A Feminist Christian Perspective on Divorce

Hannah Chen ^[1]

Introduction

Incited by Western feminism in the 1980s, Taiwan women activists began to devote themselves to rectifying laws that are discriminating to women whose rights are supposedly ensured by the Constitution. Some pioneers in family laws enhanced a long-term effort to introduce liberal divorce provisions into the civil law system in order to end the traumatic impacts of failing marriages on women. In such an atmosphere of women�s liberation, the booklet Women�s Complete Handbook on Running Away from Home - Divorce was published by Awakening Foundation, one of the leading women�s organizations in Taiwan. They hoped that in the near future women in unhappy marriages could eventually be freed from constraints installed by patriarchal divorce laws and live their lives with self-dignity and self-determination.

In Taiwan, divorce rate keeps rising annually. Comparing 3,858 in 1951 to 49,003 in 1999^[2], anxiety about the irreparable damage done to the institution of marriage has caused Taiwanese women�s movement a great deal of criticisms from the more conservative section of society. Even the church, which claims to uphold love, freedom, equality and justice, fails to put itself along the women's position. Elders and pastors either refuse to engage in divorce consulting process of Christian couples or simply ban divorce.

A similar reaction already took place decades ago in the West. In 1958, British theologian A. R. Winnett warned all Anglican churches around the world that opportunity for divorce inevitably plants the thought in the minds of married couples that �if marriage doesn�t turn out happily there is always a way of escape�^[3]. Consequently, he considered any liberalization of the divorce law as an attempt to weaken the will �to make marriage happy by the exercise of unselfishness, patience and forgiveness, and thus the marriage is impaired from the start�^[4]. In other words, no-fault divorce is nothing but a positive incentive to committing adultery. In addition, the American Christian psychiatrist, consultant and writer, John White, suggested in his series of lectures in the China Graduate School of Theology in Hong Kong, that the only way for the church to hold onto traditional family values is to educate the male to masculinity, the female femininity^[5].

No doubt, the church�s attitudes toward divorce worldwide are rooted in the patriarchal ideologies, which originated from the early forefathers in faith and which have been passed down through the Bible, traditional theology, biblical exegeses and liturgies. Thus, Christian feminists have the responsibility to uncover, reexamine and deconstruct this man-centered religious inheritance in accordance with women�s experiences so that we may reconstruct a more reasonable, more liberal, and more contextual moral theology of divorce without gender bias.

Does the Bible Really Say 'No Matter What Happens, Never Divorce'?

Divorce is not only a personal choice, but also a sign of de-organization of the institution of marriage. It is hard to discuss divorce without mentioning marriage as an issue. The laws for marriage and divorce in the biblical Jewish society could be traced back to the time of the Old Testament. In the Christian tradition, Jesus' saying in the synoptic gospels and Paul's teaching in the First Letter to the Corinthians have been quoted all the time.

Influenced by the Jewish and Greco-Roman cultures, the Christian church has approved the patriarchal family system and the legitimacy of male-dominated marriage based on sexual dimorphism. With minor diversity in methodology and pastoral considerations, there are three theories of divorce in church history, namely: separation, annulment, and limited divorce remarriage^[6].

The separation view, usually held by more conservative churches, insists that marriage is an indissoluble bond, so couples could neither divorce nor remarry. The only possible solution for failing marriages is to live separately. But separation could do no good to marriage than divorce. Besides, there is no biblical basis to support the permanent separation of marital unions.

With a Catholic background, the annulment view contends that marriage is an indissoluble covenant, matched by God. However, for some people in so-called legal marriages who are hurting because of violence, lie, or lack of valid consent by both parties, there may be a reason for annulment since it could hardly be assumed that God might be involved in such marriages. But like the separation view, there is no biblical basis for annulment. What is worse is that �hideous abuses have been heaped on the institution of marriage by the system of annulments�^[7]. Is it still worth to ban divorce, while people could easily get out of marriage by announcing that he/she had never given a Christian type of consent before?

