There’s a lot of confusion among evangelical Christians on the topic of divorce. Teaching that adultery is the only biblical grounds for divorce, many pastors urge battered wives and husbands to stay in their marriage and do their best to “love their spouse to Jesus.” These pastors overlook the fact that their spouses—the abusers of these women and men—do everything in their power to dehumanize them, sometimes professing to follow Jesus as a cover for their sin.
Because he sees the whole picture, Dallas Willard cuts through the current confusion like no one else. The following excerpt is from his seminal book The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life in God.[1] I give an executive summary of Willard’s teaching at the end of the excerpt.
Beyond Divorce Papers
One of the most important things in the male mind of Jesus day, and perhaps every day, was to be able to get rid of a woman who did not please him. And on this point the man really had great discretion, whereas from the woman’s point of view divorce was simply brutal and, practically speaking, could not be chosen. When Jesus gave his teaching that divorce as then practiced was unacceptable, the men who were his closest students responded by saying, “If that is how things are, it’s better not to marry at all!” (Matt. 19:10).
A man was generally thought to be righteous or good in the matter of divorce if, when he sent his wife away, he gave her a written statement that declared her to be divorced. She at least had then a certificate to prove her status as unmarried. This allowed her to defend herself against a charge of adultery if found with a man, for such a charge could result in her death. It also made it possible for her to seek marriage to another, or if all else failed, to make her living as a prostitute.
Certainly, there was longstanding disagreement among the interpreters of the law as to whether the man was free to divorce his wife “for every reason whatsoever” (Matt. 19:3), or only for adultery. The Pharisees dragged Jesus into this controversy, and he clearly took the highly restrictive position of the school of Shammai, which allowed divorce only on “moral” grounds. The school of Hillel, by contrast, permitted it for every reason. For example, if the wife burned the food or merely over salted it. Rabbi Akibah even allowed divorce if the husband merely saw a woman whose appearance pleased him better and he wanted her as wife instead of a wife he had.
In practice, however, a woman knew very well that she could be divorced for any reason her husband chose. The law as practiced was entirely favorable to the husband’s slightest whim, even though the Mosaic codes, chiefly found in Deuteronomy 22-24, are obviously much more restrictive and require some sort of sexual impropriety in the woman. They also specify conditions under which a man entirely loses the right to divorce a woman.
When Jesus himself comes to deal with the rightness of persons in divorce, he does not forbid divorce absolutely, but he makes very clear that divorce was never God’s intent for men and women in a marriage. The intent in marriage is a union of two people that is even deeper than the union of parents and children or any other human relationship. They are to become “one flesh,” one natural unit, building one life, which therefore could never lose or substitute one member and remain a whole life (Matt. 19:5); Gen. 2:24).
The Principle of Hardness of Heart
Yet he does not say that divorce is never permissible. To begin with, he accepts the Mosaic exception of “uncleanness,” which may have covered a number of things but chiefly referred to adultery (Matt. 5:32; 18:8-9). His interpretation of the grounds of the Mosaic exception is not, however, simply that adultery and the like are intrinsically so horrible that a marriage relationship cannot survive them. That, of course, is not really true. Many marriages have survived them. Misunderstanding this point, some people even today think that where there is adultery divorce is required by the biblical teachings. But it is not.
Rather, it is the hardness of the human heart that Jesus cites as grounds for permitting divorce in the case of adultery. In other words, the ultimate ground for divorce is human meanness. If it weren’t for that, even adultery would not legitimate divorce. No doubt what was foremost in his mind was the fact that the woman could quite well wind up dead, or brutally abused, if the man could not “dump” her. It is still so today, of course. Such is “our hardness of heart.” Better that a divorce occur than life be made unbearable. Jesus does nothing to retract this principle.
But though not absolutely ruling out divorce, he makes very incisive comments about what divorce does to people. First of all, he insists, as already noted, that divorce was never God’s intention for men and women in marriage. Divorce disrupts a natural unit in a way that harms its members for life, no matter how much worse it would have been for them to stay together. Marriage means that “they are no longer two, but one flesh” (Mark 10:8). This is an arrangement in nature that God has established, and no human act can change that order.
