HistoricalChristian.Faith

Is the marriage bond indissoluble while both spouses live?

Type: supporting argument (off-timeline) · Assessment: contested — the positive thesis that Jesus taught the marriage bond to be objectively indissoluble so long as both spouses live: a divine joining (“what God hath joined together, let not man put asunder”) and a “one flesh” union that no divorce can sever, grounded by Augustine in the marriage sacramentum and fixed as dogma by Trent. Strong by creation-theology, the three exceptionless witnesses, and the patristic reception; resisted by Matthew’s exception and the gap between “let no man put asunder” (a command) and “cannot be put asunder” (an ontology) · the affirmative rival to the exception-permits-remarriage reading

Related arguments: whether the bond dissolves — see also does the exception permit remarriage, or only separation? · the Pauline privilege — does desertion free the believer to remarry?

The claim

…a certain sacramental bond in marriage… Of this bond the substance undoubtedly is this, that the man and the woman who are joined together in matrimony should remain inseparable as long as they live; and that it should be unlawful for one consort to be parted from the other, except for the cause of fornication. For this is preserved in the case of Christ and the Church; so that, as a living one with a living one, there is no divorce, no separation for ever… the nuptial bond has a permanent obligation, and can be cancelled neither by separation nor by union with another.

— Augustine, On Marriage and Concupiscence I.10[XI], NPNF1 vol. 5. The claim is not merely that remarriage after divorce is forbidden, but why it is forbidden: the bond itself is a real and permanent thing that survives every attempt to break it, so that a second union while the first spouse lives “is not marriage but adultery.” This is the affirmative doctrine the whole strict tradition rests on — the separation-not-remarriage verdict is its consequence, indissolubility its ground.

Who advances it

The thesis is the settled teaching of the Latin West and, in its own idiom, the Christian East. Its classic statement is Augustine’s (c. 401–421), who did not invent the strict verdict — it was already the line of Hermas, Clement, Tertullian, the Council of Elvira, Basil, Chrysostom, and Jerome — but supplied its rationale, grounding indissolubility in the marriage sacramentum, the sacred sign of the union of Christ and the Church. That synthesis became the framework the medieval canonists inherited and the Council of Trent (Session 24, 1563) fixed as dogma, restating the creation ordinance — the “first parent… pronounced the bond of matrimony perpetual and indissoluble” — and anathematizing the claim that even “the innocent one who gave not occasion to the adultery” may “contract another marriage, during the life-time of the other.” It remains the doctrine of the Roman Catholic Church (canon 1141: a ratified and consummated marriage “cannot be dissolved by any human power or for any reason other than death”). Among Protestants who reject the sacramentum the no-remarriage reading still has able modern defenders: William Heth and Gordon Wenham argued it at book length, and Wenham maintained it after Heth changed his mind.¹

The case for

The creation order. The reading’s strongest plank is that Jesus himself grounds marriage not in Moses’ permission but in the order of creation, “from the beginning.” Asked whether a man may put away his wife, he answers with Genesis: God “made them male and female,” and “for this cause shall a man leave father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife: and they twain shall be one flesh… Wherefore they are no more twain, but one flesh. What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder” (Matthew 19:4–6; the same in Mark 10:9). Two things follow. The union is a real joining — “one flesh” (Genesis 2:24), a new single reality, not a contract between two who stay two. And the joiner is God, so that the sundering is forbidden to “man”: what divine action has fused, no human act — not a bill of divorcement, not a second marriage — is competent to dissolve. On this reading Jesus does not merely tighten Moses’ rule but relocates the whole question, treating the Mosaic bill as a hardness-of-heart concession the gospel withdraws (“from the beginning it was not so”).²

The three exceptionless witnesses. Of the four New Testament forms of the divorce saying, three carry no exception and each brands the remarriage itself as adultery: “Whosoever shall put away his wife, and marry another, committeth adultery against her” (Mark 10:11–12); “Whosoever putteth away his wife, and marrieth another, committeth adultery” (Luke 16:18); and Paul, reporting the Lord’s own charge, tells the separated wife to “remain unmarried, or be reconciled to her husband” (1 Corinthians 7:10–11). The indissolubilist takes these as the plain baseline and reads Matthew’s single qualified sentence in their light — the interpretive move Augustine made explicit against Pollentius, governing Matthew’s exception by the unqualified Mark and Luke. Whatever Matthew’s “except for fornication” licenses, on this weighting it cannot be the very remarriage the other three forbid outright.³

The sacramentum of Ephesians 5. The bond’s permanence is given a theological ground in Paul’s exposition of marriage as a sign of Christ and the Church: “For this cause shall a man leave his father and mother, and shall be joined unto his wife, and they two shall be one flesh. This is a great mystery: but I speak concerning Christ and the church” (Ephesians 5:31–32). Augustine builds his whole doctrine here: the “so great strength of the marriage bond” is inexplicable unless the union signifies “some greater matter” — the indivisible marriage of Christ and the Church — and because Christ never deserts the Church, the sign He instituted holds even against the will of those who try to break it. The sacramental tie, Augustine argues, is like the seal of baptism: a permanent thing “lost neither by divorce nor by adultery.” The bond is therefore dissolved by one thing only, death, which ends the signification (Romans 7:2–3; 1 Corinthians 7:39, the wife bound “as long as her husband liveth”).⁴

