Devotional 131: The Grounds for Divorce: Adultery or Willful Desertion

The Confession Read

Adultery or fornication committed after a contract, being detected before marriage, giveth just occasion to the innocent party to dissolve that contract. In the case of adultery after marriage, it is lawful for the innocent party to sue out a divorce: and, after the divorce, to marry another, as if the offending party were dead.

— Westminster Confession of Faith, Chapter 24, Section 5

Introduction

Before ever the wedding was kept, the sorrow had come. Joseph had contracted himself to Mary, and a contract in Israel was no light or informal thing; it was a binding engagement, a promise made before God and witnesses that was dissolved, if ever it was dissolved, with the solemnity of a divorce itself. Then, in the midst of the betrothal, he learned that she was with child. Matthew records his resolution in a single sentence that has never ceased to move the church: Joseph, "being a just man, and not willing to make her a publick example, was minded to put her away privily." He could not keep her, for to keep her seemed to make himself a partner in what he believed to be her sin; and he would not expose her, for the justice of Joseph was a justice softened by mercy. In that quiet resolution stands the whole doctrine of the section before us, for Joseph believed he possessed exactly what this section of the Confession declares that a man in his place would possess: a just occasion, on the ground of fornication detected before marriage, to dissolve the contract and set the sorrow aside. We have been walking, section by section, through the doctrine of marriage. We have seen what marriage is, the union of one man and one woman in one flesh for life; we have seen what it is for, the ends for which God ordained it; we have seen who may enter it, and within what boundaries it may not be contracted. Now we come to the question that every age has found the most difficult of all, the question of the end: what is a man or a woman to do when the bond that God joined together has been broken by the sin of the other party? It is the tenderest subject in the whole doctrine, and it is the one on which error has run to two opposite extremes, each of them cruel in its own way. There are those who make divorce a light thing, to be taken up for every cause and cast aside for every discontent, as though the covenant were a garment to be changed with the season; and there are those who make it an impossible thing, binding the innocent sufferer to a spouse who has already forsaken them, as though the gospel had nothing to say to the wronged but "endure." The Confession will have neither error. It walks the narrow and careful path that Scripture itself has marked out, and it does so with a tenderness toward the innocent and a severity toward sin that are both, in the last analysis, the tenderness and the severity of God. It is a mercy to approach this doctrine at all, and to approach it reverently. For it is not an academic question but a question that has been asked, in tears, in a thousand homes; and the answer the Confession gives is an answer designed for real men and women, sinned against and sinning, who need to know what the God who is light and love requires of them when the one-flesh union has been torn in two. Let us look, then, carefully and with prayer, at what Scripture teaches and what the Divines have confessed.

