The ethics of marriage in the New Testament

The ethics of marriage in the New Testament

Exam questions often expect you to apply ethical theories to real-life situations. In this article, Kay Plowman applies situation ethics to teachings on marriage and divorce

Kay Plowman

Marriage is the legal union of two partners, and divorce the legal termination of that union.

‘Marriage is a total troth communion which can be broken by any kind of prolonged infidelity, whether through the squandering of monies, unwillingness to share of self, breaking of confidences or other betrayals of trust. ’

New Dictionary of Christian Ethics and Pastoral Theology (1995)

The Bible states that God ordained marriage the means by which a husband and wife make a commitment to an exclusive and binding relationship that will last until the death of one of the partners: ‘A man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and they will become one flesh’ (Genesis 2:24). The biblical writers did not approve of divorce, and taught that, ideally, the relationship should be maintained as a holy, permanent one: ‘Therefore what God has joined together, let man not separate’ (Matthew 19:6b).

The ethics of marriage and divorce have long been an issue of concern for religious believers. That concern is still relevant in the twenty-first century, and has resulted in widely differing attitudes to the issues of marriage and divorce, not just among religious believers, but also in the media, Parliament, law and in moral philosophy.

The law controls marriage relationships, but

IS IT POSSIBLE TO RECONCILE BIBLICAL AND ETHICAL TEACHING OVER THE DILEMMA OF DIVORCE?

combines legal and moral issues in a distinctive way. For instance, adultery may be considered immoral, and it may be legitimate grounds for a legal divorce, but it is not a crime. Indeed, some thinkers argue that sexual activities that take place between consenting adults, married or unmarried, heterosexual or homosexual, are not a matter of morality at all.

Jesus the situationist

Is it, therefore, possible to reconcile biblical and ethical teaching over the dilemma of divorce?

One answer may lie in the application of situation ethics. In his book Situation Ethics, Joseph Fletcher argued against what he felt were the failures of legalism inherent in ethical systems that propose rules to govern human behaviour.

He did not suggest a total abandonment of rules and principles, but believed that we can only know the right thing to do through our own personal experience. For example, Jesus in Mark 10, when asked about divorce law by the legalistic Pharisees, referred them back to creation, rather than the Law of Moses, which was designed to accommodate man’s sinful nature: ‘It was because your hearts were hard that Moses wrote you the law’ (Mark 10:5b).

Similarly, the story of the woman caught in adultery showed Jesus adopting a situationist approach, demonstrating love, compassion and integrity, and showing the weakness of using absolute laws as a means of judging individual moral cases: ‘If any one of you is without sin, let him be the first to throw a stone at her’ (John 8:7b).

Cases such as these were the substance of much academic debate among the Pharisees during the time of Jesus, and it is not surprising that he was drawn into their discussions. As a teacher, his opinion on matters that divided the different rabbinic schools would inevitably have been sought, and his responses — which blend obedience to the will of God, and yet compassion for the individual — can be seen to provide a model for modern Christian approaches to ethical dilemmas. Fletcher argued that the answer to ethical and moral dilemmas lay in the application of agape, the love that Jesus commanded: ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul, and with all your strength and with all your mind; and love your neighbour as yourself’ (Luke 10:27).

Fletcher proposed four presumptions of situation ethics:

■ pragmatism, which demands that a proposed course of action should work, and that its success or failure should be judged according to the principle

■ relativism, which rejects such absolutes as ‘never’ or ‘always’

■ positivism, which recognises that love is the most important criterion of all

■ personalism, which demands that people should be put first

Fletcher defined love as being always good, and the only norm. It should be just and only the end of love justifies the means. Crucially, it makes a decision there and then in each individual situation, independent of previous cases and without making reference to a set of absolutes. The theory is thus subjective and teleological — drawing on personal experience to make judgements, and considering the outcome of the action, rather than the application of absolute rules, as the important factor.