The limited divorce remarriage view asserts that although the Bible doesn't permit divorce in principle, there can be some exceptions, such as unchastity. Another exception is granted by the rule called by the Church 'Paul privilege'. This applies to people who are �converted after marriage�; the so-called unbelieving spouse may, for the sake of harmony, propose to divorce. This view might seem more realistic than the other two, but still it is not good enough for wives whose husbands may not have committed adultery, or been converted after marriage, but who may have battered, abused, sexually harassed, or deserted them for quite a long time. How can these women be liberated before they get beaten to death, or eventually commit suicide to escape from such brutality?

These three theories all fail to deal with women's real experiences in marriage. Is Jesus' saying, 'what God has joined together, man must not put asunder', a universal law or not? Could the male-stream conventional interpretations really have any textual evidence in defense of their stands? Assuming that textual evidence is not impossible, is it workable to transplant the teaching on divorce from almost 2000 years ago to our modern times without even considering the cultural differences?

A Re-visionary Perspective

On account of contemporary scholarship, there are grounds to believe that Jesus' teaching could be more liberating than the conventional views. First, with the help of textual criticism we now know that Jesus' saying about divorce has been preserved in different forms. For example, the part forbidding remarriage in Mt.5.32 is absent from the manuscript D and three early Latin texts^[8]. This indicates that long before the manuscripts, controversy about the meaning of the teaching had already circulated among the early churches.

Second, the so-called 'exception clauses' in Mt.5.32 and 19.9 are not included in the text of Mark or Luke. In cases like this, source critics might suggest it is either because the evangelist used some sources which other authors didn't have access to, or because he and his church just added their opinion into it while developing their own pastoral strategy. Both of them lead to the same conclusion, that is, in the earliest period of the church, the teaching on divorce has been taken more as an ideal, which could be adjusted according to the different cultural or social contexts, rather than a universal law or a fixed ban.

Moreover, if we see carefully how the editors of the synoptic gospels interwove the teaching of Jesus with other materials from the perspective of editorial criticism, it is obvious that none of them intended it to be legalized. On the contrary, the teaching on divorce was intended to emphasize the righteousness from God in contrast with the righteousness from law. Since laws are not made about other teachings of Jesus, especially those on anger, lustful desire, an eye for an eye, etc., why are laws made on divorce? In comparison to Paul's words in 1 Corinthians, we can also say that even the apostle to the Gentiles did not obey it strictly; otherwise he should not have spoken of permitting believers to divorce their �unbelieving� spouses.

Complex Ideologies in Church History

The provision that marriage cannot be dissolved was not incorporated into the canon law until the 4th century when the church had power to make its own laws by enforcing penalties of excommunication and penance. According to the early church father Augustine, in his book On Adulterous Marriages, divorce cannot dissolve the bond of marriage. Hence, it could be deduced that remarriage after a valid divorce, such as on the ground of fornication, is adultery. Following Augustine, the church formulated a public �divine� policy by making marriage one of the seven sacraments.

Perhaps the church had its own good reasons to do so at that time and maybe the church did try to put it in a way that did not discriminate any of the sexes. However, a quick look at the Justinian Code of Laws in the 6th century, two hundred years later, will show how such a church policy turned out to be a total failure in terms of defending women's rights^[9]. In the Code, polygyny, not polyandry, was accepted. So it is reasonable to suspect that what the church did under the rule of the Roman Empire in the Middle Ages might be suitable for modern-day people in Taiwan.

Critique According to Women�s Experiences

If Jesus� teaching is not to be taken as law, how are we to reinterpret it according to today�s women's experiences? Doubtless to say, the Mosaic Law is a product of patriarchy � only men could divorce their wives by a certificate of dismissal and only men could define the reasons for divorce. If Jesus restored the Jewish law in answer to the question of the Pharisees, he had no choice but to sacrifice gender justice. Thus, he passed over the Mosaic Law and the story of the fall, which has often been used to support male superiority. Instead, he went directly back to the creation narrative in Genesis 2. Instead of saying yes or no, Jesus highlighted the 'one flesh' ideal of marriage, thereby revealing that the Law of Moses is to constrain and not to allow men to divorce arbitrarily. Suppose gender justice is an essential element in interpretation of the text, then obviously at this point Jesus was rebuking those Pharisees for taking the law into their own hands. In doing so, Jesus could be seen as protecting women from being unjustly assumed by the community as unfaithful; he also helped to ensure women's rights to remain single, in case they might be forced into another marriage. Jesus' equating divorce to adultery is a hyperbole aimed at the men's cruelty of putting off their wives, not to forbid those rejected and abused wives to find other happy matches.