Scripture Foundation

The doctrine of this section is not a human invention devised to ease the hard cases of life; it is drawn from the very words of Christ and of his apostles, and it has its firmest foundation in the teaching of our Lord himself upon the question of divorce. The governing text is Matthew 19:3-9, where the Pharisees came to Jesus, tempting him, and asked, "Is it lawful for a man to put away his wife for every cause?" They meant to ensnare him, for the schools of the rabbis were divided on the point, and whatever answer he gave would offend someone. But Jesus would not be drawn into their disputations. He carried them back to the beginning, to the institution itself: "Have ye not read, that he which made them at the beginning made them male and female, and said, For this cause shall a man leave father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife: and they twain shall be one flesh? Wherefore they are no more twain, but one flesh. What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder." Marriage, he taught, is the making of one flesh, and the bond it creates is of God's making; no man has the right to dissolve what God has joined. The Pharisees pressed him with the law of Moses, which commanded the giving of a bill of divorcement, and Jesus answered with words that cut to the heart of the matter: "Moses because of the hardness of your hearts suffered you to put away your wives: but from the beginning it was not so." Divorce, in other words, is not part of God's original design but a concession to sin, a remedy for a disease that ought never to have entered the world. Then he added the one exception upon which the whole doctrine turns: "And I say unto you, Whosoever shall put away his wife, except it be for fornication, and shall marry another, committeth adultery: and whoso marrieth her which is put away doth commit adultery." The word rendered "fornication" is the Greek porneia, and it is the hinge of the whole matter. It is a word broader than moicheia, the particular sin of adultery between married persons, for it comprehends every kind of unlawful sexual uncleanness; and it is this, and this alone, that dissolves the bond. For every other cause the marriage stands, and the putting away of a spouse for any lighter reason is itself a species of the very sin it claims to remedy. The same exception appears in the Sermon on the Mount, where our Lord treats the matter yet more briefly. Matthew 5:31-32: "It hath been said, Whosoever shall put away his wife, let him give her a writing of divorcement: but I say unto you, That whosoever shall put away his wife, saving for the cause of fornication, causeth her to commit adultery: and whosoever shall marry her that is divorced committeth adultery." Here is the doctrine stated with an almost shocking economy, and it guards the marriage bond on both sides at once. On the one hand, the bond is sacred; no man may dissolve it for a light or trivial cause, and he who does so, and sends his wife away, exposes her to a temptation she ought never to have been exposed to. On the other hand, the bond is not absolute in the sense that some would make it, for when fornication has already broken the one-flesh union, the putting away is not a new sin but the solemn acknowledgment of a breach that has already taken place. The exception is not a license but a recognition, and the whole weight of the doctrine rests upon that single clause, "saving for the cause of fornication." Why adultery, of all sins, should have this effect is made plain by the apostle Paul, and it is a point that the whole doctrine turns upon. 1 Corinthians 6:16: "What? know ye not that he which is joined to an harlot is one body? for two, saith he, shall be one flesh." The word "joined" is the Greek kollōmenos, from a root that means to glue or to cleave fast, and it is the same root the Septuagint uses in Genesis 2:24 for the cleaving of a man to his wife. Paul deliberately takes up the language of the first marriage and turns it upon the sinner: the man who goes in to a harlot has cleaved to her with the same cleaving by which a husband cleaves to his wife, and he has become one body with her. This is the reason adultery dissolves a marriage, and the reason the Confession can speak of the offending party "as if" dead. Adultery is not merely a breach of a promise or a wound to an affection; it is the tearing of the one-flesh union itself, the forming of a rival union in the very flesh that God had joined to another. A bond that has been so torn is no longer the bond that God made, and it is this that gives the innocent party their just occasion. And it is this same logic that underlies the last clause of the section, the freedom of the innocent party to marry again. Romans 7:2-3: "For the woman which hath an husband is bound by the law to her husband so long as he liveth; but if the husband be dead, she is loosed from the law of her husband. So then if, while her husband liveth, she be married to another man, she shall be called an adulteress: but if her husband be dead, she is free from that law; so that she is no adulteress, though she be married to another man." Death dissolves the bond, and the surviving party is free. The Confession simply applies this truth to the case before us: adultery has, in the purpose and declaration of God, the effect of death upon the offender's part of the union, and the innocent party, after a lawful divorce, stands as free as if the offender had died. It is a severe saying, and it is meant to be severe, for the weight of it is the measure of the sacredness of the bond it dissolves.

