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Modern Christians tend to misunderstand two of Jesus’ most radical teachings: his prohibition against divorce and remarriage, and his teaching about the Church. But what if this isn’t just a coincidence? After all, the biblical texts explaining marriage tend to do so by comparing it to Christ’s relationship with the Church, and vice versa. Does this explain why the Protestant Reformers broke with the earliest Christians (and the New Testament) on both of these doctrines? And also… does getting this wrong open the door to polygamy?
Transcript:
Welcome back to Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Heschmeyer. I want to explore a thesis that I have, which is that Jesus has these radical teachings about marriage and about the church that many modern Christians don’t understand, and that these are not unrelated issues; that Jesus’s marriage teaching explains his teaching about the church, and vice versa, and that when you get one wrong, you’re likely to end up getting the other one wrong as well.
Hear me out, love to hear what you think. Let’s start with a quick recap. Now, last week, I did an entire episode on Jesus’s radical marriage teaching, so I’m going to go very quickly through this part, but for those who maybe are just tuning in and don’t want to watch an entire hour to get caught up, Jesus presents a marriage teaching, where he goes back to Genesis and says the two shall be become one.
They’re no longer two, but one, and, “Therefore,” he says, in Mark 10 verse nine, “What therefore God has joined together, let not man put us under.” Now, that looks like a blanket prohibition against trying to dissolve a Christian marriage. Sure enough, in the next two verses, he says that whoever divorces his wife and marries another, commits adultery against her. Now, to say it’s adultery is to say the marriage isn’t actually dissolved. He’s not just saying they’re committing fornication or sexual sin outside of, no, it’s actually the sin of adultery. That’s pretty significant.
You find very clear passages that look like a really radical view that divorce and remarriage is strictly prohibited. Now, those who defend an exception to this tend to cite to Matthew 19:9, which gives what appears to be an exception clause for a Greek word called porneia. This is often mistranslated to be adultery, but as we saw last week, the word porneia is not the Greek word for adultery, which appears twice in Matthew 19:9, but not in the exception clause.
Then in fact, porneia was the Jewish term for invalid marriages of the kind that the Gentiles had that were not permissible under Jewish law. The better understanding of Matthew is that Jesus is showing that this prohibition against divorce and remarriage applies to only valid marriage, those marriages which God has joined together, not those marriages which Caesar has tried to join together. Caesar can say two men can marry, three people can marry, whatever, but God has a particular vision of marriage.
If God has joined it together, then divorce and remarriage are impossible, and the porneia clause is just making the point that if not, this doesn’t apply. Hopefully that’s clear. As I said last week, this is a truly radical teaching, as you get from the very next verse, which the disciples respond by saying, “Well, if this is the case with marriage, it’s better not to get married.” Then Jesus presents an equally radical teaching on celibacy, which we’re not even going to touch.
Today, I want to turn now and say, “Okay, to make sense of this radical teaching, you need to go to one place, and scripture points you to that one place over and over and over again. It’s the church and its covenant faithfulness.” This is, again, it’s a two-way road. If you want to understand the nature of Christ’s relationship to the church, you need to understand marriage. If you want to understand marriage, you need to understand Christ’s relationship to the church.
We see this all over the place, beginning in the Old Testament. Malachi 2 is one of the primary texts that I quoted from last week, and the verse I quoted was verse 16 of Malachi 2, where God says, “I hate divorce.” All right, very clear, very straightforward. What I didn’t tell you then, and I’m happy to tell you now, is that this condemnation of divorce arises from a discussion of Levitical covenant unfaithfulness, that the priests and Levites hadn’t been faithful to the mosaic covenant.
In Malachi chapter 2, God says, “And now, you priests, this command is for you.” He accuses him of being unfaithful to, as he says, “My covenant with Levi.” Beginning in verse 13, he says, “You cover the Lord’s altar with tears, with weeping and groaning,” because he no longer regards the offering or accepts it with favor at your hand. You ask, “Why does he not?” Because the Lord was witness to the covenant between you and the wife of your youth, to whom you have been faithless.
Though she is your companion and your wife by covenant, has not the one God made and sustained for us the spirit of life? What does he desire? Godly offspring. Take heed to yourself and let none be faithless to the wife of his youth. Now, what I hope is clear from this is in scolding the priests in this way, he’s not literally referring to them saying, “In your homes, apart from your priestly duties, you’re all cheating on your wives and you’re being unfaithful to them.”
No, the image of failing to reproduce, failing to beget children, and the image of being faithless to the covenant are talking about the Levitical covenant pretty explicitly. It is in this context that God says, “For I hate divorce, and covering is one garment of violence. Take heed to yourselves and do not be faithless.” That’s the first, just even before we get to Jesus in the New Testament. You’ve got God clearly saying in Israel, that what’s going on between God and the Levitical covenant is very much like a covenantal marriage.
Well, let’s jump forward to the New Testament. There’s several different places. Roman 7 is one place I think is really interesting, because in the context, Saint Paul is just talking about justification, but he says, “Do you not know, brethren, from seeking to those who know the law, that the law is binding on a person only during his life?” Thus, a married woman is bound by law to her husband as long as he lives, but if her husband dies, she’s discharged from the law concerning her husband.
Accordingly, she’ll be called an adulteress if she lives with another man while her husband is alive, but if her husband dies, she’s free from that law, and if she marries another man, she is not an adulteress. You just think like, why is he going on this excursus through marriage law? Well, he’s going to explain, verse 4, “Likewise, my brethren, you have died to the law through the body of Christ, so that you may belong to another, to him who’s been raised from the dead in order that we may bear fruit for God.”
Then in verse 6, he really clarifies, “We are discharged from the law, dead to that which held us captive.” In other words, there’s in this change with the covenantal system, Christ coming in and fulfilling the old law with his death, and creating a new law at the Last Supper, or new covenant, I should say, that this is very much like the ancient marital covenant that was described in Malachi’s 2 has been brought to an end. It’s been completed, in a way, because one of the parties in the marriage is now dead. That’s kind of the idea.