However, much of male-stream theological studies are so hypocritical that they ignore or underestimate the suffering and oppression of many women in marriage. In some cases, domestic abuse, marital rape, desertion, or even belittlement can be more serious, more traumatic, and more devastating than adultery. If from a patriarchal point of view, divorce is allowable in considering what damage adultery is likely to do to a husband's feeling, then should we not grant women, in cases mentioned above, more right to run away from home according to a feminist perspective?

Paul Bohannan's theory of divorce states that divorce is not an event but an ongoing process. According to him, there are six stages of divorce, namely: emotional divorce, legal divorce, economic divorce, co-parental divorce, community divorce, and psychic divorce^[10]. If this is true, we will have to concede that many couples, including Christians, have divorced emotionally. Why does the church seldom condemn this phenomenon? Is it because it is seen to cause less damage to marriage than divorce does?

Someone may argue that happiness is not the aim of Christian marriage. Since the decision to get married is made by personal free will, so even if a marriage ends up miserably, the wife should still stick it out to face the responsibility. Is remaining in marriage the only way to be responsible for making a mistake in choosing her mate? Who has the right to condemn others to live in a 'marital hell' for life just because of wrong choices?

Is Marriage Really a Gift?

Indissolubility of marriage is not a given fact, but an ideal or a vision. It should be taken as part of a process of growth, rather than a deadly illusion. However, since many traditional male theologians are so used to doing theology only with their souls and not with their bodies, with words and not with the world, they tend to forsake the cultural context of gender. They often end up overlooking what women actually feel in marriage, and they eventually fail to correlate their theology with women's real experiences. Hence, the result is a theology that is not only by men, of men and for men, but also full of patriarchal ideologies.

Feminist theologians, on the contrary, do theologizing using materials from the world, from life experiences and they also do exegeses contextually. �They are involved in the present state of the world and thus adapt a hermeneutic approach to the text. They base their power of analysis on the people's own named experiences.�^[11] In addition, they analyze and critique traditional theology of sexism and challenge its theological premises or statements in accordance with the feminist consciousness, and then lift up the place of women in the story of faith.

Many Christian women may agree or disagree with male theologians that marriage is a gift from God so that no one should dissolve it. On the one hand, many Christian women may welcome gladly the picture drawn by Bernard Cooke:

�the more profoundly Christian a marriage relationship becomes, the more inseparable are the two persons as loving human beings, and the more does their relationship sacramentalize the absolute indissolubility of the divine-human relationship as it finds expression in the crucified and risen Christ.^[12]

On the other hand, many Christian women also acknowledge that the Christian ideal of marriage has never been put into practice at all. In fact, it is mostly the women, not men, who are used to being asked to sacrifice, to follow Jesus' example of unselfishness, patience and forgiveness. This is because even now the institutions of marriage and family are still constructed according to men's interests. The so-called 'human nature' and 'image of God' have been distorted by sexism as a support to sustain gender discrimination. So there is a need for feminist theologians to incorporate the critical analyses of patriarchal views of gender, marriage, and family, which are raised by other feminists, in contextual theology.

Feminist Challenges to Patriarchal View of Gender in the Bible

Sexual dimorphism has been sanctified by biblical exegetical tradition. It asserts that women serve mainly a supportive function in the lives of men. Many male biblical scholars make use of the narratives of creation and the fall in the book of Genesis to construct their theory of human nature or human destiny with gender prejudice. Consequently, woman's nature or destiny has become subordinate to man. She simply becomes someone's wife, to give birth to his children. Except for these traditional roles, women have no other way to identify or express themselves as independent persons.

