Three Churches, Three Verdicts: Can You Remarry After a Divorce?
The Rail and the Bread
She comes forward for communion with her hands cupped, the way she was taught as a girl from her grandmother, and somewhere between the rail and the bread an unwelcome, yet familiar, thought arrives, “Does this count for me anymore?” Her first husband is alive. He lives forty minutes south in Fort Mill with someone new. She has been married to her second husband for eleven years, it’s not a perfect marriage, but by most measures it is a good marriage, gentler and slower than the first. Yet, the question waits for her at the rail like it has a reserved seat each Sunday.
If her first marriage was real, and the church keeps telling her marriage is forever, then what is the thing she goes home to every night?
She has wanted to ask the pastor about this, but hasn’t found the courage yet to do it. Divorce carries a raw shame; a mix of regret, loss, and brokenness. And unlike the internal battles of the soul, this is visible to all, a scarlet D she carries wherever she goes. And as a faithful Christian there is the question that is always lingering; the one she can’t avoid.
Is my remarriage an offense to God?
Let me be upfront, I have been married to my beautiful wife for 15 years, far from perfect, but she is perfect for me. My story here is not of my own divorce, but one of coming from a broken home, and then being graced with a step-dad, who became my dad. I have sat across the table as a pastor with so many humble Christians who wrestle with this question. If divorce has not lived on any street in the neighborhood of your life, it is easy to dismiss the question as having a simple answer. The Christian church however has not spoken with one voice on the topic of divorce and remarriage. The reason is that Scripture itself hands us a knot that theologians have pulled at for two thousand years without agreeing on how exactly it comes loose. I am not claiming this article will give the definitive answer on divorce and remarriage, rather, it will provide a way to wrestle honestly and humbly with the text.
The verse that may not say what you think
Almost everyone who worries about this question lands first on a line from the prophet Malachi, “I hate divorce, says the Lord.”1 It gets printed on Free Will Baptist wedding programs, quoted in pre-martial counseling sessions, and sometimes used as a moralistic Whac-A-Mole. God hates divorce. End of conversation, let’s go get fried chicken.
There is a problem though, the Hebrew in that verse is a bit knotty. The older renderings of the verse made God the speaker who hates the act. A number of recent translations however, read the same consonants differently. The 2016 revision of the English Standard Version (no one's idea of a liberal text2) turns the line toward the man who hates and divorces his wife, the one who covers his garment with violence (following the Hebrew, which the ESV's main text softens to "does not love his wife but divorces her"). On that reading the verse is not God announcing a moral policy related to marriage. It is God taking the side of a discarded woman against the husband who threw her away. In this view, the thing God hates is the betrayal of the vulnerable one, which is close to the opposite of how the verse usually gets deployed against a divorced person in a pew. I am not here telling you which translation is right. I am telling you that the single most quoted proof text in this entire conversation rests on a disputed line, and how you read the dispute changes who the verse is for. Keep that in your pocket. We are going to come back to it in a bit.
🔒What comes next is for paid subscribers. The argument turns on a verse in Malachi that may not say what your English Bible says it does, and on a single Greek word scholars still argue about. That word is part of why three churches can look at the same marriage and hand down three different rulings. I walk through how Catholics, Orthodox, and Protestants each got to their answer. Then I set the history down and talk to the person who has walked through divorce.
