Devotional 132: Remarriage After Divorce: The Innocent Party May Marry Again

The Confession Read

Although the corruption of man be such as is apt to study arguments unduly to put asunder those whom God hath joined together in marriage: yet, nothing but adultery, or such willful desertion as can no way be remedied by the church, or civil magistrate, is cause sufficient of dissolving the bond of marriage: wherein, a public and orderly course of proceeding is to be observed; and the persons concerned in it not left to their own wills, and discretion, in their own case.

— Westminster Confession of Faith, Chapter 24, Section 6

Introduction

Every human heart keeps a small law office of its own. There is no man so artless that he cannot, when he wishes to, discover reasons for doing what he has already resolved to do; and the older and more practised he grows, the sharper his arguments become. It is this quiet advocate within us that the Westminster Divines had in view when they wrote the section before us, for they speak of the corruption of man as something that is "apt to study arguments": apt, that is, to pore over the case, to search for precedents, to stretch a text and press a principle and find a loophole, all in the service of putting asunder what God hath joined together. The Confession names the enemy before it names the law, and the enemy it names is not a stranger but the one we know best: our own clever heart. With this section the Divines bring their doctrine of marriage to its close, and it is a close of peculiar sobriety and care. We have seen what marriage is: the union of one man and one woman in one flesh for life, and what it is for, and who may enter it, and within what bounds it may not be contracted. We have seen, in the section immediately before this one, what the innocent party may do when the one-flesh union has been torn by adultery: the bond is dissolved, and the wronged may lawfully marry again, as if the offending party were dead. Now, at the last, the Divines gather the whole matter into a single sentence that has the double office of a boundary and a guard. It declares, with an exclusiveness that many a hearer finds severe, that nothing but adultery, or such willful desertion as cannot be remedied by the church or the civil magistrate, is cause sufficient of dissolving the bond of marriage; and it adds a safeguard that every age has been tempted to forget, that the dissolution, when it is lawful, must be prosecuted in a public and orderly course, and that the persons concerned are not to be left to their own wills and discretion in their own case. Here, in one sentence, is the full answer of the Reformed faith to the two opposite errors that have always afflicted the church on this subject. Against those who would make divorce a light thing, a convenience to be taken up for every discontent, the Confession sets the word "nothing": only two causes, and no other, can sunder what God has joined. Against those who would make divorce a private thing, a matter of wounded feeling to be settled behind closed doors, it sets the phrase "public and orderly": the case must be carried into the light, before the church and before the magistrate, and decided by witnesses and not by the will of the aggrieved alone. The doctrine is severe, and it is meant to be severe, for it guards the most sacred covenant men make on earth. But it is also tender, for every guard it sets is a guard around the innocent, and every boundary it draws is drawn to keep the hasty and the hard heart from doing in the dark what they would blush to do in the day. Let us look, then, at the word of God that grounds this confession, and at the teaching of the men who framed it.

