Is Remarrying After Divorce A Sin?

Christian churches give different answers. The Catholic Church teaches that a new marriage after divorce is adultery while the first spouse lives, unless a church court finds that the first marriage was never valid. The Orthodox Church permits a second marriage with a penitential rite, and many Protestant churches allow remarriage, at least after adultery or desertion.

Every answer starts where Jesus started, with marriage as it was “from the beginning” (Matthew 19:8): male and female made one flesh, joined together by God. The churches part over what follows when that union breaks, as it does in families we all know. Even Paul, writing about a marriage that had already come apart, gave a word of mercy: “God has called you to peace” (1 Corinthians 7:15).

Pharisees asked Jesus whether it was lawful for a man to divorce his wife “for any cause” (Matthew 19:3). He answered from Genesis: God made them male and female, and the two become one flesh. “What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate” (Matthew 19:6). When they asked why Moses had allowed a certificate of divorce, he said, “Because of your hardness of heart Moses allowed you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it was not so” (Matthew 19:8).

On remarriage, Mark and Luke record his words without any exception. “Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her, and if she divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery” (Mark 10:11–12; compare Luke 16:18). Matthew records the same teaching twice with an exception. In the Sermon on the Mount, “everyone who divorces his wife, except on the ground of sexual immorality, makes her commit adultery, and whoever marries a divorced woman commits adultery” (Matthew 5:32). In chapter 19, “whoever divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality, and marries another, commits adultery” (Matthew 19:9). The churches’ different answers come largely from how they read that exception.

The Greek word in the exception is porneia, a broad term for sexual wrongdoing. Many Protestant interpreters take it to mean adultery or other sexual unfaithfulness by a spouse, which gives the wronged partner the right to divorce and to marry again. The Westminster Confession of 1646, a doctrinal standard of Presbyterian churches, puts it this way: “In the case of adultery after marriage, it is lawful for the innocent party to sue out a divorce: and, after the divorce, to marry another, as if the offending party were dead” (24.5).

A Catholic translation reads the word differently. The New American Bible Revised Edition, published on the website of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, renders it “unless the marriage is unlawful.” Its note explains the clause as referring to marriages within the degrees of kinship forbidden in Leviticus 18:6–18, which were regarded as incest, and concludes that “the clause constitutes no exception to the absolute prohibition of divorce when the marriage is lawful.” Catholic canon law allows a spouse whose partner has committed adultery to separate, but the marriage bond remains (canon 1152).

Paul passes on the Lord’s command to married believers: neither spouse is to leave the other, and a wife who does separate “should remain unmarried or else be reconciled to her husband” (1 Corinthians 7:10–11). He then addresses a case Jesus had not, a believer married to an unbeliever. The believer should not divorce a spouse who consents to stay, “But if the unbelieving partner separates, let it be so. In such cases the brother or sister is not enslaved. God has called you to peace” (1 Corinthians 7:15).

Many Protestants read “not enslaved” as freedom to marry again. The Westminster Confession names “such willful desertion as can no way be remedied by the church, or civil magistrate” as the only ground besides adultery that dissolves a marriage (24.6). The Catholic Church applies the verse narrowly, as the “Pauline privilege”: a marriage between two unbaptized people can be dissolved when one of them is baptized and the other departs (canon 1143).

Paul also writes that death ends a marriage: “A wife is bound to her husband as long as he lives. But if her husband dies, she is free to be married to whom she wishes, only in the Lord” (1 Corinthians 7:39; compare Romans 7:2–3). Christians who allow no remarriage while a former spouse is alive rely heavily on these verses.

Usually only after the first spouse has died or a church tribunal has declared the first marriage null. Canon law states that “A marriage that is ratum et consummatum can be dissolved by no human power and by no cause, except death” (canon 1141), meaning a valid marriage between baptized people that has been consummated. A civil divorce does not end that bond in the Church’s eyes. Other marriages can be dissolved only in the narrow cases the law provides: a marriage never consummated, or the Pauline privilege (canons 1142–1143). The Catechism says that a new union “cannot be recognized as valid, if the first marriage was,” and that a divorced person who remarries civilly is “in a situation of public and permanent adultery” (1650; 2384).

A Catholic whose first marriage has failed can ask a church tribunal to examine it. If the tribunal finds that the marriage was invalid from the start, for example because one party’s consent was not free (Catechism 1628), it declares the marriage null, “that the marriage never existed,” and “the contracting parties are free to marry” (Catechism 1629). This declaration of nullity is often called an annulment.

