The Pauline privilege — does desertion free the believer to remarry?

Type: supporting argument (off-timeline) · Assessment: contested — when an unbelieving spouse departs, Paul says the believer “is not under bondage” (ou dedoulōtai, 1 Corinthians 7:15). Does this dissolve the marriage and free the believer to marry again (the “Pauline privilege” — Ambrosiaster, the Reformers, Roman canon law, and most Protestants), or merely release the believer from the obligation to preserve an unwanted marriage, with no right to remarry (the Greek fathers and much modern critical exegesis)? The verb underdetermines it, and the reception is split · a second ground beyond Matthew’s porneia, raising whether Jesus’ grounds were meant to be exhaustive

The data every reading must fit

Paul is answering a mixed marriage — a believer wed to a pagan. If the unbeliever is content to stay, the believer must not divorce (1 Corinthians 7:12–14); “but if the unbelieving depart, let him depart. A brother or a sister is not under bondage in such cases: but God hath called us to peace” (1 Corinthians 7:15). The whole weight of the dispute rests on three words — ou dedoulōtai, “is not enslaved” — the perfect passive of douloō (“to enslave”). Does “not enslaved” mean the marriage bond is gone, so the deserted believer may take a new spouse; or only that the believer is not bound to fight to keep a marriage the unbeliever has walked out of, free to let the separation stand but not to remarry?¹

Three further data bound the question. First, Paul had just addressed the believer–believer split by citing the Lord’s own charge: the separated wife must “remain unmarried (menetō agamos), or be reconciled” (1 Corinthians 7:10–11) — and pointedly does not repeat that formula in v. 15. Second, he introduces this case on his own authority (“to the rest speak I, not the Lord,” 7:12): desertion is a second ground beyond the one exception Matthew records, so the verse also bears on whether Jesus’ teaching was meant to be exhaustive. Third, when Paul later does mean “free to remarry,” he says so in as many words — the widow is “at liberty to be married to whom she will; only in the Lord” (1 Corinthians 7:39) — and he does not use that formula here. Any reading has to reckon with both the strong verb and the studied silence.

The two readings

(A) The bond is dissolved — the deserted believer may marry again. On this reading “not enslaved” is a real change of status: the unbeliever’s departure has broken the marriage, so the believer stands free as a widow would. It is the oldest Latin reading — Ambrosiaster (c. 375) held the abandoned union “no longer binding,” “not a sin if it is abandoned because of God,” the earliest clear statement of what later canon law would name the Pauline privilege. Luther read the “not under bondage” to “set the believing spouse free to marry again,” and Calvin made desertion a second dissolving ground alongside adultery — “the first and chief bond…not merely loosed, but even utterly broken through.” From the Reformers it passed into the Westminster Confession (1648), which allows divorce for “such wilful desertion as can no way be remedied” and, its expositors argue, remarriage of the innocent party; and Instone-Brewer folds abandonment into the Old-Testament grounds as “the ultimate neglect,” freeing the deserted believer to remarry.² Roman canon law crystallized the same reading into a formal instrument — the Pauline privilege of canon 1143, dissolving a marriage of two unbaptized persons “in favour of the faith” of the one who is baptized, the dissolution taking effect “by the very fact that a new marriage is contracted.”³

(B) Only the obligation to preserve the marriage is lifted — separation, not remarriage. On this reading “not enslaved” frees the believer from the duty to cling to a marriage the unbeliever is destroying — the believer need not compromise piety or wage endless strife to hold it together — but says nothing about a new marriage. This is how the Greek fathers, reading the verse in its own tongue, uniformly took it. Chrysostom glosses it as release under duress: if the pagan spouse would make the believer “take part in his ungodliness on account of thy marriage, or else part company…it is better to separate” — “a brother is not under bondage…in such cases.” Theophylact reads it the same way — “you are not enslaved to him…you are not compelled to follow him” into unbelief — and Theodoret takes it only to clear the believer of blame: “the believing partner is innocent and free from any accusation.”⁴ Much modern critical exegesis agrees that the verse simply does not reach remarriage. Gordon Fee judges that Paul is “essentially repeating his first sentence” — the believer is not bound to maintain the marriage when the pagan departs — and that reading the “Pauline privilege” of remarriage out of it goes beyond what Paul says; Robertson and Plummer’s classic critical commentary is blunter still: “we cannot safely argue with Luther that ou dedoulōtai implies that the Christian partner, when divorced by a heathen partner, may marry again…Paul has not said…that a Christian partner deserted by a heathen may be married to someone else.”⁵