Perhaps one of the hardest things for the contemporary mind to accept is that life runs in natural cycles that cannot be disrupted without indelible damage to the individuals involved. For example, a child that does not receive proper nutrition in its early years will suffer negative effects for the rest of its life. The deficiency cannot be made-up later. And failure of a newborn baby to bond with its mother in its early weeks is thought by many researchers to do irreparable psychological damage.
These are representative of a wide range of natural cycles to be found in human life. We now know that even the physical structure of the brain will never develop in certain crucial directions unless it does so within a particular period of the individual’s life. In the order of nature some things can simply never be regained if they are lost.
Divorce also powerfully disrupts one of the major natural cycles of human existence. And the individuals involved can never be the same—whether or not a divorce was, everything considered, justifiable. That is why no one regards a divorce as something to be chosen for its own sake, a “great experience,” perhaps. But of course a brutal marriage is not a good thing either, and we must resist any attempt to classify divorce as a special, irredeemable form of wickedness. It is not. It is sometimes the right thing to do, everything considered.
Second, and this is the main point of the teaching in Matt. 5:31-32—just the fact that a man (or woman) has given the woman (or man) a “pink slip” and “done everything legally” does not mean that he or she has done right or has been a good person with regard to the relationship. This is what Jesus is denying with his teaching here, for that is precisely what the old dikaiosune [righteousness], as operative among the men of his time, affirmed.
Forced into “Adultery”
Third, he very clearly gives his reasons for rejecting the old view of rightness in divorce by saying that anyone who sends away his wife on grounds other than “uncleanness” forces her into adultery, and whoever takes as wife a woman who has been sent away from another engages in adultery (Matt. 5:32; 19:9).[2] This is not to forbid divorce, but it is to make it clear what its effects are. What, exactly, do these statements mean?
In the Jewish society of Jesus’ day, as for most times and places in human history, the consequences of divorce were devastating for the woman. Except for some highly unlikely circumstances, her life was, simply, ruined. No harm was done to the man, by contrast, except from time to time a small financial loss and perhaps bitter relationships with the ex-wife’s family members.
For the women, however there were only three realistic possibilities in Jesus’ day. She might find a place in the home of a generous relative, but usually on grudging terms and as little more than a servant. She might find a man who would marry her, but always as “damaged goods” and sustained in a degraded relationship. Or she might, finally, make a place in the community as a prostitute. Society simply would not then, as ours does today, support a woman to any degree or allow her to support herself in a decent fashion.
These circumstances explain why Jesus says that to divorce a woman causes her to commit adultery and to marry a divorced woman is to commit adultery (Matt. 5:32; 19:9). To not marry again was a terrible prospect for the woman. It meant, in nearly every case, to grow old with no children as well as with no social position, A perpetual failure as a human being. But to marry was to live in a degraded sexual relationship the rest of her life, and precious few husbands would allow her to forget it. As in the phrase “adultery in the heart,” Jesus speaks of being forced into “adultery” to point out the degraded sexual condition that was, then if not now, sure to be the result of divorce.
Is It Then Better Not to Marry?
As noted already, when his apprentices heard what Jesus said about divorce, they immediately concluded that it was better not to marry at all than to be unable to get rid of a woman easily (Matt. 19:10). But Jesus, like Paul later (1 Cor. 7:9), points out that not marrying can also force one into an impossible situation. It is, accordingly, an option only for those especially qualified for it (vv. 11-12). More important, of course, he knew that the resources of the kingdom of the heavens were sufficient to resolve difficulties between husband and wife and to make their union rich and good before God and man—provided, of course, that both are prepared to seek and find these resources.
And we must remember, of course, what we have been saying all along about the order in the Sermon on the Mount. It is not an accident that Jesus deals with divorce after having dealt with anger, contempt, and obsessive desire. Just ask yourself how many divorces would occur, and in how many cases the question of divorce would never even have arisen, if anger, contempt, and obsessive fantasized desire were eliminated. The answer is, of course, hardly any at all.