From the view of patriarchy, the perfect woman�s image has its full expression in Proverbs 31:10-31. She 'brings him good, not harm, all the days of her life'. She 'watches over the affairs of her household and does not eat the bread of idleness'. She 'gets up while it is still dark' and 'her lamp does not go out at night', so that her 'respectable husband' may hang around the city gate idly and 'takes his seat among the elders of the land.' On the surface, this kind of image praises the female for her femininity. But more than this there is the lust for, and exploitation, dominance and oppression of women. There is the drive to regard women as tools to satisfy men's needs or desires. Liberal feminists have shown that women are not born to become mothers or wives, but are cultivated or trained to fit that mold since their childhood. Radical feminists have proposed the distinction between gender and sex to clarify what leads to oppression of women. They claim that it is not so much their sex or biological identity but the gender roles construed socially to accommodate women as 'the second sex' for the benefit of patriarchy.

Feminist Challenges to Patriarchal View of Marriage in the Bible

Based on sexual dimorphism, marriage becomes one form of social control of female sexuality. In the Old Testament, the word 'adultery' could only refer to intercourse with married woman. For women committing adultery, there is only one penalty, the severest one � capital punishment. According to the book of Deuteronomy, a non-engaged girl who is raped may have to be married to the one who raped her. If an engaged woman had been raped in town but did not call for help, the intercourse would be counted as adultery with her personal consent, and the penalty would be death.

To some degree the church has extended the taboo on chastity or virginity to males by asserting that marriage would be grounded on mutual consent to be faithful to each other. But this kind of revision is more often than not mere fantasy, since it overlooks how gender inequality in economics has influenced the institution of marriage. As social feminism has correctly pointed out, capitalism has impacted monogamy. In order to get rid of female competitors in the labor market, male workers have gained themselves so-called 'family wages' from capitalists. Since women scarcely have equal opportunities to be hired or get comparable wages for equal work, marriages are usually weighed in terms of wealth rather than love. Moreover, structural inequalities are built into marital relationships. The housewife would have to take over all the domestic labor on behalf of the husband, while enjoying the least of household resources � all in the name of love. But what kind of love is it?

Feminist Challenges to Patriarchal View of Family in the Bible

Family means kinship interlaced through marriage and a system of power relationship among the members. It seems that the Bible is all for a patriarchal family system, where woman's status depends on the function of her sexuality � i.e. whether her marriage could add to the welfare of her father's house, or whether she could give birth to many children for her husband's house. Even the experience of mothering has been institutionalized as a calling, a kind of 24 hours a day, 7 days a week labor. Moreover, according to traditional theology, reproduction should not be under the control of women. It is the natural consequence of sexual intercourse. It is also the will of God � i.e. the biblical command to 'be fruitful and increase in number'. Only through reproduction, with its accompanying pain, could women be saved.

But the truth is that not all women want to be mothers. Given that there are some who want to be, there may be those who might not be able to have babies by any means at any given time. Even if some could or would adjust their career plans to welcome 'the uninvited guests', they might not be able or willing to meet obligations of motherhood designed by patriarchy.

Since the oppression of many women in marriage is multi-faceted, their burden so huge, marriage is to these women far from being a gift of God, but an unbearable hardship in life. What good reasons do the church have to insist on prohibition of divorce more than the need for women's liberation? Does Christ love the institution (of marriage) more than the suffering person?

On 'No Fault Divorce' Debate

Christian women believe that feminists do not need to totally reject the values of marriage, while criticizing its dark sides. We do not give up our hopes for marriage to be improved with much more flexible and symmetrical gender roles for both parties. We dream that the time will come when there would be no more domination or persecution within marriage or family but, instead, there will be the 'one flesh' gift of love from God. Perhaps a time will come when married people could truly say what Ruth wonderfully said in the Bible � "where you go I will go; where you stay I will stay; your people will be my people and your God will be my God; where you die I will die, and there I will be buried". When that happens, marriage would have ceased to be the locus of male power but a sphere in which the kingdom of heaven resides.