The weight of the reception. The separation-not-remarriage reading is not one patristic voice among many but the overwhelming consensus of the first fifteen centuries — a datum that tells heavily on how the sayings were in fact heard by readers far closer to their idiom than we are. From Hermas (“if he put his wife away and marry another, he also commits adultery”) through Jerome and Augustine, the fathers who read the exception clause agreed it licenses dismissing an adulterous spouse but not a new marriage while the first lives; the Latin canon law of Elvira enforced it, and the Greek East, though it developed a pastoral relaxation (“economy”), continued to call the premature second union adultery (the Council in Trullo, canon 87). The strict reading is thus the oldest attested one, held with near-unanimity, and it is the settled dogma of the communions that between them hold most of the world’s Christians.⁵

Adversarial assessment

What holds. The affirmative case is genuinely strong at three points. The creation-order grounding is Jesus’ own: he answers the divorce question from Genesis, not Deuteronomy, and “what God hath joined together, let not man put asunder” is a hard saying to soften. The three exceptionless witnesses are a standing weight: any reading that lets an innocent party remarry must explain why Mark, Luke, and — hardest of all — Paul, reporting the Lord’s charge directly, each brand the remarriage as adultery or forbid it. And the reception is real and near-unanimous, not a late Latin overlay: the separation-only reading is attested from Hermas on. The indissolubilist’s method — govern the one qualified text by the three unqualified ones — is a defensible, indeed traditional, interpretive principle.

What is overstated or imprecise. Three cautions keep the thesis short of “sound.” (1) Matthew’s exception is a real datum, not a nuisance to be governed away. Matthew twice qualifies the prohibition with “except for fornication” (5:32; 19:9), and on the reading of D. A. Carson the exception governs the whole divorce-and-remarry conditional, releasing the innocent party — a construal the Greek permits. The syntax of 19:9 is genuinely ambiguous and cannot be made to yield the absolute reading by grammar alone; that Augustine reaches indissolubility by subordinating Matthew to Mark and Luke is a deliberate interpretive choice he himself conceded rests on obscure texts, not a self-evident command.⁶ (2) “Let no man put asunder” is an imperative, not obviously an ontology. The saying forbids sundering (“man must not”); the leap to “the bond cannot be sundered” — that adultery and desertion leave a real tie intact — is supplied by the sacramentum theology, not read off the words. The Reformers pressed exactly this gap: adultery, they held, does in fact break the bond, so that the offender “is considered as one dead” and the innocent is free; Luther struck deeper still, denying marriage is a sacrament at all and so pulling the ground out from under Augustine’s inference. (Ephesians’ “great mystery,” mystērion, became sacramentum only in the Latin, and the later sacramental-theology freight the word carried is part of what is in dispute.)⁷ (3) The consensus is near-unanimous, not strictly unanimous. The Latin Ambrosiaster let an innocent husband remarry two centuries into the tradition; Origen already reported church leaders tolerating remarriage “contrary to what was written”; Epiphanius positively defended the concession; and the Eastern practice of “economy” came to permit remarriage after divorce outright. A tradition this weighty is powerful evidence, but it is a reception, not a proof, and it did not speak with one voice.

Assessment

Contested. That the marriage bond is objectively indissoluble while both spouses live is a well-grounded and anciently-held reading — carried by Jesus’ own appeal to creation, by the three exceptionless witnesses (Mark, Luke, Paul), by the sacramentum of Ephesians 5 as Augustine develops it, and by a near-unanimous patristic reception fixed as dogma at Trent. But it does not hold without genuine dispute: Matthew’s twice-stated exception is a real qualification whose grammar the absolute reading cannot govern away, the move from “let no man put asunder” (a command) to “the bond cannot be dissolved” (an ontology) is a theological inference the Reformers rejected, and the consensus, though overwhelming, was never strictly unanimous. So the interpretation is strong by the lights of creation-theology, the weight of the parallels, and reception-history, and weaker by the lights of Matthean exegesis and the Protestant reading of the exception — a genuine deadlock with no clear winner. It is the affirmative pole of the same crux weighed, from the side of the text’s syntax, on the exception-permits-remarriage page (also contested), and reached again through a different proof-text on the Pauline privilege page: whether adultery or desertion dissolves the bond is the one question these three arguments circle. The affirmative depends on, but does not here re-decide, that porneia means a wife’s marital unfaithfulness (weighed under the exception clause); and it rests, at the definitional level, on the ontological “one flesh” model of marriage weighed against the covenant model on the covenant-versus-ontological-bond page.

Sources