Selections from Chapter 6: (Click here for full text)

 When Your Partner Walks Out

Most of Paul’s teaching on marriage and divorce is found in his first letter to the Corinthian church in about ad 55. Corinth was a major cosmopolitan city and was largely made up of Gentiles though there were also a lot of Jews in the city and in the young church. They were having problems applying Jesus’ teaching in a city which followed the Roman legal system. To complicate things further, Corinth was in the grip of a terrible famine which made any kind of family life difficult.

It is almost certain that Paul was married when he was younger, though we know that he was single when he wrote 1 Corinthians. Marriage was compulsory for a pious Jew, and Paul said that before his conversion, he was a very religious Pharisee (Act.23.6; Phil.3.5). Every Jewish male was expected to marry in order to fulfil God’s command to "multiply and fill the earth" (Gen.1.28) and it was unthinkable that a pious young man would remain single. Paul’s wife had probably died in childbirth (as happened all too often in the 1^st century) and we can conclude that he knew about marriage personally – its joys, responsibilities and sadnesses.

As well as being compulsory for Jews, marriage was also compulsory in Roman law, though it was rarely enforced. This law was enacted by the emperor Augustus who saw that most Roman young men avoided marriage and fatherhood so that they could enjoy an endless series of affairs. He was worried by the lack of legal sons born into Roman households, and the weakening of the family unit, so in 18 BC he introduced laws which made it compulsory to get married.

Paul contradicted both the Jewish and the Roman laws by teaching in 1 Corinthians 7 that marriage was optional. Corinth, being a Roman city, followed Roman law and many members of the its church were former Jews, so they also knew about Jewish law. Paul therefore had a tough job to convince them that if they were not already married, they should not get married – at least, not yet.

Many people think this teaching means that Paul was against marriage, but he was only telling the Corinthians to wait until "the present distress" (v. 26) was over. He did not need to tell them what kind of ‘distress’ this was, because their suffering was all too obvious to them. Historians guess that he must have been referring to the famine which was afflicting the region at that time. In the 1^st century, getting married meant having children, and it is not easy caring for babies and toddlers in a time of famine.

More in this chapter...

Paul and Jesus have the same message for two different cultures:

1) Believers should never cause a divorce – i.e. they should not break their marriage vows.

2) Believers should not use a groundless divorce – i.e. Jews should not use the new Hillelite "Any Cause" divorce, and no-one should use the Roman "divorce-by-separation".

Jesus added that believers should do all they can to save a marriage, which includes forgiving a partner who breaks vows and then repents. And Paul added that believers who have wrongly enacted a divorce-by-separation should attempt to be reconciled and not remarry because this would make the divorce irreversible.

Paul said further that if someone is divorced against their will, they may accept it. There is nothing they can do to reverse the divorce, and God has called them to peace.

But this leaves us with two questions:

– can a believer divorce a partner who breaks their vows unrepentantly?

– and can a believer remarry after a divorce?

These questions will be answered in following chapters, but first we have to ask a more fundamental question: Do marriages ever end in the sight of God?