(1Co 7:27 ESV) 27 Are you bound to a wife? Do not seek to be free. Are you free from a wife? Do not seek a wife.
The first question and answer is clear enough. Those who are married should not divorce. The second question and answer are less clear.
“Free from a wife” is literally “have you been loosed from a wife.” The verb is perfect passive. A few translations translate the words as written —
(1Co 7:27 NET) The one bound to a wife should not seek divorce. The one released from a wife should not seek marriage.
(1Co 7:27 NASB) Are you bound to a wife? Do not seek to be released. Are you released from a wife? Do not seek a wife.
(1Co 7:27 YLT) Hast thou been bound to a wife? seek not to be loosed; hast thou been loosed from a wife? seek not a wife.
(1Co 7:27 CEB) If you are married, don’t get a divorce. If you are divorced, don’t try to find a spouse.
(1Co 7:27 ASV) Art thou bound unto a wife? Seek not to be loosed. Art thou loosed from a wife? Seek not a wife.
The perfect tense refers to a circumstance that has changed. The Greek can be translated as “free from wife,” with no indication whether the man has been previously married or not, but this seems very unlikely in context. After all, Paul addressed the unmarried and widows in 7:8-9. And then he addressed “virgins” in 7:25-26. It seems unlikely that he would once again address the state of the never married here. Having discussed the married, the never married, widows, and the engaged, it seems much more likely that he’d address the one class he’d not yet discussed: the previously divorced.
The man who ‘has been loosed’ (which may mean divorced, that the spouse has died, or that he has never married) should not seek a wife. Both verbs are in the perfect tense and indicate settled states.
Leon Morris, 1 Corinthians: An Introduction and Commentary (Tyndale NTC 7; IVP/Accordance electronic ed. Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1985), 115.
“Released from a wife” (NASB; not simply “unmarried”— NIV) can mean “divorced” or “widowed,” and in the immediate passage must at least include the former (its meaning in the preceding line). Paul discourages both remarriages (v. 27) and first marriages of virgins for reasons given in the context, but he permits both.
Craig S. Keener, The IVP Bible Background Commentary: New Testament (Accordance electronic ed. Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1993), 468.
And even if the perfect tense doesn’t imply a previous change in state (from married to single), it certainly does not imply “never married.” The grammar cannot be stretched to that point.
(1Co 7:28 ESV) But if you do marry, you have not sinned, and if a betrothed woman [virgin] marries, she has not sinned. Yet those who marry will have worldly troubles, and I would spare you that.
Paul then declares that even those he mentions in verses 25-27 would be better off not to marry, marriage for them is not sin.
The clause “if a betrothed woman [virgin] marries, she has not sinned” clearly refers back to v. 25. The clause “if you do marry, you have not sinned” therefore must refer to “Are you free [have you been freed] from a wife?”
Therefore, Paul approves marriage for those who are free from a wife (whether by having never married or having been divorced). It’s already been made clear that Paul does not buy the whole “marriage is a triangle” logic, which supposes that someone not in fact married anymore is legally deemed married by God — a doctrine taken from the Council of Trent and not the Gospels.
The obvious challenge presented to this interpretation is —
(1Co 7:10-11 ESV) 10 To the married I give this charge (not I, but the Lord): the wife should not separate from her husband 11 (but if she does, she should remain unmarried or else be reconciled to her husband), and the husband should not divorce his wife.
Paul seems to plainly prohibit a second marriage here, but the logic of that conclusion is plainly inconsistent with Paul’s allowing a woman married to a pagan to remarry if he divorces her. Marriage is either a triangle or it’s not.
And it’s not. If we think of marriage as a type of contract, then the conclusion becomes obvious. If I promise to pay you $20 to cut my grass, and you agree to cut my grass for $20, we have a binding contract. If we’re both Christians, in a sense, God is a party to that contract because he’ll hold us both to it. Christians must keep their word.
But if we agree to cancel the contract, God doesn’t continue to hold us to it. And if you refuse to cut my grass, I’m not bound to pay you the $20 anyway.
God’s a party to the contract, but that doesn’t mean that one party has to honor the contract when the other party does not.
Just so, if a pagan breaks a marriage, it’s broken and the spouses are no longer married, and there’s nothing binding the other spouse to the marriage — because the marriage has ended.
And so the “Pauline exception” really is simply an application of common sense to marriage. And 1 Corinthians 7:27 follows the identical logic. It’s not sin to violate a marriage that no longer exists.
