienced in these two experiences may evoke similar emotions, or follow similar trajectories in the popular imagination. The question is whether they are in fact analogous theologically and biblically, and my contention is that they are not. This is to say, that one may accept the remarriage of divorcees without accepting same sex marriage. Now, it might be that a Christian decides to accept neither, and there are huge numbers of Christians around the world who faithfully accept neither, but whether we accept or reject the remarriage of divorcees we do so on different grounds to our rejection of Same Sex Marriage.
There are four particular ways in which we see that the remarriage of divorcees and same sex marriage are not analogous.
- the biblical witness of the Old Testament
- the biblical witness of the New Testament
- The witness of Church History
- The witness of theology
First, the biblical witness of the Old Testament makes it clear that remarriage is at least possible, even if not ideal or intended, unlike same sex marriage. We see this, for example, in the laws in Deuteronomy 24:1-4:
If a man marries a woman who becomes displeasing to him because he finds something indecent about her, and he writes her a certificate of divorce, gives it to her and sends her from his house, and if after she leaves his house she becomes the wife of another man, and her second husband dislikes her and writes her a certificate of divorce, gives it to her and sends her from his house, or if he dies, then her first husband, who divorced her, is not allowed to marry her again after she has been defiled. That would be detestable in the eyes of the Lord. Do not bring sin upon the land the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance. (Deut 24:1-4 NIV)
The purpose of citing this text is not to ascertain exactly what our theology of marriage and divorce should be, but to understand properly the materials with which we construct a biblical theology of marriage. Theology is not concerned only with what the Bible says in specific text, such as in this passage (since we don’t believe in crude proof-texting), but with what the Bible teaches across all of its pages.
With a wider lens we see the remarriage of divorcees, both male and female. We note that that neither divorce nor remarriage are held to be impossible. It is not the case with same sex marriage: search as we might, we will find no account of marriage outside of the union of male and female. Marriage in the Old Testament is the reconstitution of the fulness of humanity in its two aspects, male and female, separated at creation and reunited in the act of procreation. All other forms of sexual union are here condemned.
We are not attempting to construct a strictly Old Testament sexual ethic, but we must take seriously the patterns and trajectory of what both testaments teach. In the Old Testament we see something that is in many ways looser in terms of remarriage and divorce, but we see no provision for same-sex sexual relationships.
Secondly, ‘but what about the teaching of Jesus?’, as we explore the witness of the New Testament. Being an Anglican minister, I rejoice in much of the inheritance of the Western, Latin, Church—the soil in which Anglicanism grew. Part of the tradition has been a desire to take Jesus’ words in Mark chapter 10 very seriously. This has led to a prima facie rejection of both divorce and remarriage in the our part of Christendom; we will return to other parts of Christendom later but first we must address the text.
The best way to read the Bible is with the Bible, and accordingly, we read in search of a coherence. This means we must read:
He answered, “Anyone who divorces his wife and marries another woman commits adultery against her. And if she divorces her husband and marries another man, she commits adultery.” (Mark 10:11-12 NIV)
in such a way that it coheres with the much softer (albeit not as soft as Deuteronomy) reading in that we find in Matthew:
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 flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one 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 sexual immorality, and marries another woman commits adultery.” Matthew 19:3-9
The effect is this: to see divorce as something not to be taken lightly, nor to be understood as something that God intended, as it detracts from the creation ordinance of marriage. The fullness of the New Testament teaching on marriage, divorce, and remarriage, is one which is deeply wary of divorce—but it is so on the grounds of the creation principles of male and female marriage ordained for the purpose of procreation.
We must not accept that to endorse remarriage after divorce is to throw away Jesus words in Mark, but rather to read them in harmony with his words in Matthew; and crucially, whether we accept the remarriage of divorcees or not, we do so in light of the appeal to creation, which rules out any possibility of same sex marriage.
(For amore detailed reading of these texts, locating them in their cultural and religious context within the debates between the schools of Hillel and Shammai on ‘any reason’ divorce, see this article published previously. Also note that, in the ancient world, ‘divorce’ always assume the right to remarry.)
Thirdly, we have looked briefly at the understanding of the Latin West which prohibited divorce and remarriage—albeit on different grounds to the prohibition on same-sex sexual activity; it is worth noting the divergence among theologians and churches across Christendom as we look at the witness of church history. Certainly much of the tradition has condemned remarriage as gravely sinful (this is inescapable), and yet even where it is condemned there is a sense of the reality or necessity of the new nuptial union:
Concerning those young men who are Christians who apprehend their wives in adultery and are forbidden to marry, we decree that, as far as it is possible, counsel be given them not to take other wives while their own, though guilty of adultery, are still living. (Consilium Aralatense I, c. 10, The History of the Indissolubility of Marriage, p. 289)
Phrases like “as far as it is possible” and “counsel” here denote an approach which is very strong, but not absolute. Likewise, even the injunction “not to take other wives” recognises the reality of the new nuptial bond. No such acknowledgement exists in the tradition for anything like Same Sex Marriage.
Furthermore, in their own reading of the tradition, churches of the East (and to a lesser extent Oriental Orthodox Churches) have always permitted (perhaps only tolerating) remarriage after divorce in certain cases. At the time of the Reformation, there was a recalibration, reading the tradition in light of the scriptures more robustly. Luther, for example, finds no compulsion for the innocent party in a divorce to remain unmarried. Calvin, in his commentary on Matthew goes further:
And whosoever shall marry her that is divorced. This clause has been very ill explained by many commentators; for they have thought that generally, and without exception, celibacy is enjoined in all cases when a divorce has taken place; and, therefore, if a husband should put away an adulteress, both would be laid under the necessity of remaining unmarried. As if this liberty of divorce meant only not to lie with his wife; and as if Christ did not evidently grant permission in this case to do what the Jews were wont indiscriminately to do at their pleasure. It was therefore a gross error; for, though Christ condemns as an adulterer the man who shall marry a wife that has been divorced, this is undoubtedly restricted to unlawful and frivolous divorces.
Again, there is no parallel to same sex marriage here. Calvin robustly defends the inherited tradition, that merely presenting a bill of divorce does not dissolve a marriage—but he goes further than others by saying, nevertheless, should a marriage truly be dissolved, the innocent party is free to remarry. Calvin does not give us room to draw an analogy between this and provision to marry for two people who could never have married.
Finally, having reviewed the biblical witness across the two testaments, and the witness of the church across the world and the ages, we turn now to the theology of marriage which gives rise to no analogy between the remarriage of divorcees and same sex marriage. To summarize the theology of marriage, as an Anglian, it is good to begin with the Book of Common Prayer, there we are taught why marriage was ordained:
Read it all in Psephizo