What the Divines Meant

When the Westminster Divines set down this section they were not innovating, but confessing what the church had always believed, and they were doing so in the teeth of a long and tangled controversy. The question of divorce had divided Christendom for centuries, and it had a particular sharpness in England, where the Reformation itself had been, in one of its roots, a quarrel over exactly this ground. The church of Rome had refused almost every divorce, whatever the sin of the offending party, and had bound the innocent sufferer to a spouse who had already forsaken them; while on every side the looser practice of the age threatened to turn marriage into a contract to be broken at pleasure. The Divines, walking between these two errors, confess the doctrine of the section with a precision that rewards the closest attention. Observe first the careful distinction between the two cases the section names. The first is the case of the contract: "adultery or fornication committed after a contract, being detected before marriage." In the language of the seventeenth century, and in the law of the church that the Divines inherited, a betrothal was not a casual engagement but a solemn and binding covenant, the sponsalia, a promise of marriage made before God and witnesses that carried with it the same obligations, in most respects, as marriage itself. It could not be dissolved at a whim, and to break it was a grave matter. But it was not yet marriage, for the one-flesh union had not yet been made; and therefore fornication detected before the wedding gave the innocent party a just occasion to dissolve the contract, and to be free of a union that had been polluted before ever it was solemnized. This is the case of Joseph, the just man of Matthew's first chapter, who believed he had just such an occasion, and who was minded to use it, and would have used it, had not the angel of the Lord stayed his hand. The section does not command the dissolution of such a contract; it declares it a just occasion, a lawful liberty, which the innocent party may use or forgo as conscience and mercy direct. The second case is the heavier one, the case of marriage itself. Here the section declares that "in the case of adultery after marriage, it is lawful for the innocent party to sue out a divorce." Mark every word of that sentence, for the Divines weighed them as carefully as gold. It is "the innocent party" who may sue, and the innocent party alone; the offender has no right to dissolve what he has himself broken, and to grant him such a right would be to crown sin with a liberty. It is "lawful," which is to say it is permitted, not commanded; the Confession nowhere requires the wronged party to divorce, and many a godly man and woman has chosen, like Hosea, to receive back the unfaithful spouse in the hope of restoration, and has found grace to do so. And it is "to sue out a divorce," a phrase that carries the whole weight of lawfulness: the dissolution is not to be done by private will or in the heat of wounded feeling, but openly, through the due and orderly course of the magistrate and the church, with the cause proved and the sentence pronounced. The Divines are careful even here to keep the matter within the bounds of order, for the bond is God's, and the loosening of it is too solemn a thing to be left to the discretion of the parties alone. Then comes the clause that has startled many a reader, and that is the very heart of the mercy of the section: "and, after the divorce, to marry another, as if the offending party were dead." The Divines are not saying that adultery is a small thing, or that marriage is a bond to be cast off lightly. They are saying the precise opposite. They are saying that the bond of marriage is so sacred, so truly a one-flesh union, that its violation by adultery has the same effect upon it as death itself. Death dissolves a marriage because the one flesh has been severed by the departure of one of its members; and adultery, which joins the offender in a rival one-flesh union, severs the bond no less surely. The innocent party, therefore, is not merely permitted a separation of bed and board, a bare cohabitation broken off; they are released from the bond itself, and stand as free to marry as if the offender lay in the grave. It is a hard doctrine for a hard case, and the hardness of it is the proof of the tenderness that lies beneath: God will not bind the innocent to the corpse of a covenant that the guilty party has already slain.