Now, oh, now you’re free to marry again. This creation of a new covenant, that’s all a covenantal kind of theme. That’s the imagery that St. Paul is using. That makes a lot more sense in Romans 7 if you understand Malachi 2. Well, likewise with Ephesians Chapter 5. In Ephesians 5, St. Paul famously gives descriptions about how we should interact with each other in marriage, “Be subject to one another out of reverence for Christ. Wife, be subject to your husbands as to the Lord.”
Notice how quickly in trying to explain family life and trying to explain marriage, Paul has to turn to the church. He says, “For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, and is himself a savior.” Then he says, again, “As the church is subject to Christ, so let wives also be subject in everything to their husbands.”
Then he says, “Husbands, love your wives as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word baptism, that he might present the church to himself in splendor, without spot, or wrinkle, or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish.” If you want to understand how to treat your husband, if you want to understand how to treat your wife, you need to understand the covenantal relationship between Christ and the church.
Ephesians 5 verse 28. “Even so,” Paul says, “Husbands should love their wives as their own body.” This is a critical line. “He who loves his wife loves himself.” You’ll notice in Ephesians 5 here, St. Paul is describing marriage by looking to the church, and looking to the church in two aspects. One, that the church is, in one way, the bride of Christ, and two, the church is, in one way, the body of Christ. Here, in Ephesians 5:28, he’s brought these two images together, that the two becoming one is so radical that Christ loving the church is really Christ loving himself.
We don’t talk about the church this way. That is a really radical vision of the church. It’s also a really radical vision of marriage, that when a man loves his wife, he’s loving himself. If he does ill to her, he’s doing ill to himself. That this loving your neighbor as yourself part, that’s good for your neighbor, but you’re invited into something much more deeper and more profound, where it’s not just loving the other as yourself, but realizing that in a real way, you are loving yourself and loving the other party of this covenantal union.
Ephesians 5:29, Paul goes on to say, “No man ever hates his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it as Christ does the church, because we are members of his body.” If you were to read Ephesians 5 and say, “Is Paul talking about marriage, or is Paul talking about the church?” You can’t answer yes. The answer is just yes, he’s talking about bot,h and he can’t get a sentence out about one without bringing up the other. That’s how intimately connected these two themes are in his theology.
That’s going to become really clear in the next verse, because just as Jesus, when he’s talking about marriage, when he shows that divorce is actually completely unacceptable, points us back to God’s original plan in Genesis, Genesis 2 verse 24, where it talks of the two becoming one flesh. Paul quotes that here in Ephesians 5:31, and you think he’s going to say, “This explains marriage,” but he actually says, “This explains the church,” and he puts it in these really sacramental terms.
He says, “This is a great mystery,” mysterion, the Greek word for sacrament. This is a great mystery, and I mean in reference to Christ in the church, but he can’t stop talking about marriage as well. He says, “However, let each one of you love his wife as himself, and let the wife see that she respects her husband.” More than any other passage, I would say Ephesians 5 shows that you can’t understand the church without understanding marriage, and you can’t understand marriage without understanding the church. Paul can’t separate the two because they’re that connected.
There’s plenty of other passages that point in the same direction that maybe we’ve overlooked. For instance, in John chapter 3, St. John the Baptist, he says, “You yourselves bear me witness that I said, I am not the Christ, but I’ve been sent before him.” How does he describe his relationship? He says, “He who has the bride is the bridegroom.” That’s Christ. “The friend of the bridegroom who stands and hears him rejoices greatly, the bridegroom’s voice.” That’s John the Baptist.
John’s whole understanding of who he is and who Christ is is expressed in this kind of marital imagery. Likewise, we can see in Revelation 19, in Revelation 19, towards the end of the Book of Revelation, there’s this heavenly chorus, “Hallelujah for the Lord, our God, the Almighty reigns. Let us rejoice and exult, and give him the glory for the marriage of the lamb has come, and his bride has made herself ready. It was granted her to be clothed with fine linen, bright and pure.”
Then John adds here, “For the fine linen is the righteous deeds of the saints.” The church is the bride in this heavenly mystery that John sees unfolding. This is a recurring biblical theme, and I’m actually just scratching the surface of all of the Old and New Testament references to first Israel and then the church being the bride.
Revelation 19, verse 9, though, has this incredible invitation, I want to make sure we get, where the angel says to John, write this, “Blessed are those who are invited to the marriage supper of the lamb.” This marriage supper of the lamb, that wedding feast of the lamb, that’s what all this is pointing to, this incredible encounter between the bridegroom and the bride. If you understand how Jewish marriages work, they were in two stages. I’ve done other videos on this, where you’d get legally married, but then the bridegroom would go out and prepare a house for the bride, and then he would come and take the bride into his house.
Jesus at the Last Supper presents his goal as doing this, and he goes before us to prepare a place for us. This is very much bridegroom kind of language, and it culminates here in Revelation 19 in the wedding feast of the lamb. That’s the second stage of the Jewish wedding. Obviously, there’s a lot there. There’s a lot of liturgical stuff, there’s a lot of Eucharistic themes to that. What I want to get right now is just there’s some kind of very deep connection in Christ’s relationship to the church and in the bridal/bridegroom relation.
If we don’t get that, we’re missing something important about both. I keep saying that, but what is that connection? Well, I want to present it this way, that if you want to understand the connection very simply, it is an indestructible, divinely created covenantal union, an indestructible, divinely created covenantal union. You can capture all of those features together by saying that the two become one. If the two become one, they become only one.
Jesus ahead doesn’t have multiple bodies. Christ the bridegroom doesn’t have multiple brides. There is, if biblical understanding of the church is correct, it follows that there’s one church, that Christ isn’t a polygamist, he doesn’t have a ton of different brides. We’ll actually get into that at the very end of this episode, but that’s what I want you to see, that if you get marriage right, you can see why there’s one church. If you get the church right, you can see why divorce and remarriage are impossible. They are these indestructible, divinely created covenantal unions.