A divisive subject

The application of situation ethics to the problem of divorce is complex, due to the conflict within Christianity itself concerning New Testament teaching. While major Christian denominations would all accept the New Testament pronouncements on marriage and agree that the relationship should ideally be lifelong, denominations are divided as to how strictly they interpret the biblical teaching on divorce. Decisions about whether to allow divorced Christians to marry again in church, or even whether to accept the marriage of a Christian to a non-Christian, will often be matters of conscience. For instance, a priest may not, himself, be troubled by the prospect of conducting the marriage service of a divorced person, but, aware that others in the church would be challenged by it, may refuse to allow the service to take place. The issues are so deeply personal that it is impossible to reach a consensus. A person’s individual beliefs are so firmly embedded that, although they are inevitably subjective, they emerge — through church teaching and often the hardness of the human heart towards that which threatens their own security — as objective laws.

Even the teachings of Jesus contain apparent contradictions, a fact that should make it even harder for churches or individuals to claim that they know the ‘truth’. In Mark’s Gospel, Jesus says that a partner is bound not to separate from their spouse: ‘Anyone who divorces his wife and marries another woman commits adultery against her. And if she divorces her husband and marries another man, she commits adultery’ (Mark 10:11–12). However, in Matthew’s Gospel there appears to be an exceptive clause: ‘I tell you that anyone who divorces his wife, except for marital unfaithfulness, and marries another woman commits adultery’ (Matthew 19:9a).

Matthew may have included it only to satisfy his Jewish-Christian readers, who would have been horrified at the prospect of staying married to an unfaithful partner — and indeed, who would have been forbidden not to seek divorce under such circumstances. Some modern-day Christians continue to accept this as biblically permissible grounds for divorce, although Selwyn Hughes argues that there is a special incentive for Christians to seek reconciliation rather than divorce in such cases.

Paul

Similarly, Paul allows a Christian partner to separate from a non-Christian spouse who refuses to stay with them. This was an important provision at a time when conversion to Christianity often meant total abandonment of a traditional way of life, and again is often cited as legitimate grounds for a Christian partner to be divorced from their non-Christian spouse without ‘guilt’: ‘But if the unbeliever leaves, let him do so. A believing man or woman is not bound in such circumstances’ (1 Corinthians 7:15a). So strongly do some Christians feel about the likely failure of the marriage of a Christian to a non-Christian that many churches actively seek to discourage it, or even forbid it, and married people within the church who worship without their spouse (usually women) are often subjected to continual pressure to seek the conversion of their partner. Many are left feeling in some way inadequate when their partner fails to convert, and are not encouraged by the feeling that if only they had been a ‘better Christian’ their spouse would be worshipping alongside them.

J. A. T. Robinson

A useful analysis of the ethics of marriage and divorce was outlined by John A. T. Robinson in his controversial book Honest to God, in which, influenced by the situation ethics of Joseph Fletcher, he offered an approach to the modern moral problems of marriage and divorce. Robinson maintained that there had been a ‘wind of change’ in morality which Christian thinkers had to recognise or else face the downfall of Christian morality altogether.

Robinson claimed that morality had traditionally assumed that morals are based on laws handed down by God and which are eternally valid for human behaviour. These laws had the effect of making certain things always wrong (sins) or always right, and provided the basis for whether society judged them to be crimes. He identified traditional thinking on marriage and divorce to be a particular arena in which this kind of thinking prevailed.

‘There is, for instance, a deep division on the interpretation of the ‘indissolubility’ of marriage. There are those who say that ‘indissoluble’ means ‘ought not to be dissolved’ — ought never to be dissolved. There are others who take it to mean ‘cannot be dissolved’.

See how these different emphases draw different dimensions of the problem. If marriage ’ ‘ought not’ to be dissolved, then it becomes a grave issue of morality if it is; if it ‘cannot be’ dissolved, then no legal fiction drawn up by a court of law can affect what goes on in heaven, where earthly divorce counts for nothing and a couple are as united in marriage as they were on the day they took their wedding vows. Robinson claimed that these views were grounded in the opinion that marriage is a metaphysical reality which survives independently of the actual physical relationship and which cannot be affected by any objective facts or legal manoeuvres: ‘It is not a question of “Those whom God has joined together let no man put asunder”: no man could if he tried.’

‘be understood legalistically, as prescribing what all Christians must do, whatever the circumstances…they are illustrations of what love may at any moment require of anyone…it is saying that utterly unconditional love, admits of no accommodation; you cannot define in advance situations in which it can be satisfied with less than complete and unreserved selfgiving.