Scripture Foundation

The doctrine of this section rests upon no human invention; it is drawn from the very words of God, and the Divines were here, as everywhere, careful to build only where Scripture had laid the foundation. Four passages bear the weight of the sentence, and it is worth our while to set each of them in its place. The first is the word of our Lord that the section itself echoes, Matthew 19:6: "Wherefore they are no more twain, but one flesh. What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder." We have already heard these words in an earlier section, but they must be sounded again here, for they are the ground upon which the whole sentence stands. The joining of man and woman in marriage is not the work of man but of God; it is God who makes the two one flesh, and it follows that no man has the right to unmake what God has made. The phrase "let not man put asunder" is the charter of the marriage bond, and it is the very phrase the Confession takes up when it speaks of those who would "unduly to put asunder those whom God hath joined together." Before there can be any question of lawful causes, this must be fixed in the mind: marriage is a divine joining, and the burden of proof rests forever upon the one who would dissolve it. The presumption of the whole doctrine is against dissolution, as the presumption of the law of nature is against the taking of life; and just as a man may not slay another except where God himself has authorized the sword, so he may not sunder a marriage except where God himself has named the cause. The second passage is the one upon which the second ground of this section rests, and it is the apostle's word to the Corinthians, 1 Corinthians 7:15: "But if the unbelieving depart, let him depart. A brother or a sister is not under bondage in such cases: but God hath called us to peace." Here is the ground of what the Confession calls "willful desertion." The situation Paul contemplates is a marriage in which one party has come to faith and the other has not, a thing that must have happened constantly in the early church, when the gospel entered a household and split it, so that a wife believed while her husband mocked, or a husband bowed the knee while his wife clung to her idols. What is the believer to do if the unbelieving spouse refuses to live with him, and departs? The apostle's answer has the calm of a man who speaks for God: "let him depart." The word rendered "depart" is the Greek chōrizetai, the very word whose root meaning is "to separate," and it describes not a temporary absence nor a hasty word but a deliberate severing: the settled, willful abandonment of the marriage by one who means to go. And to the believer left behind Paul speaks a word of astonishing liberty: "a brother or a sister is not under bondage." The Greek is ou dedoulōtai, "is not enslaved"; the believing party, whose spouse has repudiated the union and walked away from it, is not held in a bondage God himself has broken. "God hath called us to peace": the gospel does not chain the faithful to the one who has forsaken them, but releases them into the peace that is the portion of those who walk with God. It is upon this text, and upon no other, that the Confession founds its doctrine of willful desertion; and the word "willful" is chosen with care, for the departure that dissolves a marriage is not the flight of a man in a quarrel, nor the withdrawal of a wife for a season, but the settled, obstinate, final forsaking of the union, a forsaking that, in the sight of God, has the effect of a death. The third passage grounds the procedural half of the section, and it carries us back to the law of Moses, to Deuteronomy 24:1: "When a man hath taken a wife, and married her, and it come to pass that she find no favour in his eyes, because he hath found some uncleanness in her: then let him write her a bill of divorcement, and give it in her hand, and send her out of his house." The phrase that matters here is "a bill of divorcement," and behind our English rendering stands a Hebrew expression of terrible precision: sepher kerithuth, "a writing of cutting off." Divorce in Israel was never a private act, done in a corner on the strength of a man's own will; it was a written, witnessed, public transaction, a document given into the woman's hand, an affair carried out in the light and before the community. Our Lord, when he commented upon this very law, declared that it was a concession to the hardness of the human heart and not the original design; but the formal, orderly character of the bill remains instructive, for even the concession God granted was hedged about with process. The man could not simply drive his wife from the door on a word; he must write the bill, give it in her hand, and send her out; and every step of it was done openly, before witnesses, at the gate where the elders of the city sat in judgment. The Confession's demand for "a public and orderly course of proceeding" is nothing other than this ancient order carried over into the life of the church, and it teaches that whatever God has permitted in the way of dissolution, he has permitted to be done lawfully and in the open, and never in secret by the bare will of the parties. The fourth passage supplies the severity that must attend the whole, and it is the searching word of the prophet, Malachi 2:16: "For the LORD, the God of Israel, saith that he hateth putting away: for one covereth violence with his garment, saith the LORD of hosts: therefore take heed to your spirit, that ye deal not treacherously." God hates putting away. The words are startling in their bluntness, and they must be allowed their full weight, for they stand as a perpetual guard over every syllable of this section. The doctrine of the two causes is not a permission to be seized with relief; it is a remedy for a sorrow, and the God who grants the remedy is the God who hates the disease. "Take heed to your spirit, that ye deal not treacherously": the prophet searches the motive, for the same outward act may be done in faithfulness or in treachery, and God looks upon the heart. This word is the curb upon the very casuistry the Confession names in its opening line, for the man who "studies arguments" for putting away is the man who has already dealt treacherously in his spirit, and the prophet's warning is addressed to him before ever a bill is written or a court convened. These four texts stand in a line and bear the whole weight of the section between them. The word of Christ fixes the sacredness of the bond; the word of Paul supplies the second lawful cause; the law of Moses supplies the order in which the cause must be prosecuted; and the word of the prophet supplies the severity that must govern every heart that approaches the matter at all. Upon this fourfold foundation the Divines raised their sentence, and it has stood unshaken for four centuries because the foundation is the word of God.

