Divorce and remarriage

“So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore, what God has joined together, let no one separate.”

— Matthew 19:6

Marriage is a lifelong, one-flesh covenant instituted by God at creation, intended to last as long as both spouses live (Gen. 2:24; Rom. 7:2). Divorce is the dissolution of that covenant; remarriage is entering a new marriage while a former spouse is living. Divorce is not God’s design for marriage and was tolerated under Moses only “because of hardness of heart” (Matt. 19:8). Only two circumstances dissolve the marriage bond so that remarriage is not adultery: persistent sexual immorality by one spouse (Matt. 19:9), and desertion by an unbelieving spouse who refuses to remain married (1 Cor. 7:15).

Confessional Definition

The Westminster Confession of Faith (1646) gives the fullest Reformed confessional statement on the subject, in a chapter titled “Of Marriage and Divorce.” On the first ground, adultery, it states:

“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.”¹

On the second, desertion, it adds:

“Nothing but adultery, or such wilful 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.”²

Charles Hodge summarized the resulting Reformation-era consensus: “So far as the churches and their confessions are concerned, this is still the doctrine of almost all Protestant denominations,” namely “that the dissolution of the bond of marriage was allowable only for the two offences of adultery and wilful desertion.”³

The Savoy Declaration (1658) and the 1689 Second London Baptist Confession both restate Westminster’s own chapter on marriage’s nature and purpose almost word for word, affirming that marriage “was ordained for the mutual help of husband and wife, for the increase of mankind with a legitimate issue, and the preventing of uncleanness.”⁴ Neither confession, however, carries forward Westminster’s two paragraphs on divorce; the chapter each titles simply “Of Marriage” is silent on the grounds, if any, for dissolving the union.⁵ On divorce specifically, the 1689’s own witness is this gap rather than a stated position; Westminster remains the confessional family’s dedicated statement of the two-ground doctrine Hodge describes.

Biblical Basis

The nature and permanence of marriage

Genesis grounds marriage in creation itself: God made mankind “male and female” (Gen. 1:27), and “a man leaves his father and mother and bonds with his wife, and they become one flesh” (Gen. 2:24). Jesus builds his own teaching on divorce directly on this text, telling the Pharisees who ask whether divorce is lawful “for any cause” that God himself, not the husband, is the one who joins a man and woman together, “so they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate” (Matt. 19:4-6). Malachi likewise names divorce a breach of covenant rather than a private matter: the man “who hates and divorces his wife… covers his garment with injustice” before the Lord, who was “a witness between you and the wife of your youth” (Mal. 2:14, 16). Paul’s incidental statements about marriage’s duration point the same direction: a wife “is bound as long as her husband is living,” and only his death, not a legal divorce, sets her free to remarry (Rom. 7:2; 1 Cor. 7:39).

Jesus rejects divorce and remarriage as adultery, with one exception

Mark and Luke record Jesus stating the rule without qualification: “Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her,” and “everyone who divorces his wife and marries another woman commits adultery” (Mark 10:11; Luke 16:18). Matthew records the same teaching twice with a named exception: “Whoever divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality [πορνεία], and marries another, commits adultery” (Matt. 19:9; cf. 5:32). Matthew 19 opens with the Pharisees’ own question about Deuteronomy 24:1-4, the Mosaic provision requiring a “certificate of divorce” where a husband “found some indecency” in his wife. Jesus answers that Moses only permitted divorce “because of the hardness of your hearts,” not that Moses commanded it, and that this permission never reflected God’s original design (Matt. 19:8).