Catholics who have remarried civilly without a declaration of nullity remain members of the Church. The Catechism encourages them to attend Mass, pray and raise their children in the faith, but says they “cannot receive Eucharistic communion as long as this situation persists,” and that absolution in confession is open to those who repent and commit “to living in complete continence” (1650–1651). Pope Francis’s Amoris Laetitia (2016) says that such Catholics “are not excommunicated” (243) and that “The way of the Church is not to condemn anyone for ever” (296). It adds that a person in an objective situation of sin may be growing in grace “while receiving the Church’s help,” and a footnote says: “In certain cases, this can include the help of the sacraments” (305, note 351). Bishops of the Buenos Aires region read that note as opening, after careful discernment, “the possibility of access to the sacraments of Reconciliation and Eucharist” in limited cases, and in a letter of 5 September 2016 Pope Francis told them, “There are no other interpretations.”

The Orthodox Church also teaches that marriage is meant to be lifelong, but it permits remarriage as an exception. The Orthodox Church in America explains: “While the Church stands opposed to divorce, the Church, in its concern for the salvation of its people, does permit divorced individuals to marry a second and even a third time.” Such marriages are performed by “economy,” a pastoral exception to the rule, and the service “bears a penitential character.”

The Russian Orthodox Church sets out its practice in The Basis of the Social Concept (2000). It cites Matthew 19:9 and says that “The Lord pointed to adultery as the only permissible ground for divorce,” yet it also lists other grounds the Russian Church has recognized since a council of 1918, among them falling away from Orthodoxy, malicious abandonment, a threat to the life or health of a spouse, and, more recently, chronic alcoholism or drug addiction. A marriage must be dissolved by a church divorce before another is allowed. The document continues: “The Church does not at all approve of a second marriage. Nevertheless, according to the canon law, after a legitimate church divorce, a second marriage is allowed to the innocent spouse.” A spouse whose own fault ended the first marriage may remarry only after repentance and a penance, and a third marriage is allowed only in exceptional cases.

Protestant churches hold a wider range of positions than the other two traditions. Besides the Presbyterian standard, which allows remarriage after adultery or willful desertion, there is the Anglican practice. In 2002 the Church of England’s General Synod resolved “That there are exceptional circumstances in which a divorced person may be married in church during the lifetime of a former spouse,” left the decision to the minister of each church, and rescinded older resolutions that had urged clergy not to marry anyone with a former partner still living. Some of its clergy still decline to take such weddings.

Some evangelicals allow no remarriage at all while both former spouses live. John Piper, then pastor of Bethlehem Baptist Church in Minneapolis, wrote in a 1986 position paper that “the New Testament prohibits all remarriage except where a spouse has died,” beginning his case from Luke 16:18. Others allow more. David Instone-Brewer, a scholar of rabbinics and the New Testament at Tyndale House, Cambridge, argues that Jews of Jesus’ day recognized a second ground for divorce in Exodus 21:10–11, which protected a wife’s right to food, clothing and marital love, and that neglect, abandonment and abuse are still valid grounds. “While divorce should never happen,” he wrote in 2007, “God allows it (and subsequent remarriage) when your partner breaks the marriage vows.”

The traditions weigh divorce itself differently, and each makes room for the spouse who did not cause it. For Catholics it is “a grave offense against the natural law” (Catechism 2384), yet a civil divorce may be tolerated when it is “the only possible way of ensuring certain legal rights, the care of the children, or the protection of inheritance” (2383), and a spouse who is “the innocent victim of a divorce decreed by civil law” has “not contravened the moral law” (2386). The Russian Orthodox Church says that “Divorce is denounced by the Church as sin,” and for spouses whose marriage has failed it “is ready to re-admit them to the Sacraments after they make repentance.” Presbyterians, with the Westminster Confession, call divorce “lawful” for the innocent party after adultery (24.5).

Paul names reconciliation as the alternative to staying single (1 Corinthians 7:11). For Catholics a valid marriage survives a civil divorce, so a couple who reconcile are returning to the marriage they already have. The law of Moses set one limit: a man could not take back a wife he had divorced if she had since married another man, “for that is an abomination before the Lord” (Deuteronomy 24:4).

The churches answer through their own rites. Orthodox churches celebrate a second marriage with its own penitential service. Protestant churches that allow remarriage hold church weddings for it, the Church of England at the minister’s discretion. The Catholic Church cannot celebrate a new marriage while a valid first marriage stands. Since December 2023, however, the Vatican’s declaration Fiducia Supplicans has allowed priests to give a simple, spontaneous blessing (38) to “couples in irregular situations” (31), the term Amoris Laetitia uses when it turns to the divorced who have entered a new union (297–298). The blessing must not be a ritual that could be confused “with the blessing proper to the Sacrament of Marriage” (31).

Each of these churches holds marriage to what God meant from the beginning, and each has its own way of meeting the people whose marriages ended anyway: a tribunal, a penitential rite, a minister’s judgement, a simple blessing. Over all of them stands the word Paul gave to a believer left on their own: “God has called you to peace” (1 Corinthians 7:15).

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• Matthew 5:31–32: divorce and remarriage in Jesus’ words
• Divorce in Christianity: what are the biblical grounds?