What the Divines Meant

When the Westminster Divines set this sentence at the close of their chapter on marriage, they were not merely summarizing what had gone before; they were doing two things that had never been done with such exactness in any English confession, and both of them repay the closest attention. The first is the warning with which the sentence opens, and it is a warning that has been too little noticed. "Although the corruption of man be such as is apt to study arguments unduly to put asunder those whom God hath joined together in marriage." The Divines knew their own hearts, and they knew the hearts of the men and women for whom they wrote; they knew that nothing so tempts the fallen nature to casuistry as a difficult marriage, and that there is no doctrine in the whole of Scripture that men have twisted with such eagerness as the doctrine of divorce. Let a man grow weary of his wife, let a woman find her husband a burden, and the heart will go to work at once, collecting grievances, magnifying faults, hunting through the Word for a permission, until at last the man who began with a discontent ends with a settled conviction that God has loosed him. The Divines name this process in a single phrase, "study arguments," and they name it as the thing it is: the corruption of man, the fruit of a fallen heart, and not the leading of the Spirit. The whole doctrine of the section is framed, from first to last, against this inner advocate; and the reader who misses this has missed the very point. The Confession does not begin by saying how a marriage may be dissolved; it begins by warning us how eager we are to dissolve it. The second thing the sentence does is to narrow the grounds of divorce to two, and to no more than two: "nothing but adultery, or such willful desertion as can no way be remedied by the church, or civil magistrate, is cause sufficient of dissolving the bond of marriage." The word "nothing" is the load-bearing word of the sentence, and the Divines set it down against a world of contrary teaching. In their own day, and in every day since, men have multiplied the causes of divorce as readily as the rabbis of old multiplied the causes for which a man might put away his wife; incompatibility, unhappiness, the drifting apart of affections, the finding of a better companion: a thousand "causes" have been invented by the heart that studies arguments. Against them all the Confession sets a single word: nothing. Adultery, which tears the one-flesh union in the flesh itself, is a sufficient cause, and we have already considered it at length. Willful desertion, which sunders the union in the will and the life, is a sufficient cause, and it is grounded, as we have seen, in the apostle's word. But mark the care with which the second cause is defined: it is desertion, not disagreement; it is willful, not hasty or temporary; and it is such desertion "as can no way be remedied by the church, or civil magistrate." The Divines will not suffer a man to call himself deserted who has not first been laboured with by the church and pursued by the magistrate. Let the spouse be gone a month, a year, and let the church plead and the magistrate compel and every remedy be tried; and only when every remedy has failed, and the desertion stands at last as settled and irremediable, does it become a cause sufficient to dissolve the bond. The bar is set deliberately high, for the Divines knew that a low bar is the ruin of the innocent and the refuge of the inconstant. Then comes the safeguard that completes the sentence, and it is the part of the section that our own age has most completely forgotten: "wherein, a public and orderly course of proceeding is to be observed; and the persons concerned in it not left to their own wills, and discretion, in their own case." Divorce, even where it is lawful, is never a private act. The Confession forbids, in terms, that the persons concerned should be left to their own wills and discretion in their own case, and it forbids it for a reason we have already seen: the heart that studies arguments cannot be trusted to judge its own case. The will of the aggrieved is the very thing that must not decide, for the will of the aggrieved is precisely where the corruption lies in wait. And so the case is to be carried into the open, before the church, whose elders may search the matter and pronounce upon it with the Word in their hands; and before the civil magistrate, whose office it is to see that the laws of God are honoured in the ordering of the commonwealth. The church's discipline and the magistrate's sword are the two witnesses before whom the matter is to be brought, and the dissolution, if it comes, comes as the sentence of lawful authority and not as the secret deed of a self-appointed judge. This is the Confession's answer to the private, silent divorce that a thousand couples effect between themselves and call it freedom; and it is an answer our own age, which has made divorce at once easier and more private than it has ever been, stands in sore need of hearing. Let no one think this doctrine cold, for it is the very warmth of God that it reflects. The God who hates putting away is the God who would not have his children torn apart by a hasty word or a wounded mood; and the God who names the two causes and no more is the God who would shelter the innocent from the endless, gnawing uncertainty of never knowing whether their marriage stands. A bond that can be dissolved for anything can be dissolved for nothing, and the woman who lives under a law of infinite causes lives without any security at all. It is the exclusiveness of the doctrine that is the mercy of the doctrine, and the orderliness of the doctrine that is its tenderness, for a marriage that may only be dissolved for the two gravest causes, and only in the open, before the church and the law, is a marriage in which the innocent may rest secure.