In particular, the brutal treatment that women received in divorce in Jesus’ day—and now men too in our day—would simply not happen. Hard hearts may make divorce necessary to avoid greater harm and hence, make it permissible. But kingdom hearts are not hard, and they together can find ways to bear with each other, to speak truth in love, to change often through times of great pain and distress until the tender intimacy of mutual, covenant-framed love finds a way for the two lives to remain one, beautifully and increasingly.
Is, then, divorce ever justifiable for Jesus? I think it clearly is. His principle of the hardness of hearts allows it, though its application would require great care. Perhaps divorce must be viewed somewhat as the practice of triage in medical care. Decisions must be made as to who cannot, under the circumstances, be helped. They are then left to die so that those who can be helped should live. A similar point applies to some marriages. But just as with the case of going to trial, discussed earlier, it is never right to divorce as divorce was then done and as it is now usually done. And it makes no difference today whether you are a man or a woman.
Divorce, if it were rightly done, would be done as an act of love. It would be dictated by love and done for the honest good of the people involved. Such divorce, though rare, remains nonetheless possible and may be necessary. If it were truly done on this basis, it would be rightly done, in spite of the heartbreak and loss it is sure to involve.
This position certainly represents a change on my part. I recall with embarrassment sitting around a seminar table at the University of Wisconsin in the early sixties. The professor had not yet arrived for our seminar in formal logic, and one of the class members was talking about his divorce proceedings. Without being asked for my opinion, I ventured to say, “Divorce is always wrong.”
Looking back on it, the strangest thing of all was that no one objected to what I said or even to my saying it. Everyone seemed accepting of it. Of course, that was because my words represented a cultural assumption of those days. But in fact I was vastly ignorant of the things men and women do to one another.
Later I came across the situation of a devout woman whose husband had married her as a cover for his homosexuality. He consummated the marriage so it couldn’t be annulled and after that he had nothing to do with her. They had no personal relationship at all. He would bring his male friends home and, in her presence, have sex in the living room or wherever else they pleased anytime they pleased. Her religious guides continued to tell her that she must stay in the marriage, while she died a further death every day, year after year.
I was simply an ignorant young man full of self-righteous ideas. This and later episodes of discovery educated me in the hardness of the human heart. But Jesus, of course, always knew.
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Executive Summary:
Dallas Willard makes three basic points regarding divorce:
- God’s intent is that marriage should be for life. So, divorce isn’t to be entered into lightly. Ideally, as each spouse dies daily to their own desires, they should be able to live together in love, despite the many challenges they may have to navigate.
- However, we don’t live in an ideal world: sometimes a spouse has no real interest in dying to self, as God calls us to. Hence, Jesus allowed divorce (as Moses did) due to the hardness of the human heart. That is, in order to protect the wife from the abuse that her hard-hearted husband could inflict on her—the wife being the only one needing protection in Jesus’ day. The same applies to husbands today. Jesus’ grounds for divorce are not if adultery has been committed because his law of love requires forgiveness. It’s about the danger one spouse’s cruelty poses to the other if they remain in the marriage. That is, God deems protecting a husband or wife from emotional and physical abuse critical enough to make divorce allowable. And for Jesus to allow divorce meant he definitely allowed remarriage.
- When it’s the only way to protect a husband or wife from abuse, divorce is necessary and even good because it protects not just the victim but also the victimizer from further victimization, which clearly heaps more judgment and ruin on the latter’s soul. In such a case, divorce can be an act of love: provided it’s not done out of spite, it can perfectly fulfill Jesus’ command to do to each other what we’d want done to us if the situation were reversed. So, to prevent spousal abuse, divorce can qualify as an embodiment of First Corinthians 13’s description of love.
Likening the situation to triage where some patients have to be left to die in order to save others, Willard says divorce—though always extremely hurtful—is sometimes necessary to do the best you can with a clearly dangerous situation.
[1] Dallas Willard, The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life in God (New York, NY: HarperOne, 1997), pp 168-73
[2] The Gospel of Mark, written more for the Gentile context, where, at least in some circles, it was not unheard of for a woman to divorce her husband, makes it clear that this discussion applies to women as well as men (Mark 10:12).