Ken Magnuson identifies πορνεία as the interpretive center of the exception clause. Some read it narrowly, as covering only sexual sin during a betrothal, the situation Joseph faced before he learned that Mary’s pregnancy was of the Holy Spirit (Matt. 1:18-21); on that reading, Matthew’s clause explains an isolated case rather than adding a general ground for divorce, leaving Mark and Luke’s flat prohibition intact.⁶ Magnuson finds this unconvincing: πορνεία is a broad New Testament term for sexual immorality generally, covering more than adultery specifically, and nothing in Matthew 19’s own context restricts it to betrothal.⁶ On the majority reading he defends, persistent, unrepentant sexual sin by one spouse breaks the one-flesh bond itself, so that the other spouse’s remarriage is not adultery, without divorce ever being commanded rather than merely permitted.⁶

The Mosaic concession and its limits

Deuteronomy 24:1-4 itself neither commands nor straightforwardly commends divorce; its one explicit command is that a man may not remarry a wife he divorced after she has married another man, calling such a remarriage “an abomination before the Lord” (Deut. 24:4). John Murray called this text unique in the Old Testament, since it “occupies a unique place… because it contains, as no other passage in the Old Testament, specific legislation bearing upon the question of divorce.”⁷ Its “certificate of divorce” functioned to protect the divorced woman, guaranteeing her the right to remarry rather than leaving her legally bound to a husband who had sent her away.⁶ Jesus’s own appeal to this text treats it as a concession to sin, not as God’s pattern for marriage.

Paul allows a second ground: desertion by an unbeliever

Paul restates Jesus’s teaching to a mixed church at Corinth: “A wife is not to leave her husband… and a husband is not to divorce his wife,” and if a believing spouse does separate, reconciliation, not remarriage, is the goal (1 Cor. 7:10-11). He then addresses a case Jesus had not spoken to directly, a believer married to an unbeliever: “If the unbeliever leaves, let him leave. A brother or a sister is not bound in such cases. God has called you to live in peace” (1 Cor. 7:15). Magnuson reads “not bound” as freedom from the marriage itself, on the same pattern as the widow’s freedom to remarry in verse 39, and notes that Paul’s concession is not permission for the believer to seek divorce, but permission to accept a divorce that an unbelieving spouse is determined to obtain.⁶

Historical Development

The early and medieval church increasingly treated marriage as indissoluble by anything but death, a position formalized as dogma at the Council of Trent (1545-1563), which anathematized anyone who denied the church’s own authority to establish the impediments by which a marriage could be judged void.⁸ Where a marriage proved unworkable, the medieval Western church allowed only permanent separation “a mensa et thoro” (“from table and bed”), without the right to remarry, or else multiplied the grounds on which a marriage could be declared null from its beginning.⁸

The Reformers broke with this system on both fronts. They denied that Ephesians 5:32’s “great mystery” (Vulgate: sacramentum) makes marriage a grace-conferring sacrament in the Roman sense, reading it instead as Scripture’s own description of marriage’s symbolic weight, that it images the union of Christ and the church, without turning matrimony into a channel of saving grace.³ Against the accumulated exception and annulment law of the medieval system, they reasserted that Scripture itself names only two grounds, adultery and desertion, on which the marriage bond is actually dissolved.³ This position passed into the Reformed confessions of the following century: the Westminster Assembly (1646) stated it at length, while the Savoy Declaration (1658) and the 1689 Baptist confession, following Savoy’s own shorter chapter, carried forward Westminster’s statement of marriage’s purpose without its accompanying paragraphs on divorce.

Opposing Views

Roman Catholic indissolubility

Catholic teaching holds that a valid, consummated marriage between Christians cannot be dissolved by any cause. Hodge described the position this way:

“Marriage between Christians, according to Romanists, is indissoluble. Neither adultery nor desertion justifies divorce. Death alone can sever the bond.”⁸

In Hodge’s own assessment, denying that adultery breaks the marriage bond does not make marriage more sacred in practice; it instead produces “unscriptural devices to remedy the injustice of forcing a husband or wife to maintain the conjugal relation with a guilty partner,” among them an expanding list of grounds for annulment.⁸