Robinson challenged the view that marriage was based on the absolute command of God. Instead, he argued that the moral teachings of Jesus were not intended to Robinson argued that it was impossible to begin from a position of saying divorce or sexual relations before marriage are inherently wrong or sinful, because the only intrinsically wrong thing is a lack of love. He supports the views of Fletcher:

’ If the emotional and spiritual welfare of both parents and children in a particular family can be served best by divorce, wrong and cheapjack as divorce commonly is, then love requires it… . And this is the criterion for every form of behaviour, inside marriage or out of it, in sexual ethics or in any other field. For nothing else makes a thing right or wrong. ’

Robinson’s situationist view allows in so respects for the teaching of Jesus. Jesus’ attitude to those on the fringes of the society in which he lived was one of true agape, and one for which he risked rejection by his own people. He allowed the greater purpose of love to be served when he healed lepers, spoke seriously and intimately with women, allowed a ‘sinful’ woman to anoint his head, and invited the hated tax collectors to share table fellowship with him. For a modern Christian to argue on the one hand that Jesus was right to do this, and would still do it today, and yet to imply that neither Jesus nor God his Father could find room in their hearts to forgive a divorcee — whether the ‘guilty’ or ‘innocent’ party — serves only to crystalise much of the hypocritical and narrow thinking that many feel representatives of Christianity have, over the years, been guilty of.

Strengths and weaknesses

Situation ethics itself has many strengths. It allows for individual cases to be judged on their own merits, irrespective of what has been done in similar situations in the past. People are not subject to rules that bind them. Nothing is intrinsically wrong or right, except the principle of love. Such love seeks the wellbeing of others even if the course of action is not one of preference. Most importantly, it is based on the teaching of Jesus, and so could be considered a truly Christian ethic.

Inevitably, however, there are weaknesses. Despite Fletcher’s attempt to be anti-legalistic, the application of even just one principle makes it a legalistic approach. To say no rules apply, and yet to also say the only rule is love, is a contradiction. Also, the theory is dependent on the calculation of consequences. It is impossible to be accurate in making such a calculation. Crucially, it reduces ethics to a single principle and one way of evaluating moral action. The theory could, therefore, justify adultery, murder, and even genocide in the interests of love.

Applying the theory to divorce, therefore, presents problems in itself. If it is the sexual tie that is crucial in marriage and if its breach is the only permissible grounds for divorce according to the New Testament, then a Christian who seeks a divorce for any other reason, including cruelty, could be said to be acting immorally and contrary to the will of God. A situationist, however, would argue that there are many ways in which the mutual bond of trust and commitment can be broken, and that it is an unreasonable imposition on the emotional and physical wellbeing of the individual to refuse to allow other grounds for divorce. This does not help religious believers, however, who see it as their duty to adhere to the teachings of Christ.

Seeking a blend

Yet there may be a middle ground. It is possible that both Christians and non-Christians would accept that, although adultery violates the bond of exclusive commitment beyond repair, it is also possible to maintain that the principles of love and forgiveness should be allowed to take precedence. Divorce need not be the inevitable end to marriage, and both the New Testament and situation ethics support the notion of loving reconciliation. Furthermore, when a marriage ends, there must be the chance for another relationship, potentially one which is more in the spirit of Christ’s love, to take its place, and to deny individuals any opportunity to find such a blessing is dangerously unloving. So too must be the insistence that an individual remains at the mercy of a violent, abusive or cruel partner, simply to justify the teachings of a church or the beliefs of a third party. The evangelists never recorded Jesus telling anyone to remain in a situation that brought them misery or put them in peril, and given the hard teachings that the New Testament does include, it seems likely that they would have included such a teaching had he done so.

THE EVANGELISTS NEVER RECORDED JESUS TELLING ANYONE TO REMAIN IN A SITUATION THAT BROUGHT THEM MISERY OR PUT THEM IN PERIL

Christians should therefore seek a blend of law and love. Not law in its legalistic, inhibiting guise, but in the freedom it gives for man to know that he does not act alone, but has the revealed will of God to help him. So, even though Fletcher saw law and love as mutually exclusive, they may, in fact, be linked, as Paul observed: ‘Love does no harm to its neighbour. Therefore love is the fulfilment of the law’ (Romans 13:10).

Kay Plowman is an experienced writer and teacher.