Now, what does that mean for the church in particular? I want to flag a couple of passages. In Matthew 16 verse 18, now, this is a hot-button topic for a lot of reasons for Catholics and Protestants with the papacy, and I’m going to allide most of them, and glide right past it, and point you to just one feature. In Matthew 16 verse 18, Jesus says to St. Peter, “I tell you, you are Peter, rock, and on this rock, I will build my church.”
Then he says that the gates of Hades or hell won’t overcome the church, but notice it’s divinely created, just as God joins together a true marriage. Well, here, a true church is made by God, not by man. That’s really important. If Jesus had never said those words, then his followers would have to go start their own denominations. His followers would have to say, “Hey, I want to follow Jesus, but he didn’t leave us a church. We’ve got to make a man-made organization and follow him that way.”
A lot of people act as if Jesus didn’t build a church, but Jesus tells us the opposite, that he did build a church, so we don’t have to go make some man-made denomination. We don’t have to build our own church because Jesus already did that work for us. That’s the first thing, divinely instituted. Second, that there’s a real participation. Now, here, those Eucharistic themes are going to come out again. In first Corinthians 10 verse 16, Saint Paul says, “The cup of blessing which we bless, is it not a participation in the blood of Christ? The bread which we break, is it not a participation in the body of Christ?”
This idea of participating in the body and blood of Christ is a really great theme, and I’m not going to do it justice here, but I want to point to one thing. In verse 17, Paul says, “Because there is one bread,” or the word can also be translated, because there’s one loaf, “We who are many are one body, for we all partake of the one bread.” The Eucharist is what causes us, in a real way, to become one with Christ. Just as in marriage, the act of the marriage act, the two become one flesh. Here, in the life of the church, this encounter with the body of Christ and the Eucharist makes the two become one flesh.
That is an interesting way, these acts of physical union, if you will, there’s a parallel there that’s not a coincidence. It’s the most intimate expression of union from a human perspective. Look, you’re a human being, you have body and soul. When you want to express union, we often find ways of doing that at a bodily level. That can be anything from a handshake, to a hug, becoming blood brothers, where you cut your hand, and press your blood against theirs to show this union even in the blood, to the embrace of a husband and wife, and here, in this fullness in the Eucharist with Christ.
That’s the idea that two become one flesh. How does it happen? Well, what’s happening is St. Paul tells us, “In a Eucharistic way.” What does it mean to become one flesh with Christ? Well, Paul tells us that as well in Ephesians chapter 1, he tells us in verse 22, that, “God has put all things under Christ’s feet, and it’s made him the head over all things for the church,” which is his body, “The fullness of Him who fills all in all.” In other words, Paul is letting you know, when he says that the church is the body of Christ, he means that the church is the fullness of Christ, that you don’t have the full Christ if you have Jesus and not the church.
It’s like knowing somebody and not knowing their wife. You know them pretty incompletely, that to really understand who they are, you have to see the other half of them, because the two have actually become one flesh. Well here, Paul’s saying, “Yeah, the two actually are one.” You can see this in some other ways as well. For instance, in John 14 verse 6, Jesus famously says, “I’m the way, the truth, and the life.” What does the church say about herself in the Acts of the Apostles?
Well, she refers to herself as the way. We see that in places like Acts 24 verse 15. Even the description the church has for herself in the New Testament shows that she understands herself to simply be a continuation of Jesus on earth, that this is his body continuing to be incarnate in a mysterious way on earth, that yes, bodily, Jesus has gone to heaven, he ascended into heaven, and yet he hasn’t abandoned us. Why has he not abandoned us? There’s another sense in which his body is still on earth, because his bride is still on earth.
So radically, our bridegroom and bride to be identified one with another, that where you see the church, you see Jesus. That’s why without blasphemy, the church can refer to herself as the way. Again, remember, Paul’s words, “He who loves his wife loves himself,” and he applies this to Christ and the church, that when Christ loves the church, he’s really loving himself. Now, that’s big for something like the Protestant Reformation. Why? Well, because opposing the church is opposing Christ.
You don’t get to say, “I love Jesus, but I hate the church.” There’s not room for that in Christianity. Acts 5, verse 38 and 39, Gamaliel, who we looked at a few weeks ago, he talks about this, even though he’s not even a Christian. He’s a Jewish leader, he’s a Pharisee, and he says about the apostolic movement, that, “If this undertaking is of God, you’ll not be able to overthrow them. You might even be found opposing God.” Well, those words certainly appear to be prophetic, because a few chapters later, excuse me, in Acts chapter 9, a young man by the name of Saul of Tarsus is breathing threats and murder against the disciples of the Lord.
Now, catch that. He’s not going to try to go capture and kill Jesus. Jesus has lived, died, risen again, gone to heaven. That’s not Saul’s mission. He’s trying to persecute Christians. He’s trying to persecute the church. He goes to the high priest and asks for letters, so that if he finds any belonging to the way, men or women, he might bring them from Damascus to Jerusalem. As he’s on the way to Damascus, he’s knocked to the ground and he hears a voice saying to him, and the voice doesn’t say, “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute my church?”
It doesn’t say, “Why do you persecute my followers?” It simply says, “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?” That is a baffling thing to hear from heaven, because how could you be persecuting someone in heaven? They’re in heaven. Saul’s confused and he says, “Who are you, Lord?” The answer comes back, “I am Jesus whom you are persecuting,” that to persecute the church is to persecute Jesus, to oppose the church is to oppose Jesus. If the church had just said those things about herself, you could look at that and say, “That’s blasphemous,” but this is actually what scripture says, because this is what Jesus says.
Hopefully you can see the marriage teaching and Christianity is really radical. The teaching on the church in Christianity is also really radical. The two make sense in light of each other. The two become one flesh. You might ask, “What happened? How did we lose sight, so many of us, of these two radical teachings?” That is a more difficult question to answer adequately than I can do in one video. I want to propose a somewhat simplified answer. First, the Reformers redefine the church.