Weighing the readings

Where reading (A) is strong. Three things pull toward dissolution. The verb is forceful: douloō is “to enslave,” and to say a person is “no longer enslaved” most naturally describes a status that has ended, not merely a duty relaxed — someone still bound in an intact marriage could hardly be called “not enslaved.” The context sharpens it: Paul had the exact phrase for the no-remarriage rule ready to hand — “remain unmarried” (7:11) — and had used it two verses earlier for the believer–believer case, so his silence here reads, on this view, as a deliberate difference: the deserted believer is not told to remain unmarried because the deserted believer’s marriage is over. And the peace clause supplies the pastoral logic — “God hath called us to peace” — that binding a believer to a marriage the unbeliever has abandoned serves no one. That Ambrosiaster reached this in the fourth century, and the Reformers reading the Greek fresh reached it in numbers, shows it is no mere apologetic convenience.⁶

Where reading (B) is strong. The counter-weights are equally real. The verb argument cuts both ways: in Koine douloō and deō (“bind,” the word Paul uses of the marriage bond in 7:39 and Romans 7:2) are near-synonyms, and “not enslaved” underdetermines what the believer is freed from — the bond itself, or only the crushing obligation to preserve it. The silence cuts the other way too: Paul did have a “free to marry” formula (“at liberty to be married to whom she will,” 7:39), used it of the widow, and conspicuously did not use it of the deserted believer — so his silence is at least as easily read as withholding remarriage as granting it. The chapter’s whole drift is to stay as one is (7:8, 7:26–27, 7:40), against which a fresh licence to remarry runs uphill. And the earliest, closest readers — the Greek fathers, native to Paul’s idiom — unanimously heard separation-to-preserve-piety, not remarriage.⁷

Why neither wins on the word. As with Matthew’s exception, the decisive term will not bear the decision alone. “Not enslaved” is compatible with both a dissolved bond and a lifted obligation, and the surrounding data point in opposite directions — the strong verb and the un-repeated “remain unmarried” toward (A); the near-synonymous vocabulary, the unused “free to marry” formula, the chapter’s stay-as-you-are drift, and the Greek patristic reception toward (B). So the verdict turns on which one lets govern the ambiguity — the internal logic of Paul’s wording, or the canon and the reception — exactly the split that leaves the parallel Matthean question contested. A further wrinkle is peculiar to this verse: because Paul adds desertion as a ground on his own authority (7:12), reading (A) makes Jesus’ grounds illustrative rather than exhaustive (Instone-Brewer’s frame), while reading (B) keeps Paul’s concession narrower than a full divorce-with-remarriage ground — a question the verse raises but cannot itself close.⁸

Adversarial assessment

What holds. This is a genuine, independently-advocated crux, not a manufactured one. Each reading rests on real features of the text — (A) on the forceful perfect dedoulōtai and the un-repeated “remain unmarried”; (B) on the near-synonymity of “enslave” and “bind,” the unused “free to marry” formula, and the chapter’s ascetic drift — and each is carried by a serious and living tradition: (A) by the Latin Ambrosiaster, the Reformers, the Protestant confessions, and Roman canon law; (B) by the Greek fathers and much modern critical exegesis.

What is overstated on each side. Three cautions. (1) It is an overreach, common in the Reformed and popular literature, to present the perfect tense as proving dissolution-and-remarriage: the grammar does not compel it, and Paul’s failure to reuse his own “at liberty to be married” formula (7:39) where it would have settled the matter is a standing difficulty, not a footnote. (2) The Roman “Pauline privilege” should not be read back into Paul as if it were the plain sense of the verse: it is a canonical construction — the Church’s power to dissolve a non-sacramental (two-unbaptized) marriage in favour of the faith — that rests on ecclesial authority as much as on exegesis, and applies to a narrower class of cases than the verse’s wording. (Note the irony that on this proof-text Rome permits remarriage where the privilege applies, the mirror image of its strictness on Matthew’s exception.) (3) The strict camp overstates equally if it claims Paul clearly bars remarriage here: he does not say that either. The honest floor, marked by Fee and by Robertson–Plummer, is that Paul does not explicitly address remarriage in v. 15 — agnosticism about the point, not a positive prohibition.

Assessment

Contested. Whether the desertion of 1 Corinthians 7:15 frees the deserted believer to remarry is genuinely undecided. The load-bearing term — “not enslaved” — is compatible with both a dissolved bond (so the believer may marry again) and a merely lifted obligation to preserve the marriage (so the believer may let the separation stand, but not remarry); the immediate context supplies data pulling both ways; and the reception splits along the same fault line the doctrine splits on everywhere else — the Greek fathers, Fee, and Robertson–Plummer reading separation-only, while Ambrosiaster, the Reformers, the Protestant confessions, and Roman canon law read dissolution-and-remarriage. It is the same underlying question as whether Matthew’s exception permits remarriage, reached by a second proof-text; the two are best read together, and both come out contested because in each the decisive word cannot settle the scope, so the verdict turns on whether one weights the passage’s internal logic or the canon and the church’s reception. The distinct sub-question the verse raises — whether, since Paul adds desertion on his own authority, Jesus’ grounds were illustrative rather than exhaustive — is a live one that this passage opens but does not close.

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