Theological Depth

The doctrine of this section engaged the ablest minds of the Reformed tradition, and the great teachers of that tradition expounded it with a care that still rewards the reader, for they knew that here, above all, the church must hold together two truths that the world is forever tearing apart: the sacredness of the bond, and the freedom of the innocent. Calvin treats the matter at length in his harmony of the Gospels, and his reasoning is the ground upon which the whole Reformed doctrine rests. On the words of our Lord in Matthew 19 he insists that marriage is the institution of God, and that the bond it creates is not a human arrangement but a divine joining, which man has no authority to dissolve. Divorce, he argues, is not a part of the original design but a concession to the hardness of the human heart, a remedy that God has permitted, not a liberty that he has approved. Then, with a characteristic precision, he presses the one exception. When Christ speaks of "fornication" as the sole ground of divorce, Calvin insists that the word is to be taken in its full weight: it is the violation of the marriage bed itself, the very thing that severs the one-flesh union, and it is this, and nothing less, that looses the bond. The husband who puts away his wife for a lighter cause sins against the institution he claims to honour; but the husband whose wife has already torn the union by her own unfaithfulness is not the breaker of the bond but its witness. For Calvin, then, the whole doctrine hangs upon the one-flesh union: marriage is the making of one flesh, and it is the unmaking of that one flesh, and nothing else, that dissolves it. This is why adultery, and adultery alone, has the effect the section assigns to it, for adultery is not an injury to the marriage but its destruction. Turretin takes up the question with the rigour of a man trained in controversy, and he asks the very question that divides the churches to this day: does divorce dissolve the bond of marriage itself, or merely the cohabitation, the living together, while the bond remains unbroken? It is a question every pastor must answer, for if the bond remains, then the innocent party, though separated, may never remarry without adultery; if the bond is dissolved, then the innocent party is free. Turretin answers with an unhesitating firmness: for the innocent party, in the case of adultery, the bond itself is dissolved. He proves it from the very texts the Confession rests upon, and above all from the words of Christ himself, who declares that the man who puts away his wife "except it be for fornication" commits adultery if he marries another, which plainly implies that the man who puts her away for that cause, and for that cause alone, does not commit adultery when he marries again. The exception would be meaningless if it did not carry with it the freedom to remarry, for to loose a man from cohabitation while binding him to the bond would be to give him a liberty with no substance and a sorrow with no remedy. Turretin will not hear of a divorce that is a mere separation of bodies while the soul remains chained; the adultery has broken the union, and the innocent party stands free. And he is careful to add what the Confession itself implies, that this freedom belongs to the innocent party alone, for the offender has no right to the remedy that his own sin has made necessary. A. A. Hodge, in his commentary on the Confession, gathers the several strands into a system, and he is especially helpful on the one point that most readers miss: the difference between the contract and the bond. The betrothal, he observes, is a covenant to marry; the marriage is the marriage itself; and the two are to be distinguished as carefully in the application of this section as they are in the law of God. Fornication after the contract but before the marriage dissolves the contract, because the promise of marriage has been polluted by the very sin that marriage is meant to keep out; but it does not dissolve a marriage, because there is as yet no marriage to dissolve. Adultery after marriage, by contrast, strikes at the bond itself, and therefore works the fuller dissolution the section declares. Hodge then presses the last clause with a force that some find startling: the innocent party, after a lawful divorce, is free to marry again, "as if the offending party were dead," because in the sight of God the bond has been as truly severed by the adultery as it would have been by the grave. He is careful to insist that this is no encouragement to divorce, but the opposite; it is the measure of how sacred the bond is, that nothing short of its own destruction can dissolve it, and that he who destroys it by his unfaithfulness has already forfeited every right he possessed in it. To Hodge, as to Calvin, the whole doctrine is a monument to the sanctity of marriage, not a convenience for the inconstant. Robert Shaw, with his accustomed economy, gathers the whole into a sentence that has the weight of a closing argument: adultery dissolves the bond of marriage, and therefore the innocent party may lawfully marry again after a lawful divorce; the guilty party has no such liberty, and the bond may be dissolved by no lighter cause than the one the Scripture names. And Watson, turning the doctrine as he always does toward the heart, sets the whole matter in the light of the seventh commandment. He will not let the severity of the doctrine soften the tenderness of its application: if the marriage bed is to be kept undefiled, then the wronged party is not to be crushed beneath a burden God has never laid upon them, for the God who hates divorce is also the God who hears the cry of the innocent, and who will not bind the wounded to the one who wounded them. Watson presses the comfort home with the warmth that has made his name a byword for pastoral gentleness: the same God who made the bond made the remedy, and the innocent may take it without a stain upon their conscience, for the sin that broke the bond is not theirs but another's, and the freedom they take is not a liberty they seized but a mercy they received. The testimony of these witnesses is one, and it is a beautiful thing to see the same doctrine taught in Geneva and in Princeton and in the Scottish kirk, not because the church devised it but because the Word declares it. Marriage is the making of one flesh; the tearing of that one flesh, and nothing less, is its dissolution; and the innocent party, whose union has been torn by another's sin, is free. The severity of the doctrine is the guard of the tender; and the mercy of the doctrine is the shelter of the wronged.