They keep on paper the teaching about the church, but they just changed the meaning of the word church. When you talk about the church in the biblical context, Jesus says things like, “You’re the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hid, nor do men light up a lamp and put it under a bushel, but on a stand, and it gives light to all in the house. Let your light so shine before men that they may see your good works, and give glory to your father who is in heaven.” There’s two features to notice.
Number one, the church is visible. It’s on a hill where you can see it. It’s a light that you can’t put under a bushel basket. It cannot be hidden. Number two, it’s organized, it’s structured, and we see this all over the place. People go to the church for things. When there’s a problem, you take it to the church. People clearly know where and what the church is during the times of the Bible. What happens? Well, I’m going to focus just on the reinterpretation of the words I just quoted you from Matthew 5. There’s much more that could be said, but I think this is a big one.
In Matthew 5, Jesus tells us this about the church, and then shortly after that, he talks about the impossibility of divorce and remarriage. Both of these are in the Sermon on the Mount, I suggest not coincidentally. How do we get this redefinition of what the city on a hill is? Well, fortunately, because the phrase city on a hill has this really important role to play in American politics, from the Puritans onto like Ronald Reagan, where it’s applied to describe America, there’s a number of people who aren’t theologians who’ve actually traced this history, which is kind of fun seeing people from an outside perspective just exploring this for other reasons.
One of those is Richard M. Gamble in his book, In Search of the City on a Hill: the Making and Unmaking of an American Myth. He traces, well, how did interpretations of this passage end up taking Jesus’s words on the Sermon on the Mount, and they end up being used to describe the US of A, which wasn’t around whether you know it or not, in Jesus’s Day? Gamble says, “The early church fathers had understood the city’s visibility as expressing this same meaning as Jesus’ point in the following verse about the lamp’s visibility on the stand, and the height of the lamp that’s illuminating the whole house.”
When these theologians, again, the early Christians, turned to the picture of the city itself, they interpreted it in a variety of ways, but always within a fairly narrow range, and always in reference to the church. They might draw out different themes from the passage, but they always understood this to be Jesus’s teaching about the church. That’s not just early Christianity. Gamble points out that continues to be the case down through Aquinas, at least, in the 13th century, that all of these writers agree on the meaning.
“It was Jesus’s metaphor for his church as his own body, for his ongoing teaching ministry, and for the conspicuous doctrine in the life of his disciples, and the teachers of the word who followed after them.” Okay, so that’s the pre-Reformation view of things. What happens with the Reformation? What happens in Catholic Protestant debate, and dialogue, and conversation, that makes this get redefined? Well, here, I want to turn to Abram C. Van Engen, in his book City on a Hill: A History of American Exceptionalism.
You’ll see, again, people who want to know the US story have to do a lot of work unpacking this city on a hill thing. Van Engen says, “For Catholics,” the verse, Matthew 5:14, “Define the true church as a permanent, visible, universal institution.” Right? We just saw how it does that, right? Jesus’s true followers were set on a hill to be seen by all. Since Protestants first appeared in the 1500s, since they’d been effectively non-existent, invisible, unknown, or unseen for over a millennium, how could they argue that they were descended from the life and teachings of Christ?
If you’re a Protestant, you have to say one of three things. Number one, “Oh, yeah, Protestantism’s always been around.” Now, that’s historically untenable, and someone’s going to tell you, “Okay, well, show me the evidence.” You can go to position two, which is Protestantism’s always been around, but it was hiding for a thousand years. We were in the mountains and people destroyed all of our records, and so you didn’t know about us. Well, then you weren’t really a city on a hill. You were under a bushel basket for a millennium, or number three, you just bite the bullet and say, “Yeah, all of these distinctive theological ideas, all of the core doctrines that divide us from Catholics, these were things that for at least a thousand years, nobody believed.”
Okay. Well, you don’t sound like a city on a hill there, either. However you interpret your own pre-Reformation history if you’re a Protestant, it doesn’t seem to be that you are a city on a hill that was clearly visible and clearly teaching the gospel. That just does not appear to have been the case. Van Engelen says, “Moreover,” Catholics added, “Jesus made the reason for his declaration abundantly clear.” The church had to be public and visible. It had to be the city on a hill of the Roman Catholic Church, so that all Christians would know where to turn for guidance.
Well, why that? In every age, Christians were admonished to obey the teachings of the church. Hebrews 13:17 tells us to obey our leaders. It’s talking about our church leaders as those who will have to give account. If I’m supposed to be obeying some spiritual leader God has put in authority over my life, I need to know who that leader is. It doesn’t sound like God’s telling me to go choose my own guru, go choose my own pastor who agrees with what I already think.
No, he’s telling me to obey, which he would only be telling me if I might not want to do that, but I can’t obey if I can’t find the church. One of the reasons the church is visible is because otherwise, Christianity is impossible. You just can’t obey Jesus’s commands if there is no church that you can find to obey. In every age, Christians were admonished to obey the teachings of the church. The Catholics wondered how anyone could have done so for the past millennium and more, they’d not actually known which church was true or where it could be found.
You might say, “Okay, that seems like a sound argument. How did all the Protestants at the time respond?” Van Engen says, “Well, first, Protestants responded by simply ignoring the verse altogether. They just didn’t mess with it. They didn’t have a good response,” but eventually, they realized they couldn’t just leave the verse alone. They didn’t want to just cede a verse of scripture to the other side. To unpack and reinterpret it, they began by arguing that Christ never promised perpetual visibility to anyone.
That becomes a really critical point in the story. Now, if you’re interested in how that goes from there to each local community being a city on a hill, to then the Puritans taking that to describe the New England experiment, to then the colonists taking that to describe the 13 Colonies, to then the US of A, that’s the rest of the story there, and there’s a bunch of books on that, as you can probably imagine. I want to actually focus on this part of the story: that the reformers don’t have a good argument, but they realize that the key difference between them and the Catholics is that they’ve redefined church.
