What about remarriage?

Question 11008.

The question of remarriage after divorce is one of the few where I have watched churches cause real and lasting damage in both directions. Some have treated remarried believers as permanent second-class members. Others have waved the whole matter through as though Jesus had never spoken about it.

I want to set out where I land, why, and where I hold my position with less certainty than I would like. This is not an area for the confident manufacture of rules, and anyone who finds it simple has not sat with enough real situations.

The knot at the centre

Everything about remarriage after divorce turns on one question: does a divorce actually dissolve the marriage bond, or does it only end the legal arrangement while the bond continues before God? If the bond survives, then remarriage after divorce is adultery in every case. If a legitimate divorce dissolves it, then the innocent party is free.

Jesus’ words are the reason the question is live. Whoever divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality, and marries another, commits adultery (Matthew 19:9). The charge of adultery only makes sense if the first marriage is in some way still standing. And the exception only makes sense if, in that one case, it is not.

Notice also that the question is not settled by how badly the first marriage ended. Remarriage after divorce is not permitted because the previous spouse behaved appallingly, nor forbidden because the divorce was messy. It turns on whether the bond itself still stands, and that is a question about covenant rather than about who behaved worst.

So the exception clause is doing real work. Jesus is not saying that remarriage after divorce is always adultery; He is saying that it is adultery except in a named circumstance. Remove the exception and you have to explain why He bothered to state it.

What Jesus taught

The setting is the rabbinic debate about lawful divorce, which I have described more fully when writing about the biblical grounds for divorce. Jesus takes the Pharisees back to creation, calls Moses’ provision a concession to hardness of heart, and then attaches His exception.

The exception is porneia, sexual immorality in the broad sense rather than a single narrow act. Where a spouse has broken the marriage covenant sexually, the innocent party who divorces on that ground and remarries is not, on Jesus’ own terms, committing adultery.

Mark and Luke record the saying without the qualifying phrase (Mark 10:11-12), and some conclude that Matthew introduced it. I do not follow that. Matthew wrote for readers steeped in the Hillel and Shammai argument, where the qualification was the very point at issue, and the Gospels routinely supply detail one another omits.

There is an older reading which takes porneia to mean incestuous unions within prohibited degrees, of the kind Leviticus 18 forbids, making the exception a matter of annulment rather than divorce. It is a serious proposal and it has been ably argued. I do not find it persuasive, because porneia in the New Testament is regularly used of sexual sin generally, and because the Pharisees’ question was about divorce as they practised it, not about illegal unions.

What Paul taught

Paul takes up remarriage after divorce twice. In 1 Corinthians 7:10-11 he passes on the Lord’s own instruction: the wife should not separate from her husband, but if she does, she should remain unmarried or be reconciled. That is the ordinary case, and it is restrictive.

Then he addresses the mixed marriage. If the unbelieving partner separates, let it be so. In such cases the brother or sister is not enslaved. God has called you to peace (1 Corinthians 7:15). The word douloo is the language of bondage, and Paul deliberately says the deserted believer is not under it.

What does that freedom amount to? If it means only freedom from having to chase after the deserter, the statement is nearly empty, since the situation itself has already settled that. Most interpreters take it as freedom from the marriage bond, and therefore freedom to remarry. That is my position, held with reasonable confidence.

Paul adds a further principle later in the chapter: a wife is bound to her husband as long as he lives, and if the husband dies she is free to marry whom she wishes, only in the Lord (1 Corinthians 7:39). Death plainly dissolves a marriage. The question the New Testament leaves us to work out is which other covenant-breaking events do the same.

Three positions Christians hold

It helps to see the field before arguing about a corner of it. The strictest position holds that the marriage bond survives any divorce until death, so that remarriage after divorce is adultery without exception. Those who take this view read the exception clause as referring to unlawful unions, or as permitting separation without dissolving the bond, and they can point to Mark and Luke recording the saying with no qualification at all.

The middle position, which is mine, holds that Scripture names two circumstances in which the bond is dissolved and the innocent party is free: sexual immorality and desertion by an unbelieving partner. It takes the exception clause at face value and takes Paul’s ‘not enslaved’ to mean what it appears to mean.

The broadest position holds that any divorce, once it has happened, ends the marriage as a matter of fact, so that remarriage after divorce is permitted to anyone who has repented of whatever went wrong. It appeals to the finality of a legal dissolution and to the breadth of forgiveness, and it has the pastoral advantage of simplicity.

I cannot take the broadest view, because it makes Jesus’ words about adultery unintelligible; if divorce simply ended the marriage in every case, remarrying afterwards could never be called adultery at all. I cannot take the strictest, because it empties an exception the Lord Himself stated. That leaves the middle ground, which is less tidy than either and, I think, closer to the text.

Where remarriage after divorce becomes less clear

I have set out two grounds on which I believe remarriage after divorce is permitted: sexual immorality by the other party, and desertion by an unbelieving partner. I hold those with some confidence because they rest on plain statements.

Beyond that, the certainty thins out. What of the believer divorced against their will by another believer, with no adultery and no unbelief in view? Paul’s instruction points towards remaining unmarried or being reconciled, and yet the innocent party has been abandoned as thoroughly as if the deserter had been an unbeliever. I lean towards treating unrepentant, settled abandonment by a professing Christian as functionally what Paul describes, on the ground that the profession is being contradicted by the conduct. I am aware that others read this more strictly.

What of the guilty party who has since repented? Some hold that such a person may never remarry, since their freedom would be the fruit of their own sin. Others hold that genuine repentance and forgiveness open the way. I lean towards the second, because I cannot find a category in the New Testament for a sin fully forgiven that nevertheless imposes a lifelong disability, and because we do not treat any other repented sin that way. I do not pretend the question is settled.

