Divorce

A woman in her mid thirties sat across from me in my counseling office and posed her question: “Do I have a biblical basis for this divorce I am seeking?”

Jan and her husband, Rick, were both Christians, but during the past two years a great change had taken place within Rick and consequently in his relationship with Jan. As Jan put it, “Each day Rick resembles less and less the man whom I originally married. That Rick was kind and considerate; this Rick is argumentative and hostile.” The incident that precluded Jan’s entertaining further thoughts about preserving the marriage had occurred two days before she picked up the phone and made an appointment with me. In a fit of rage because his four-year-old daughter had spilled her milk at the dinner table, Rick had picked up a knife and, waving it wildly, had chased the child to her room.

Nor had Rick’s fits of irrationality been limited to that one occasion. In the evening after dinner he frequently became drunk and would play with his loaded gun, not caring that three children under ten were playing in the same room.

Psychologically, too, Rick was destructive to his family. He would look at his six-year-old daughter and say things like, “You’re ugly,” or when she tripped and fell, “How come you can’t be more like other kids your age?” Jan also came in for her share of his verbal abuse, which had almost destroyed her sense of good self-esteem. Even more Jan feared the effect he was having on their three small children during their formative years, when children develop their basic self-image. After only a year of this abuse, the children were having nightmares; they were excessively shy in social situations and were performing poorly in school. Above all, Jan feared what Rick might do someday in a real act of violence.

Jan had tried everything, from applying spiritual  principles to her marriage to psychological counseling. County authorities had been notified of the potential danger to the children; so periodically the children had been removed from the home, each time until Rick seemed better. But every time he improved, it was only briefly so that, as he put it later, he could get his kids back from those “nosy social workers.” Apart from meeting the minimum requirements of the county in order to regain his children, Rick refused any help with his problems. Indeed he seemed unwilling to even admit he had problems.

At this point Jan was questioning her  ability to stay on in this situation, which threatened the physical well-being of both her and her children. Yet Rick had always been faithful to her sexually. She could not in all honesty fulfill her church’s prerequisite for divorce: adultery. At times she had found herself praying that he would be unfaithful so she could be free of him with a clear conscience before God. When she was particularly desperate, she wished him dead. Then she felt ashamed of her prayers.

Everyone she had talked to at her church had a different viewpoint, ranging from, “Stay with him and leave it in God’s hands,” to, “Since there is no sexual immorality involved, you don’t have a scriptural basis for divorce.” Then some would ambiguously add: “This must be an exception, somehow. You obviously can’t go on living with him.” None of these viewpoints were very helpful.

Jan seemed to be facing a dilemma that gave her no way out. Any answer seemed wrong: It could not be right to take chances with her own life and the lives of her children; yet from the viewpoint of her church, divorce was wrong for her. The most compassionate of her friends were essentially telling her that she should go ahead and sin by getting a divorce in order to secure her family’s safety. Was it impossible, therefore, to guarantee her children’s safety and at the same time please God? Would He who commanded His disciples to let the little children come to Him not be the first to want to protect these children whom He had entrusted to her care?

Talking about a woman’s role in handling a divorce emotionally and in helping her children to adjust to the changes is relatively easy. It is far harder for a woman to handle divorce as she deals with the rightness or wrongness of that divorce.

Matthew 5:32 offers the most concise statement on divorce given by Christ in the Gospels. “But I tell you that every man who puts away his wife except on the ground of unfaithfulness causes her to commit adultery, and whoever marries her when so divorced commits adultery” (WEYMOUTH).

“Unfaithfulness” here is translated as “unchastity” in the Moffatt translation and, with less accuracy, “fornication” in the King James Version. In the Greek the meaning of the word “fornication” (porneia) goes beyond adultery to include any immoral sexual act. “It was used of sexual sin as a whole, and also of specific sexual sins. The context in which it appears determines the sense to be assigned to it. It follows that from the 4th century B.C. in Greece and 200 B.C. among Greek-speaking Jews down to 96 A.D., porneia and its cognates were used not only of fornication but of practically every other specific sin, as well as of all sexual sins taken collectively.”¹ Such reputable biblical scholars as Augustine, Clement, Strong, Rotherham, Vincent, Wuest, Goodspeed, Douay, Wesley, Ascott, and others concur with such an interpretation of the word porneia. Presumably the sins included in the meaning of this word could timelessly include incest, adultery, child molestation, homosexuality, sadism, and other sexual acts defined as immoral by scriptural precept, not just by what is considered acceptable in a given society at a given time.

While the specifics of modesty, for example, may vary from culture to culture and decade to decade, actual sexual mores are quite clearly set forth in the Scriptures and do not change. There was a time when exposing one’s “limbs” was considered immodest for a woman in this country. Now most Christian women feel quite comfortable wearing shorts, or dresses and skirts that fall well above ankle length. Short hair, tank-type bathing suits, lipstick, and hair dye were all considered to be at least on the borderline of immodesty a few years back. Yet today most Christians find all these accoutrements of female style acceptable. In contrast, such sexual acts as adultery and incest, while they may occur more frequently, within the church as well as without, are still considered immoral by most Christians and by biblical teaching.

However, the real question Christ answers in the book of Matthew is whether or not a man should be able to divorce a woman “for every cause.” According to the Jewish law of the time, a man could get a divorce for almost any reason. When the question was asked of Christ, “. . . Is it lawful for a man to put away his wife for every cause?” (Matthew 19:3), the Pharisees were probably trying to trap Christ. It was not an honest question asked by those who were seeking truth.

Even the rabbis of that day, representing the religious establishment, disagreed on the appropriate grounds for divorce. At one extreme, one school of interpretation allowed divorce for such a trivial act as a burned supper! Contrary to the basic Jewish ideal, marriage under these conditions was often a mockery. In one case recorded by Alfred Edersheim, two rabbis decided to each marry a woman for a day and then divorce her.

Women were the real victims of the looseness of the Jewish laws. Under Jewish law a woman could not divorce a man on her own. Furthermore, because the culture did not provide much opportunity for women who wished to support themselves, women who were divorced by their husbands were in danger of being thrown out on the street and left in a helpless position. The situation was therefore quite different from our culture today, and the real women’s-rights issues were centered around the protection afforded women by strict divorce laws. As a rule, women in the first century A.D. Jewish culture had little to gain and everything to lose by a divorce.

In contrast, the Greek and Roman cultures of the same era allowed women to obtain legal divorces for themselves. In reality, however, the liberalization of divorce effected little change in the life of the average woman; for economically a woman still would have had a hard time supporting herself without a husband. Perhaps the harsh economic realities account for the high incidence of prostitution at that time, for that was one way in which a woman could support herself.

While righteousness rather than the alleviation of human suffering was Christ’s primary concern in the matter of divorce, the practical effect of His rather strict pronouncement on divorce was that of protecting women from the harshness of the economic results of divorce in the culture of His time. Thus protection rather than denial of the rights of women was the practical outcome of Christ’s teaching on divorce.

Yet clear-cut as Christ’s teaching on divorce seems to be from a biblical point of view, for a situation such as that of Jan’s marriage, the issues still seem unclear and complicated. In Jan’s marriage there had been no outward act of sexual infidelity, so one must search further.