John Calvin is actually pretty open about this. If you’re not familiar, he’s one of the earliest reformers. You’ve got Martin Luther, and then you have the Reformed Protestants, and John Calvin is kind of the head of that. It’s a little loose, but you’re kind of the head of that. At the beginning of Institutes of rhe Christian Religion, he has a preparatory address to King Francis. He tells him what the major issues are. He says, “The hinges on which the controversy turns are these, first, in their contending that the form of the church is always visible and apparent.”
That is, Catholics claim form of the church is always visible and apparent. We already saw. Of course it is. Secondly, and they’re placing this form in the sea of the church of Rome and its hierarchy. Now, Calvin is right. These are two separate issues. Someone could believe that the church is visible and still reject that it’s Roman. The Eastern Orthodox for example, they’re going to say, “Yep, that’s right. There is a visible church, but it’s us, not Rome.” That’s a coherent position.
That second thing is where Catholic Orthodox, and Coptic, and whoever else, that’s where that debate is going to be. The Catholic Protestant debate, and for that matter, the Orthodox Protestant debate, the Coptic Protestant debate, isn’t on that. It’s not, “Where do we find the visible church?” It’s, “Well, did Christ really find a visible church in the first place? Is the church always visible and apparent?” Calvin says no. He says, “We, on the contrary, maintain both the church may exist without any apparent form, and moreover, that the form is not ascertained by that external splendor which they foolishly admire.”
Again, he’s taking cheap potshots. “Oh, you just like how pretty Rome is,” but the main point there is the Protestant claim, says Calvin, is that the church can exist without any apparent form. It’s just like this, not like a body which has a form, like a puff of smoke, like a spirit, which doesn’t. We ascertain the form, not by anything apparent, but rather by the pure preaching of the word of God and the due administration of the sacraments. The problem with that redefinition of the church, where the church is wherever the word of God is preached purely, and the sacraments are ministered properly is, it’s completely subjective.
Your idea of sound preaching and mind might be 180 degrees of post. Your idea of good sacramental discipline in mind might be 180 degrees of post. Calvin acknowledges that Catholics make an outcry whenever the church cannot be pointed to with the finger. You’ve redefined church where no one can say where it is or isn’t, and it looks pretty subjective and pretty amorphous. I have to obey the church on penalty of disobeying Christ and fighting him, unless I’m convinced the church is wrong because it’s no longer preaching the word of God properly, or administering the sacraments correctly?
Do you see how question-begging that is? It basically says you have to agree unless the other side’s wrong, and the whole point of obedience is it only matters when you have reason to think you might be right and the people in charge are wrong. If that’s not the issue, then obedience is easy. If your pope, bishop, priest, pastor, whatever, elder, you name it, just says things that you think are brilliant and you agree with all of it, there’s no need to call you to obedience. You’re going to do it.
Obedience, where the rubber hits the road, is where you actually disagree, but the prudence of something, the wisdom of something, the interpretation, all of that stuff. Calvin, by redefining church in this way, has made the church this completely amorphous thing that it’s basically impossible to be in schism anymore, because who’s to say who is and isn’t in schism? Everyone’s going to say their interpretation is the right one, and it’s everybody else who’s preaching the word wrongly. That’s Calvin.
Martin Luther says very similar things. He has a slightly different ecclesiology. There’s some subtle differences that Protestants can highlight between what Calvin’s vision of the church is and Luther’s, but he also believes in this kind of redefinition of the church, and treating it as a much more invisible reality. Now, Luther’s is a little more dynamic, and both Luther and Calvin believe something different than those who say there’s only an invisible church. Both Luther and Calvin have a role for the visible church, but as you can see, it’s possible in Calvin for the church not to have any apparent form.
Well, likewise, in Luther he says, “Therefore, whoever does not want to err should remember clearly that Christianity is a spiritual assembly of souls in one faith.” It’s not like the bodily gathering of human beings, it’s this spiritual collection of souls, and that no one is regarded as a Christian because of his body. Do you see how dis-incarnated this is? The whole reason early Christians would tell you that the church is the body of Christ is because it needs to be bodily present on earth. This isn’t like gnosticism where you’re going to find some hidden teaching.
Luther has redefined it so your body is just not important. It’s all about your soul in this invisible way. It’s a spiritual assembly of souls, not a bodily assembly. “Therefore,” Luther says, “He should know that the natural, real, true and essential Christendom exists in the spirit and not in any external thing, no matter what it may be called.” Now, Luther will go on to say there’s two types of churches: the visible church and the invisible church. Subsequent Protestants will debate what, if any, relationship there is.
Is the invisible church a subset of the visible church? Are they like a Venn diagram, where there’s an overlap, where some people are in one and not the other? It turns out that they’ve just invented this thing called the invisible church. Now, I say invented. They’ve gotten this from John Wycliffe and John Huss from the 1400s, but they’re defending this very radical redefinition of the church. That’s the first kind of redefinition we have to deal with that.
Yeah, they’ll say, “Yeah, we have to follow the church, but it’s not the incarnate visible body of Christ. It’s a spiritual assembly of souls somewhere.” That’s a lot of S’s. The second redefinition, of course, is marriage. They’re going to also water down Jesus’s teaching on divorce and remarriage. It makes sense. If you’re going to attack one covenantal union of Christ, why not attack them all? That’s an uncharitable way of putting it, but you’ll see what I mean as I go.
I want to actually turn to a couple of Protestant authors, William Heth and Gordon Wenham. Now, they together wrote a book called Jesus and Divorce: The Problem With The Evangelical Consensus, but William Heth, in a separate book, called Divorce and Remarriage: Four Christian Views, he’s one of those four views, talks about the work of a French Jesuit, Henri Crouzel, from 1971. He calls it, “The most comprehensive study of the earliest Christian writers’ understanding of the New Testament teaching on divorce and remarriage.”
Now, I don’t have Crouzel’s book in English, I couldn’t find it anywhere, but I have Heth’s summary of it, which is that the first five centuries, all Greek and Latin writers except for one, Ambrosiaster is that one, or Pseudo-Ambrose, who is an anonymous author who for a long time, they thought it was St. Ambrose of Milan, and isn’t, and who may be a Pelagian heretic, although there’s debates about that. Ambrosiaster either way, not like a prominent early church father.