Theological Depth

The great teachers of the Reformed tradition received this section and expounded it with a care that still rewards the reader, for they understood that here, at the close of the doctrine of marriage, the church must hold together two truths that the world is forever tearing apart: the unbreakable sacredness of the bond, and the genuine freedom of the innocent. Calvin treats the matter in his harmony of the Gospels and in his commentary on the first epistle to the Corinthians, and upon the second ground of the section his reasoning is decisive. On the apostle's word, "if the unbelieving depart, let him depart," Calvin insists that the departure of the one party frees the other from the marriage bond, and he will not have it softened into a mere permission to endure the absence. The desertion, he argues, is a kind of death; it is the sundering of the one-flesh union by the will of the departing party, and the believer who is so forsaken is "not under bondage," which is to say the Lord has loosed what the deserter has broken. Yet Calvin is equally careful on the other side, and it is the joining of the two that makes his teaching so exact. Against those who would stretch "departure" to cover every quarrel and every season of coldness, he presses the word "willful" in the Confession's sense: it is not the temporary withdrawal of an offended spouse but the obstinate, final repudiation of the marriage itself that dissolves it. And against those who would multiply causes beyond the two, he returns always to the words of Christ: "what God hath joined together, let not man put asunder." The two causes are the two breaches of the union: the one in the flesh, by adultery; the other in the will, by desertion; and there is no third, because there is no third way in which a marriage can be destroyed. Turretin takes up the question with the rigour of a man trained in controversy, and he asks the very question that every pastor must answer: does desertion dissolve the bond of marriage, or merely permit a separation while the bond remains? It is the same question we saw him put to the case of adultery, and his answer is the same unhesitating firmness. Malicious desertion, he argues, is not a mere absence but a repudiation; it is the act of one who abandons the union and refuses its duties, and by that act he himself severs what God had joined. The deserting party is, in effect, dead to the marriage, dead in will, if not in body, and the innocent party stands as free as if the deserter lay in the grave. But Turretin, like the Confession, hedges the cause about with conditions: the desertion must be total, it must be obstinate, and every remedy of church and state must first have been tried and found unavailing. A desertion that the church can heal or the magistrate can compel is no sufficient cause, for the bond still lives so long as the departing party may yet be recovered. It is this exactness that has made Turretin's treatment the standard to which later divines have returned, for he holds the two truths in their right order: the bond is sacred, and therefore nothing light may sunder it; and the innocent are free, and therefore the deepest breaches do. A. A. Hodge, in his commentary on the Confession, gathers the whole into a system, and he is especially helpful on the one point that most readers pass over: the meaning of the public and orderly course. The dissolution of marriage, he observes, is a judicial act, and as such it belongs to the church and to the state, and never to the private will of the parties. The facts are to be proved, not assumed; the grounds are to be established by testimony, not by assertion; and the sentence, when it is pronounced, is the sentence of lawful authority acting under the Word of God, and not the self-justifying verdict of the man or woman whose own case it is. Hodge presses the principle to its root: no man is a competent judge in his own cause, and least of all in a cause that touches his own heart, for the heart that "studies arguments" will always find the arguments that flatter its own desires. Hence the Confession's insistence that the persons concerned are not to be left to their own wills and discretion. The will of man is the very seat of the corruption, and the whole apparatus of church and magistrate is appointed by God to overrule it. Robert Shaw, with his accustomed economy, gathers the strands into a sentence that has the weight of a closing argument: the causes of divorce are two, and only two: adultery, and such willful desertion as can no way be remedied; and a divorce obtained upon any other ground, or prosecuted in any other manner, is null and void in the sight of God. And Watson, turning the doctrine as he always does toward the heart, sets the whole matter in the light of the prophet's word that God hates putting away. He will not let the severity of the doctrine be separated from its tenderness, for the same God who hates the sundering of marriage has himself provided the remedy for the innocent, and he would not have the wronged crushed beneath a burden he has never laid upon them. Watson presses home the comfort with the warmth for which he is remembered: the man or woman who has been forsaken by a spouse, or torn by unfaithfulness, is not to imagine that God's hatred of divorce binds them forever to the one who has broken the bond; for the sin that sundered the union is another's, and the freedom the Confession declares is a mercy to be received with a quiet conscience, not a guilt to be borne in secret. 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. The bond is sacred; the causes are two; the course is public; and the will of man is never the judge. Severity toward the bond, mercy toward the innocent, and order over both: this is the full doctrine of the section, and it is the doctrine that closes the Westminster teaching on marriage as it began, with the glory of God and the good of his people.

