THE INDISSOLUBILITY OF MARRIAGE

For many centuries, marriage was regarded as indissoluble. In countries founded on the western legal tradition, the indissolubility of marriage can be traced back to Christian teaching on the nature of marriage itself. Jesus Christ quoted the very earliest chapters of the book of Genesis as evidence of the Creation ordinance that on marriage, a man leaves his father and mother and is joined to his wife, and “they will become one flesh.” The sexual union, consummated, according to traditional Christian sexual ethics, on the wedding night, was an expression of a more fundamental union – not the erotic yet transitory joining together of vaginal intercourse, but a union of lives until death parted them. “So they are no longer two, but one,” Jesus explained. “Therefore what God has joined together, let no-one separate.”

Christian teaching on divorce was thus a strict code, replacing the Jewish teaching based on the law of Moses, which allowed divorce. Jesus said that Moses permitted divorce because people's hearts were hard. By his time, a rabbinic teaching had emerged that effectively allowed a man to divorce his wife for any reason. Questioned about this teaching by the Pharisees, Jesus was unequivocal in calling his followers to a higher standard. He permitted divorce on the grounds of adultery, thus indicating the great importance of sexual fidelity to preserve the uniqueness of the union between a man and a woman.