Everybody other than Ambrosiaster in the East, and in the West, and the Greek, and in the Latin church agree that remarriage following divorce for any reason is adulterous. Nobody held to this idea that there was an adultery exception that let you get remarried. Even those who believed that adultery was grounds for separation still held that the spouses were bound to the marriage until the death of one of them. When a marriage partner was guilty of unchastity, which was usually understood to mean adultery, the other was expected to separate, but did not have the right to remarry.
Now, notice, that’s missing the Jewish context of what porneia means, which is understandable, because a lot of these people are not coming from a Jewish background, and scholarship on Judaism isn’t really a big thing, but even then, they’re reading this except for porneia clause in a way that’s harmonious with the other parts. Modern Protestants who say that you can get divorced and remarried if there’s adultery, or sometimes any other kind of reason, have to oppose Matthew to Mark, because Jesus in Mark clearly says, “Divorce and remarriage at all is adultery.”
They just kind of push that teaching to one side and say, “Oh, no, we like this version better,” basically. Well, the early Christians aren’t doing that. They’re not picking and choosing, they’re reading Matthew in a way they can harmonize with Mark. If they view it as allowing divorce but not remarriage, well then, you don’t have the divorce and remarriage problem, because no one’s committing adultery. They’re just separating or legally divorcing because of adultery. Hopefully that’s clear.
There was an understanding that if the other partner was adulterous, you could separate and maybe even get a civil divorce, and that is still what the Catholic Church says. That’s not different, and that doesn’t create the adultery problem that happens with attempting remarriage, because the person in that position is still, as St. Paul says in First Corinthians, they can either go back to the person they were with, or they can remain effectively single, but they can’t remarry. We see a couple examples of the early Christians that William Heth is talking about and that Henri Crouzel is talking about.
For instance, in the mid-100s in First Apology, St. Justin Martyr, says that, “All who by human law are twice-married are the eyes of our master sinners, and those who look upon a woman to lust after her.” That’s pretty clear, right? That’s pretty direct. Athenagoras says, in his Plea for Christians, “For we bestow our attention not on the state of words, but on the exhibition and teaching of actions, that a person should either remain as he was born, or be content with one marriage, for a second marriage is only a specious adultery.”
Again, this bold kind of language, you don’t hear from many Christian pulpits today. Well, where is he getting this from? Well, he’s getting it from scripture. He quotes Jesus, that, “Whoever puts away his wife and marries another commits adultery, not permitting a man to send her away whose virginity is brought to an end, nor to marry again.” Okay, so those are the early Christians. Let’s turn back to William Heth, now this time with Gordon Wenham, in his Jesus and Divorce book. They’re going to pin a lot of the redefinition of marriage problems on Erasmus of Rotterdam.
Now, Erasmus was a contemporary of Martin Luther, a friend, sometimes foe of Luther’s. He was sometimes called a moderate reformer. He died a Catholic, but he’s a humanist who was kind of liberal in his day in some of his beliefs. He pushed for some things. Some of them, I think, people would agree with, some of them were wrong. One of the things he pushed for that was wrong was a re-understanding of church teaching on marriage.
He does this in 15:19, in a work called Annotations, in which he’s looking at First Corinthians 7. We’re not going to go deep on that except to say, as Wenham and Heth do, that he makes two arguments. Number one, it should be permissible to dissolve certain marriages, not fortuitously, but for very serious reasons by the ecclesiastical authorities or by recognized judges, and number two, to give the innocent party the freedom to marry again.
He seems to think these are exceptional cases where the church or maybe a civil authority could grant a divorce that then permits you to remarry, but that anything you try to change church teaching, just in like in extremis, it always ends up seemingly just blowing the doors open to anything. There’s always this kind of slippery slope. Once you say, “Yeah, I agree with Jesus 99% of the time,” it’s not long before the exception swallows the rule.
Looking at Martin Luther, he is actually really clear that marriage has to be dissolved by death. He even says in his commentary in the Sermon on the Mount, “Death alone dissolves marriage.” Nevertheless, he says that, “An adulterer is already divorced, not by man, but by God himself, because under the old law, adultery incurred the death penalty.”
His argument is, “Well, legally under the Mosaic law, you’d be dead and therefore, you’re cut loose from your spouse even from this life.” I think most of us would recognize that’s a pretty weak argument. By that standard, seemingly any sin you committed that would’ve incurred the penalty of death, which is a lot of sins in the Old Covenant, would also dissolve a marriage. Oh, you’re spiritually dead. Anytime you come into a mortal sin, your marriage is over.
That’s Luther’s argument, and he goes on to say, “Because now God here divorces, the other party is fully released, so he or she is not bound to keep the spouse that has proved unfaithful, however much he or she may desire it.” It becomes your prerogative. You can remarry, or you can marry that person again, you can consider yourself free, because they’ve committed this sin. Notice, as we pointed out last week, this creates a special two-tiered system, where if you’re the victim of sexual sin, you’re free to divorce and remarry, but Luther doesn’t want to say, “And if you commit sexual sin, you’re free to divorce and remarry.”
This creates a ridiculous position, where you say, “Well, this covenant was dissolved because of adultery.” Well, if you follow that correctly, then you can end any marriage just by cheating on your spouse. Then you say, “Well, you’re sorry about having committed adultery, but now you’re free to get married again.” The alternative, what Luther has described here, is that the other party’s fully released. Why would you not be fully released? You can’t stay married to a person who, according to Luther, God’s dissolved your marriage, and maybe they’ve gone off and married somebody else.
It doesn’t make any sense. That’s Luther’s position. You can see he’s introducing these kind of loopholes, and they’re already much bigger than Erasmus’s loopholes. John Calvin, he’s slightly after Luther, so we’re putting them in kind of the time order. He points out that actually, the adultery exception doesn’t make a lot of sense. He sort of throws this out, because he says, “Okay, well, if the adulteress deserved to be punished with death under the Mosaic law, what purpose does it serve to talk about divorces?”