Puritan Application

First, search your own heart for the lawyer within, and put him out of doors. The Confession warns us that the corruption of man is apt to study arguments unduly to put asunder what God has joined, and the warning is addressed not to the world but to the church, and not to your neighbour but to you. Ask yourself honestly whether you have ever, in a season of difficulty, begun to collect reasons why your marriage might be ended: to rehearse your spouse's faults, to wonder whether the bond still holds, to hunt, however secretly, for a permission. The heart that studies arguments has already begun to deal treacherously, and the first duty of every married man and woman is to mortify that advocate before he pleads a single case. Bring your grievances to the cross before you bring them to the law; pray over your discontents before you rehearse them; and remember that the most dangerous counsel you will ever receive is the counsel of your own wounded will. Second, let the two causes teach you how to keep your marriage, and not merely how to end it. The whole force of the section lies in the word "nothing": nothing but adultery and irremediable desertion can sunder what God has joined, and the man or woman who takes that word to heart will guard the union as the sacred thing it is. Do not let the little breaches multiply in the dark; keep short accounts with your spouse; forgive quickly, confess readily, and let no root of bitterness spring up between you. The best commentary on this hard section is a marriage so full of grace that the question of its dissolution is never once so much as raised; and the pair who labour daily to keep the one-flesh union whole are doing more for the honour of this doctrine than a hundred disputations ever could. Tend what God has joined, and you will never need to learn what may lawfully dissolve it. Third, if you have been wronged in one of the two ways the Confession names, receive its remedy as a mercy, and use it in the open and in order. It may be that your marriage has been torn by adultery, or that you have been willfully forsaken, and that every effort of the church and of the law to restore what was broken has failed. Then the Word of God speaks to you a word of liberty: the bond is dissolved, and you are free. But take the freedom in the way the Confession prescribes, and in no other. Do not act in haste, and do not act in secret; carry your case to the elders of the church, submit it to the searchings of the Word, and let the magistrate, where the magistrate has a part, perform his office. A lawful divorce is a public and orderly thing, and the very order of it will be a guard to your conscience, for what is done openly and lawfully you may carry openly through the rest of your days. Bind not yourself where God has loosed you, but neither loose yourself where only God and his appointed authorities may loose. Fourth, refuse to be judge in your own cause, and teach your children to refuse it too. The Confession forbids that the persons concerned be left to their own wills and discretion, and the principle reaches far beyond the matter of divorce, for it is one of the deep laws of the spiritual life: a man cannot try his own case, because his will is not a witness but a party. Wherever you are tempted to settle a difficult matter by your own unaided judgment, a quarrel, a grievance, a suspicion, a step you mean to take, bring it into the light, to the counsel of the godly and the bar of the Word. The man who is willing to have his case examined is the man who is not afraid of the light; and the man who insists on judging for himself is the man who has already begun to study arguments. Make your own heart the last place, and never the first, where you plead. Fifth, and above all, lift your eyes from the earthly covenant to the heavenly, and rest there. The whole doctrine of this chapter has pointed, from its first sentence to its last, toward a marriage that cannot be dissolved. Christ is the Husband of his church, and his church is his bride; and though his bride has been faithless times without number, he has never put her away. He has not studied arguments against her, though the arguments would have been unanswerable; he has borne her treachery, bought her back with his own blood, and pledged himself never to leave nor forsake her. Here is the ground of everything the Confession has taught us. The earthly bond is sacred because it is a picture of this; the causes of divorce are few because this marriage has none; and the innocent who are released from a broken covenant are released into the arms of a Bridegroom whose covenant cannot be broken at all. Whatever your case, whatever your sorrow, whatever your guilt, this one thing stands: if you are in Christ, you are joined to a Husband who will never write you a bill of divorcement, who will never desert you, and who loves you with an everlasting love. Let every married pair learn from him how to keep faith, let every wronged heart learn from him how to be free, and let every one of us learn from him how to hope.

Prayer

Almighty and everlasting God, who didst ordain marriage in the garden and dost hate putting away, we bless Thee for the wisdom and the mercy of this doctrine, and for the care with which Thou hast hedged about the covenant that Thou Thyself hast joined. Thou who knowest the frame of every heart, and who hast seen the advocate within us pleading for our own wills, teach us to suspect our own arguments, to silence our own advocates, and to bring every cause into the light of Thy Word. Guard, we beseech Thee, every marriage among Thy people, that the one-flesh union may be kept whole and undefiled, that no home among us may ever know the sorrow of adultery or the grief of desertion, and that the little breaches of daily life may be healed by daily grace. Give to husbands and wives a tender and forgiving spirit, quick to confess and swift to pardon, that the bond Thou hast made may be honoured in the keeping of it and never tested by the sundering of it. And where the bond has been broken by the sin of another, grant to the innocent a quiet conscience in the liberty Thou hast declared, and the wisdom to use it in the public and orderly way that honours Thee: neither bound where Thou hast loosed, nor hastened where Thou wouldst have them wait, nor acting in secret where Thou hast commanded the light. We thank Thee, O Father, that Thou art a Husband who never puts away His bride, that though we have dealt treacherously with Thee times without number, Thou hast not cast us off, but hast loved us with an everlasting love, and hast pledged Thyself never to leave nor forsake us. Teach us so to love as Thou hast loved, that our 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 divorce, 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.