Therefore, we should read 1 Corinthians 7:10-11 this way: Jesus said, and Paul repeats, the married couples should not divorce. Period. It’s a sin to break a marriage. (Although a marriage is broken, not when the papers are filed, but when one spouse violates the marriage covenant in a severe way. The Greeks did not have to go to court to be divorced.)
Paul’s parenthetical, “she should remain unmarried or else be reconciled to her husband,” is consistent with what he teaches throughout the rest of the chapter: It’s better to remain single than to marry.
The verb tense is imperative, which can be a command but can also be an entreaty or request. “They should marry” in v. 9 is in the same voice, and there plainly is an entreaty, not a command. In v. 26, “seek not a wife” is in the same voice. This is the language Paul uses in this chapter for wise counsel not to marry due to the present distress.
This leaves us scratching our heads over Jesus’ words in the Gospels, but two observations should help:
1. Paul is a far more qualified interpreter of Jesus than we are. We should let Paul guide us rather than imposing our views on Paul.
2. In Matthew 19, Jesus was, I think, speaking of divorcing in order to marry someone else — and both the divorce and the remarriage are prohibited in that case.
(Mat 19:9 ESV) 9″ And I say to you: whoever divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality, and marries another, commits adultery.”
The adultery is not in having sex with a second wife but in violating the marriage covenant. And if the husband divorces A to marry B, he was obviously in violation of his marriage covenant long before the formal divorce. He had no business getting close enough to B to want to leave his wife for her. Hence, the second marriage is part of the breach of the marriage covenant.
(Mat 5:31-32 ESV) 31 “It was also said, ‘Whoever divorces his wife, let him give her a certificate of divorce.’ 32 But I say to you that everyone who divorces his wife, except on the ground of sexual immorality, makes her commit adultery, and whoever marries a divorced woman commits adultery.”
Again, in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus is not legislating new rules, nor is he creating triangular legal fictions. He is saying that divorce is a sin; not that it’s impossible. A divorce ends the marriage and there is no more marriage — even if the divorce is incredibly sinful.
So in what sense is the victim of the divorce guilty of adultery? Well, she’s forced to breach her covenant with her first husband. He’s made her breach the covenant due to his own breach.
As I wrote in But If You Do Marry … ,
However, if the wife remarries, she makes reconciliation impossible. Moreover, so does her new husband. Both have made it impossible for the couple to reconcile. In fact, once the second marriage occurs, reconciliation can never happen without violating Deuteronomy 24. Hence, the second marriage makes the first covenant impossible of performance. And covenant breaking is adultery.
This, I think, is at least the heart of Jesus’ point. Remarriage is not sin (Paul said so), but remarriage that prevents a possible reconciliation is. Of course, not all marriages have any hope of reconciliation, but many do. Therefore, it is very unwise, even wrong, to quickly remarry after a divorce. Marriages “on the rebound” are notoriously unlikely to work, and they often occur before any serious effort can be made to work through the problems that led to the first divorce.
(p. 46).
Now, this takes us far away from the traditional teaching of the Churches of Christ, but those teachings have proved absurd and worse than unworkable at times. I mean, I know of people who are married but who have no sexual relations because of a divorce predating their conversion. And so they’re forced to violate 1 Cor 7:1-9, requiring conjugal relations between the married, to avoid committing “adultery” against someone who is no longer a spouse. They sin against their spouses to avoid a theoretical sin against someone who is no longer a spouse — and likely no longer cares.
I know divorced people who delay marriage until the other former spouse remarries first, on the assumption that the sinner is the one to remarry first, not the one who actually broke the marriage.
We elevate a legalism — the imagined continuation of a marriage after a divorce — over reality. Rather than focusing on preserving marriages and teaching our members to honor the spouses as well as their marriages, we seek to impose good behavior by making remarriage damning — which really is closing the barn door after the horses have left the barn.
Agree or disagree with what I conclude, you have to admit that the traditional teaching makes no sense and has brought untold grief into the lives of our members.
On the other hand, I should not be read as approving divorce. The scriptures are clear that violating the marriage covenant is a grave sin. That’s not going to change. But the sinner is the one who breached the marriage covenant, not the one who files papers in the courthouse. In ancient Corinth, there were no papers to file. This is not about the legal system. It’s about honoring your spouse and your marriage — and those who violate that covenant are the ones who put away their spouses, even if the victim is the one who files the papers.
I explain this in much more detail in But If You Do Marry …