Puritan Application

First, let the weight of this doctrine fall upon your own marriage while it is whole, and make it a means of grace and not merely a matter of law. The reason the Confession speaks of divorce with such care is that marriage is a bond of such sacredness; and the best way to honour the doctrine of the section is to honour the bond it guards. Ask yourself whether you are tending the one-flesh union God has made of you and your spouse, whether your cleaving to your spouse is as close in your heart and your hours as it is in the ordinance that joined you. The man or woman who is careless in marriage, who lets affection cool and attention wander and the little breaches multiply, is preparing the ground for the very sorrow this section contemplates. Guard the union while it is whole. Nourish it with prayer, with tenderness, with the thousand small kindnesses by which a covenant is kept warm; and remember that the best commentary on this hard section is a marriage so full of grace that its dissolution is never once so much as thought of. Second, guard your own purity, for the section speaks to the innocent, but its warning falls upon every soul. Adultery does not begin in the marriage bed; it begins in the wandering eye, the lingering thought, the friendship allowed to grow too warm, the door of the imagination left ajar. The apostle's word to the Corinthians is a searching one: he that is joined to a harlot is one body with her. Do not wait until the joining to tremble at it; tremble at the first step that leads toward it. Watch over your heart, your eyes, your conversation, your affections; and remember that you cannot cleave to a harlot and to your spouse, for the one flesh will not be divided against itself. The man or woman who would never be the offender in this section is the man or woman who mortifies the sin at its first whisper, while it is still a thought and not yet a deed. Pray daily that God would keep you from the sin that has broken a thousand homes and seared a thousand consciences, and flee from every appearance of it as from a serpent. Third, if you are the innocent party, receive the liberty this section declares as a mercy, and not as a burden of guilt. It may be that you have been sinned against in the deepest place a human being can be sinned against, that the one-flesh union God made of your marriage has been torn by another's unfaithfulness, and that you are now weighed down by grief and by a tormenting question: what does God require of me now? The Confession, echoing Scripture, answers gently and plainly: the bond has been dissolved, and you are free. It is not commanded that you divorce, and it is not commanded that you forbear; the matter is set before you as a just occasion and a lawful liberty, and you may use it with a quiet conscience, for the sin that broke your marriage is not yours. Do not let the voice of a false piety bind you where God has loosed you, nor let the voice of the world press you toward a haste the Spirit does not require. Weigh the matter in prayer, seek the counsel of the godly, and where the liberty is taken, take it as a mercy from the hand of the God who hears the cry of the innocent. Fourth, if you are the offender, the Word of God does not close its mouth against you, nor is the door of grace shut in your face. The section before us is severe, and it must be, for the sin it names is the destruction of a covenant made before God; but the God of this section is the God who forgives iniquity and transgression and sin, and there is a fountain opened for this uncleanness as for every other. David, who took another man's wife and sent the man to his death, was yet washed and forgiven, and the fifty-first psalm is the record of his cleansing. Let the offender not harden himself in the sin, nor yet despair of the mercy; let him flee to Christ, who is able to save to the uttermost, and who has said of the woman taken in adultery, Neither do I condemn thee; go, and sin no more. Where the home may be restored, let restoration be sought with tears and with patience; where it cannot, let the offender order what remains of his life in the fear of God, and find in the gospel of a faithful Husband the healing that no human covenant can give. Fifth, and above all, lift your eyes from the earthly marriage to the heavenly, and find there the deepest ground both of the severity and of the mercy of this doctrine. The whole of Scripture presents the Lord as the Husband of his people, and his people as a bride who has again and again played the harlot against him. Ezekiel pictures Jerusalem as a faithless wife; Hosea is commanded to take a wife of whoredoms and to love her still, that the prophet might live out in his own broken home the astonishing patience of God. And this is the point of it all: God is not a stranger to the sorrow this section contemplates, for he has suffered it at the hands of his own beloved, and he has not cast her off. He has borne the wrong, and bought her back, and pledged that he will never leave nor forsake her. Let the innocent learn from this Husband how to bear wrong without bitterness, and how to receive back the penitent with the very mercy with which they themselves have been received. And let every one of us, innocent and offender alike, rest in this, that our standing with God does not hang upon our own faithfulness but upon his, that the marriage of Christ and his church can never be dissolved, and that no sin of ours, not even the sin that severs a human covenant, can separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Prayer

Almighty and everlasting God, who didst ordain marriage and dost hate putting away, we bless Thee for the sacredness of the bond Thou hast made, and for the mercy that is hidden within the hard doctrine of its dissolution. Thou who knowest the frame of every heart, and who hast Thyself borne the wrong of an unfaithful bride, teach us to hold the one-flesh union in the honour that is its due, and to keep it as a thing joined by Thy hand and not by ours. Grant, we beseech Thee, to every married pair among Thy people the grace to cleave to one another in purity and tenderness, that the covenant made before Thee may be kept whole to the end, and that no home among us may ever know the sorrow this section contemplates. Guard the eyes and the hearts of Thy servants, that they may flee from every appearance of the sin that severs the one-flesh union, and may mortify it at its first whisper. Give to the innocent who have been wronged a quiet conscience in the liberty Thou hast granted, and the wisdom to use it in the fear of the Lord, neither bound where Thou hast loosed nor hurried where Thou wouldst have them wait. And give to the offender a broken and a contrite heart, and the grace of repentance that leadeth unto life, that where the home may be restored it may be restored, and where it cannot, the soul may yet be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus. We thank Thee, O Father, that Thou art a Husband who never puts away His bride, that though we have played the harlot against Thee times without number, Thou hast not cast us off, but hast bought us back with the blood of Thy dear Son, and hast pledged Thyself never to leave nor forsake us. Teach us so to love as Thou hast loved, that our own imperfect homes may be living pictures of Thy faithfulness, and that the watching world may see in our keeping of the covenant a glimpse of Thine. And bring us at last, one and all, into that marriage feast of the Lamb, where the union shall be perfect and eternal, where there shall be no more sin and therefore no more sorrow, and where we shall be forever with the Lord, the Bridegroom of our souls. We ask it in the name of Jesus Christ, who loved the church and gave himself for it. Amen.