The permanence view

A minority of evangelical interpreters hold that remarriage after any divorce constitutes ongoing adultery, including the case Matthew’s Gospel addresses. Old Testament scholar Gordon Wenham, one of its sustained defenders, reads πορνεία broadly, as covering “any sexual offences that are prohibited in the OT law: adultery, incest, homosexuality, etc.,” rather than narrowing it to the betrothal period, but concludes that Matthew’s clause governs only the lawfulness of the divorce itself, not a subsequent remarriage.⁹

The betrothal view

Others, including John Piper, read Matthew’s exception as addressing only the situation Joseph faced during betrothal, when sexual unfaithfulness before the marriage was consummated permitted a quiet divorce without the guilt of putting away a lawful wife. On this reading, Matthew’s clause harmonizes with, rather than qualifies, Mark and Luke’s unexcepted statements, and no remarriage after a consummated marriage’s divorce is ever sanctioned.⁶

Objections and Responses

Scripture’s two named grounds appear to leave victims of ongoing abuse without a biblical basis for divorce. Jesus and Paul name adultery and an unbeliever’s desertion; abuse is not named as a third, explicit ground. New Testament scholar Craig Keener, cited by Magnuson, observes that what Jesus’s and Paul’s two exceptions have in common is that “the believer is not free to break up the marriage but only to accept that the unrepentant partner has irreparably broken it,” and asks what Scripture might say of abuse “if this issue hadn’t come up.”⁶ Magnuson judges that kind of extrapolation “dangerously speculative” given Scripture’s sufficiency, while still treating the question as a genuinely hard one: the abused spouse and any children should be removed from danger and protected as a first priority, reconciliation should be pursued only where repentance and safety are both credible, and the church, not the individual alone, should help discern the case.⁶

If the spouse whose adultery justified a divorce later repents, must the marriage be preserved rather than dissolved? Neither Jesus nor Paul commands divorce for adultery, only permits it; both leave room for forgiveness. John Stott writes:

“Jesus’ purpose was emphatically not to encourage divorce for this reason, but rather to forbid it for all other reasons.”¹⁰

Because the exception clause does not specify only persistent, unrepentant adultery, the offended spouse is not bound to reconcile, but pastors and churches ought to encourage repentance and reconciliation as the norm wherever they are genuinely possible.⁶

Does Paul’s requirement that an overseer be “the husband of one wife” (1 Tim. 3:2; Titus 1:6) permanently disqualify anyone who has been divorced and remarried? The phrase, literally “a one-woman man,” concerns marital faithfulness and character more than a bare biographical status; it plainly does not disqualify a single man or a remarried widower, since Paul himself was unmarried and commended singleness (1 Cor. 7:35). A man divorced and remarried on grounds Scripture does not permit is excluded from office, but a man divorced and remarried before his conversion, or one whose divorce arose from a spouse’s own unrepentant adultery or desertion, is not necessarily excluded if he is now, and has been for some time, a faithful, above-reproach husband; that judgment belongs to the local church, which can assess the man’s actual character and conduct.⁶

Related Doctrines

References

The Westminster Confession of Faith (1646), chap. 24, “Of Marriage and Divorce,” para. 5. ↩
Westminster Confession of Faith, chap. 24, para. 6. ↩
Charles Hodge, “Chapter XIX. The Law,” in Systematic Theology, vol. 3 (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1873), 398. ↩ ↩² ↩³
The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 25, “Of Marriage,” para. 2. Text confirmed against independent transcriptions of the confession. ↩
The Savoy Declaration of Faith and Order (1658), chap. 25, “Of Marriage,” paras. 1-4. ↩
Ken Magnuson, “8. Divorce and Remarriage,” in Invitation to Christian Ethics: Moral Reasoning and Contemporary Issues (Grand Rapids, MI: Kregel Academic, 2020). ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰
John Murray, Divorce (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1961), 3, quoted in Magnuson, “Divorce and Remarriage.” ↩
Hodge, “The Law,” 397. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴
Gordon Wenham, quoted in Magnuson, “Divorce and Remarriage.” ↩
John Stott, quoted in Magnuson, “Divorce and Remarriage.” ↩