Why would there be an exception for adultery if adultery was punished by the death penalty? Your spouse is dead. You don’t have to worry about can you legally divorce him or not under the Mosaic law. What is going on here? Even he seems to realize there’s something wrong with this interpretation, but he doesn’t really resolve that fact. Rather, he just argues that even when it sounds like Jesus is completely condemning divorce and remarriage, he doesn’t mean it.
He says, “Though Christ condemns as an adulterer, the man who shall marry a wife that has been divorced, this is undoubtedly restricted to unlawful and frivolous divorces.” Even though Christ doesn’t say it’s only unlawful and frivolous divorces, even though it completely undermines the entire passage to read it that way, he just reads that kind of exception clause in there. Now, contrast that with Jesus’s words in Mark 10, “Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her, and if she divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery.”
This is a radical teaching, and it’s intended to be a radical teaching, and yet he’s reading in implied exceptions that are not in any way hinted at in the text. In fact, Calvin makes the argument that the Jews were so basically promiscuous with divorce and remarriage, that Mark just doesn’t give us those exceptions, so there’s no wiggle room. He says, “Mark intended to show that our Lord condemned the corruption, which was, at that time, universal, that after voluntary divorces, they entered on both sides into new marriages,” and therefore, he makes no mention of adultery.
Now, want to make sure you get what he’s saying here. He’s saying Jesus had taught there was an adultery exception. Mark knew this. Mark didn’t want you to abuse that privilege that Jesus had given, and so Mark covers up the adultery exception. He just doesn’t mention it because he doesn’t want you to take that ball and run with it. That is a very strange interpretation of the Gospel of Mark. There is no evidence of that whatsoever. In fact, everybody besides Matthew just has a very clear no exception.
Unless they’re all engaged in a similar kind of cover-up of Jesus’s teaching, it’s very strange to read them that way. It seems much clearer to say that Matthew’s so-called exception for porneia isn’t really an exception whatsoever. It’s just an acknowledgement that this teaching doesn’t apply to invalid marriages that were never valid in the eyes of God, that God didn’t join together. Okay. Let’s return again to Heth and Wenham’s Jesus and Divorce, because they’re going to call all of this, which is really the standard Protestant position, although you will find exceptions.
I don’t want to discount that. You will find exceptions, but this is a pretty standard Protestant position, excuse me. They’re going to call this the Erasmian position in honor of Erasmus, but that’s what they’re talking about. They say, “In many Protestant churches, Erasmian exegesis of these texts has held sway for so long that some will no doubt feel this as proof that there must be something in it,” but that doesn’t follow.
The fact that a lot of Protestants for a long time have believed Erasmus, Luther, Calvin, and the rest on this doesn’t mean they actually have a strong biblical case, because they don’t. On the Erasmian view, Wenham and Heth point out, “Jesus is made to agree that the Shammaite Jews against the more liberal Hillelites by permitting remarriage after divorce in certain instances.” Now, you might’ve just said, “What did you just say? What are you talking about?” Let’s do a quick rabbinical excursus with a little bit of an aside.
This is really important background to understanding the biblical text, and understanding what Jesus is talking about in Mark 10 and in Matthew 19. In Deuteronomy 24, under the Mosaic law, divorce was permitted. A man could divorce his wife if she finds no favor in his eyes, because he’s found some indecency in her. Ervat Dãbãr is the Hebrews, I’m sure I’m butchering, but that some indecency. The question is, what does it mean to say you can get divorced if you find some indecency in your wife?
Well, Luke Greenberg in Jewish Divorce Law, explains that there were two rabbinical schools in the first century BC. This is a century before Christ. One view is that of Shammai. It’s a more strict construction interpretation, and that views Ervat Dãbãr as meaning literally and exclusively adultery. If your wife commits adultery, you can get divorced and remarried there. That’s the stricter view.
Hillel has a more liberal view, that an indecency is just anything that displeases you about her, so you can get divorced… Some rabbis even said you’d get divorced if you didn’t like your wife’s cooking. It was just that level of, “Yeah, you can’t get divorced except for any reason,” which what? The only time you’re going to want to get divorced if there’s something that displeases you about it. Hillel’s view is just divorce on demand, divorce and remarriage on demand. Shammai’s view is only in the case of adultery.
Now, Protestants will say, “Shammai has it right.” Jesus said both had it wrong. They come to him to settle this question of how to interpret the Mosaic law, and Jesus responds in Matthew 9:8, “For your hardness of heart, Moses allowed you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning, it was not so.” Explicitly, Jesus isn’t saying, “Let’s take a liberal view of Moses, or let’s take a conservative view of Moses,” he’s telling you, “In the order of creation, you are called to more than the Mosaic exception for divorce.”
No exceptions is where he goes. The interpretation many Protestants have totally annihilates this, where what Jesus really meant to say is, “I agree with Shammai and not Hillel,” which wouldn’t be a shocking teaching, which wouldn’t have raised eyebrows as we saw the Apostles eyebrows raised, where they’re saying, “It’d be better not to get married.” No, this would be an absolutely ordinary conventional position which was widely held in Jesus’s day. Jesus is clearly not giving a widely held position of his day.
He’s taking a radical position, that the Mosaic law exception is over, because the order of creation calls us to more. Okay? Going back to Heth and Wenham, that’s just the beginning of the problem. As I explained, in order to prove that the gospel writers, the evangelists, and Paul followed Jesus in this respect, they have to reinterpret all the passages and the Gospels that we’ve already seen in First Corinthians touching on Jesus’s teaching about divorce.
To show the New Testament like Shammai allowed some dissolution divorces where immorality was involved. You have to reinterpret all of these texts, which don’t seem to have an exception, as if there is an exception, and they say, “We’ve endeavored to show, this interpretation is quite foreign,” the thought of Mark, Luke, and Paul. When you read Mark, Luke, and Paul without trying to invent an exception clause, you’ll see there is none. They give no hint that anyone may remarry after divorce. It simply is not there.