What I resist is the practice of building confident rules for cases Scripture does not address. Where the Bible is quiet, the church should be modest, and pastoral judgement should be exercised person by person rather than issued by policy.

Those who came to faith afterwards

A great many people arrive in our congregations carrying a history that was formed before they knew Christ at all. Divorce, sometimes more than one, sits in that history alongside everything else.

The New Testament pattern here is not complicated. If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has passed away (2 Corinthians 5:17). Paul lists sexual sins among the things the Corinthians had been, and then says: and such were some of you, but you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified (1 Corinthians 6:9-11).

Some object that this makes conversion a convenient reset, and that a person could in theory divorce, remarry and then profess faith. In practice I have never met that person, and I have met a great many who lived a wrecked life before Christ found them and who now carry a shame the New Testament does not ask them to carry. Remarriage after divorce that belongs to a life before conversion is part of the old that has passed away.

I therefore do not put a convert through an archaeological survey of a pre-Christian marriage in order to rule on whether they may now marry. Remarriage after divorce that occurred before conversion falls under the same forgiveness as everything else that occurred before conversion, and treating it as an exception would be to make one sin uniquely durable.

Remarriage and church office

One further question follows. Paul requires an overseer to be the husband of one wife (1 Timothy 3:2), and the phrase has been read as forbidding any remarried man from eldership.

The Greek is literally a one-woman man, and I take it as a description of present marital faithfulness rather than a lifetime audit. On the stricter reading, a widower who remarried would also be disqualified, which almost nobody actually maintains, and that inconsistency tells against it.

That said, a church is entitled to weigh the circumstances of a candidate’s history when assessing whether he is above reproach in the eyes of the congregation and the community. A man whose remarriage after divorce followed his own adultery may be entirely forgiven and still not be the right man to lead. Forgiveness restores fellowship; it does not automatically restore office.

Before a second marriage

Suppose you have concluded that you are free. There is still a good deal of wisdom to apply before anyone books a hall, and I would say most of it to anyone marrying for the first time as well.

Give it time. Grief after a marriage ends is real grief, and it does not run on a shorter clock because the other person is still alive. People who move quickly into a second marriage frequently marry the loneliness rather than the person, and remarriage after divorce entered in that condition tends to repeat the pattern that broke the first one.

Do the honest post-mortem. Even where you were sinned against, ask what you contributed, what you tolerated too long, what you never said. That is not an exercise in self-blame; it is the only way of not carrying the same habits into a new household. A good counsellor is worth the money here.

Think about the children, if there are any. A second marriage rearranges their world without their consent, and their loyalties are complicated in ways adults find inconvenient. Move slowly, tell them the truth, and do not expect instant affection for a stepparent.

And involve your church. Remarriage after divorce done quietly elsewhere, to avoid an awkward conversation, starts a marriage with a concealment in it. If your congregation cannot have that conversation kindly, that is a problem with the congregation, and it is one worth raising rather than working around. The same principles of Christian dating and marriage apply the second time, with more at stake.

How churches should treat remarried believers

Whatever position a congregation reaches, the way it treats people has to change. I have known believers who were divorced against their will, remarried after years alone, and then spent decades quietly excluded from anything that mattered in church life. That is a scandal, and it is done in the name of protecting marriage.

Once a remarriage exists, it is a real marriage with real obligations, and the counsel to break it up in order to correct an earlier wrong compounds the damage. Deuteronomy 24 explicitly refuses to allow a return to the first marriage after a second, which suggests Scripture is not in the business of unpicking these things retrospectively.

There is a further reason for care. The people most likely to be excluded by a strict policy are usually the ones who were sinned against, since the guilty party has often left the church altogether while the abandoned spouse stayed and kept serving. A rule applied without knowledge of the story tends to punish whoever remained, which cannot be what anyone intended.

So the pastoral duty is to help people live faithfully from where they are. Where sin lies in the past, deal with it honestly and then leave it dealt with. Where a marriage exists now, strengthen it. A church that can do both will be a safe place for people whose lives have not run smoothly, which is to say for most people.

So, now what?

If you are divorced and wondering whether you may remarry, do not settle it alone at midnight with a concordance. Talk it through with someone who knows the whole story, is unimpressed by you, and takes Scripture seriously. Then give it time.

If you are already remarried and carrying a low-level guilt you have never voiced, bring it into the light. Either it will turn out to be a burden Scripture never placed on you, or it is a sin that the cross has already covered. Neither outcome leaves you where you are now.

If you are teaching on this, do the work properly. Read the strictest case at its strongest before you dismiss it, and read the pastoral literature written by people who sit with the wreckage rather than only the systematic treatments. Confidence on this subject is usually a sign of inexperience.

If you are in leadership, ask what your church actually communicates about remarriage after divorce, not in its statement of faith but in the way people are treated on a Sunday. Would someone whose marriage collapsed five years ago feel able to walk through your doors and say so?

And I say to you: whoever divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality, and marries another, commits adultery.

Matthew 19:9, ESV

For Further Study

Charles Ryrie’s Basic Theology and J. Dwight Pentecost provide the dispensational framework within which I read these passages, particularly on the relationship between the Sermon on the Mount and the present administration of grace. Millard Erickson’s Christian Theology sets out the main positions on divorce and remarriage more evenhandedly than most single-volume works. Lewis Sperry Chafer is useful on the law and grace question underneath it all, John Walvoord on the Jewish setting of Matthew’s Gospel, and Arnold Fruchtenbaum on the rabbinic background to the Hillel and Shammai dispute that frames the Pharisees’ question. Anyone teaching on this should also read at least one careful treatment arguing the stricter position, since the case deserves to be met at its strongest.