The past colonial history of Taiwan actually gives witness to how marriage or family played a crucial role in the democratic movement. During the enforcement of martial law, the only resource left for civil rights fighters was the family or marriage. It was the families that helped political victims, like our vice president Lu Xiu-lain and ex-chairperson of DPP Lin Yi-xiong, who went through torture in jail and who kept struggling forward. Like Black Womanists and other Asian women theologians, we acknowledge the fact there could be no other places better than family or marriage for a person to discover ready backup and mutual love for life. However, there is still a long way to go before complete transformation of the system of patriarchal family or marriage can take place. Meanwhile, we, Christian feminists, need to find our own balanced way to carry out our theological task of 'deconstructing and reconstructing' traditional male-centered theology on the one hand and to seek for theology of gender equity on the other hand.

What follows is my personal attempt to solve the 'no fault divorce' debate.

The Family and Relatives Chapter of the Civil Law in Taiwan provides for the married couple to divorce on either of two ways. One way is to divorce according to the consensus arrived at by both parties. Another way is to file a civil suit against the party in fault. Despite these provisions however, many people who need divorce could scarcely succeed for several reasons. First, according to the law, the spouse asking for divorce has to present serious faults to prove beyond doubt that the marriage is unworkable � e.g. serious battering of wife, adultery, etc. Otherwise, the court would simply overrule the appeals. In some cases where the suits have been accepted, some judges would hesitate to pass the sentence of divorce, saying that there is still room for the couple to work on their marriage instead of severing marital relationship altogether.

Since in our society family or marriage is a major site of male dominance, this kind of retributive theory of divorce laws only punishes the already miserable women who are worn out in their 'catastrophic' marriages. To force women to sustain their failing marriages with no love but oppression is not only inhuman and extremely cruel, but is absolutely contradictory to the true faith of Christianity. We can say that divorce is a manifestation of sin of humanity. However, when Jesus spoke against it, he was criticizing that gender injustice had been legitimized in Jewish society so husbands might divorce their wives legally but immorally. He neither meant it to be a new law of divorce, nor did he condemn divorce in spite of the actual circumstances of the patriarchal society. He held unto the ideal of marriage, but also touched ground. He admitted, at least according to Matthew, that in certain situations, divorce might be a way to get people out of hate, to prevent something more horrible from happening. Only by theologizing this way could we really explain why he forbade people to stone a woman to death, even though she was supposedly caught while committing adultery. Jesus' way to deal with sin is somehow embodied in Paul's teaching. That is why Paul granted widows and divorced Corinthians to remarry if celibacy was not possible for them.

Rectifying divorce law into more conservative ones is not the right way to protect the ideal Christian family. Instead we need to encourage and empower women to fight for equity and self-fulfillment within marriages. When the gaps between couples are so huge that they could hardly be remedied, we should help them to divorce gracefully and mercifully.

With regard to the divorce law, rectification should head for 'no fault divorce' grounded on several facts:

1. Marriage could be broken in fact.

2. Sometimes people do make mistakes while getting into marriage.

3. Not every marital relationship, like conjugal love, could be enforced by law, so there is no need to forbid one to divorce the other.

4. Divorce has its bad impact on society. But it is nothing comparable to murder, rape, or burglary, so people need not be punished for broken marriages perpetually by depriving them of the right to remarry.

5. The divorce law should not be used as a tool to take revenge on someone or torture the other for betrayal or failure in marriage. On the contrary, the law should help keep the damage resulting from the breakup down to the least for the sake of the children.

6. So what the law should or could do is to order the one willing to divorce or in fault to compensate the other. Nothing more, nothing less.

Conclusion

Living in a society with high rates of divorce, should not the church address the people who have tried so hard to contemplate on the real meaning of marriage and why tragic things have happened to them? Should not our theology seek to respond to their needs and help them gain insights into their relationship with God as well as their spouses?

Before pointing out that divorce falls short of the glory of God, the church should also confess its own sins � its failure to live out the holy vision of marriage, its participation in the patriarchal oppression of women, and its ignorance of divorced couples' needs, to name some of them. The church should renew its theological methods, and start to do theology within the actual gender context of society. By theologizing this way we may hope that some day in the new millennium, the church will eventually be the helper and navigator to reconcile the male and the female, and to participate in the mission of rebuilding a well-developed society based on gender justice.

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