“Ultimately,” they say, “These exegetical gymnastics finally meet their Waterloo,” it’s a weird mixed metaphor. I don’t know what kind of gymnastics ends in Waterloo. Napoleonic gymnastics, I guess, but these gymnastics finally meet their Waterloo in the teaching of the early church fathers, which cannot be reinterpreted to permit remarriage after divorce. You just can’t say the early Christians held that view, because they clearly did not. Then you have to say, “Well, maybe the early Christians got it wrong,” and then the question there, is how did so many of them get it wrong, then?
Wenham and Heth point out, “If you’re going to take that view, you have to believe that some early church father like Hermas, or some other unknown early father, persuaded the rest of the church to take this drastic step.” Yeah, Jesus gave us an exception clause, but let’s ignore that. Let’s take a harder standard than Jesus’s own standard. Everybody just went along with it, and they say, “Well, frankly, it seems unlikely that such a revolution in social attitudes could have been foisted on the entire church, on the authority of a minor figure.”
It’s more credible to describe it to someone like Jesus or Paul, right? If Jesus or Paul taught it, it makes sense, the whole church would believe it, but if some random person who didn’t understand the church’s teaching on marriage taught it, why did no one say, “Hey, there’s this adultery exception we all know about,” and so they conclude, “The early church view, the no exception for divorce view, makes Jesus the great revolutionary who broke with the Jewish consensus about marriage and divorce.”
The Erasmian view merely makes him a disciple of Shammai, that Jesus isn’t even presenting a new teaching, even when he presents it as if he’s teaching a new teaching. He’s just regurgitating what prior Jewish rabbis had taught a century earlier. That seems like an obviously false teaching. Hopefully you can see there. What’s happened is Erasmus, Luther, and Calvin have reinterpreted scripture, have read into it exception clauses that don’t exist, have totally distorted and changed church teaching on marriage, simultaneous with Luther and Calvin, totally reinterpreting and changing biblical teaching on the church.
I am just suggesting that these two things are not unrelated moves, that it seems to be a common flaw behind both of them. If you understand, the church really is the bride of Christ, and if you understand that divorce is hated by God, then you can’t justify divorce and remarriage, and you can’t justify schism. If you’re going to justify schism, you have to do a lot of work to reinterpret all those texts to put in loopholes that weren’t there before.
Finally, a little postscript, what does all this mean about polygamy? It actually turns out that if you get divorce and remarriage wrong, and you get the church wrong, you’re likely to get polygamy wrong as well. This was prompted by a viewer’s question from an African context on last week’s video, asking me to address polygamy. First, in the context of what I was saying about polygamy, there, I was talking about the impossibility of marrying your stepmother because she’s one flesh with your father.
That’s not talking about your father having two wives simultaneously. That’s like, you’ve got a dad and mom, mom dies, dad remarries, dad dies. Even though your stepmom’s unmarried, she’s free to marry somebody else. She can’t marry you, you can’t marry her. She’s off limits because she had become one flesh with your father. Under Leviticus 18, that was considered porneia. That was considered basically incest, even though you could imagine that being permitted.
Now, in First Corinthians, St. Paul talks about a case where in Corinth, there seemed to be something like that that was acceptable in the eyes of the Corinthian Christians, and he’s disgusted. He calls it porneia and tells him not to allow this kind of sexual immorality. We don’t know more of the details of that, so I don’t want to go deeper on that, but I want to use this as a basis to say, “Get the radical teaching on marriage and the radical teaching on the church right, and you’ll see why we don’t allow polygamy.”
St. Thomas Aquinas talks about this in the Summa. He talks about how marriage has three purposes. I ignore the first two of those and just focus on the third one, that between believers, there’s what he calls the signification of Christ in the church, and thus the sacrament is said to be a marriage good, that one of the goods of marriage is that it is a sacramental embodiment of Christ’s relationship with his church. Hopefully that’s clear.
He’s going to say that polygamy is contrary to that, because as Christ is one, so also is the church one. Christ has one body. You can’t imagine one head with two bodies. That’s a monster. That’s not Jesus. Likewise, you can’t have one bridegroom with two brides. That tells us something simultaneously about there being one true church, and about polygamy being off the table. It turns out when you reject the first of those, reject the one true church, you also open the door to polygamy. Martin Luther shows us this.
In 15:26, the Landgrave of Hesse Philipp wants to know if he can have a second wife. Luther says, “I cannot advise it, but strongly advise against it, especially to Christians, unless it might a case of high necessity, like if your wife has leprosy or is similarly afflicted.” Notice, he starts to open the door a little bit to allow in some polygamy. That’s just explicitly what he’s doing. As we saw before with Erasmus, once you open that door a little bit and say, “Well, in extreme cases,” all bets are off.
Well, now, you can’t close that back up again. That door is just going to get wider and wider. Five years later, Henry VIII wants to get his marriage annulled because of porneia rules, actually. I’m not going to get into all of the messiness. Robert Barnes, writing on behalf of the King, reaches out to Luther to try to get his support. This is ironic, since Henry VIII had written in defense of the Seven Sacraments earlier. Well, actually, probably St. Thomas Moore wrote it, but it was published under Henry VIII’s name denouncing Luther.
Now that he wants a divorce, he’s going to Luther. Martin Luther replies, “Before I would approve such a divorce, I would rather allow the king to take another queen, according to the examples of the ancient patriarchs and kings who had two wives or two queens at the same time.” Notice, in trying to bring us back under the Mosaic law with its exceptions to divorce and remarriage, that you can do it in the case maybe of adultery, maybe of any fault, Luther has also brought us back where it’s less clear that we need to be monogamous.
Now, those are just two throwaway lines. I want to suggest those three things are all connected: getting the church right, and getting marriage right, and then seeing how that means you can’t have polygamy. I’m presenting all this largely as a thesis, because I’ve not seen anyone explicitly say the reformers, in rejecting the one, it kind of feeds their rejection of the other.
Given how important the two are to understanding each other in texts like Ephesians 5, I’m advancing that as an argument. I’m curious as to what you think about it. I look forward to your thoughts and your comments below. God bless you.