Why do churches disagree about marriage?

Mark has it without qualification: "what therefore God has joined together, let no man separate", and then "whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her", with the same said of a woman.

Matthew has the same saying with four words added: "whoever divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality, and marries another, commits adultery."

Paul, writing earlier than either, adds a third case and flags exactly what he is doing: this ruling is his, "not the Lord", and it is that if an unbelieving spouse leaves, "the brother or the sister is not under bondage in such cases".

The Catholic catechism of 1992 states that "a marriage concluded and consummated between baptized persons can never be dissolved", a bond "henceforth irrevocable". What that church can do, after a tribunal has examined the case, is declare "that the marriage never existed".

The Holy and Great Council of the Orthodox Church, held in 2016, whose decisions delegations of ten churches signed, Moscow’s not among them, treats a state marriage as outside the sacrament: "a civil marriage between a man and a woman registered in accordance with the law lacks sacramental character since it is a simple legalized cohabitation recognized by the State." On remarriage it lists as "absolute impediments to entering into marriage" a marriage "not completely dissolved or annulled" and a third marriage, under a canonical tradition that "categorically condemns bigamy and a fourth marriage". Where it relaxes a rule, as it may for marriage to a non-Orthodox Christian, it calls that ecclesiastical oikonomia, exercised "with the salvation of man as the goal" and "in a spirit of pastoral discernment".

The Westminster Confession of 1647, which officers of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church still vow to receive, permits both divorce and remarriage, and does it by naming the causes and stopping. It lets the innocent party in a case of adultery sue out a divorce and “after the divorce, to marry another, as if the offending party were dead”, then closes the list: “nothing but adultery, or such willful desertion as can no way be remedied by the church, or civil magistrate, is cause sufficient of dissolving the bond of marriage.”

Romans has "their women changed the natural function into that which is against nature. Likewise also the men, leaving the natural function of the woman, burned in their lust toward one another."

1 Corinthians has a list of those who will not inherit the kingdom, printed in the translation quoted throughout this site as "nor male prostitutes, nor homosexuals", with no footnote. The Greek behind those two English words is malakoi and arsenokoitai, and what they denoted is the centre of the argument rather than a detail of it.

A translation that prints a contested word without a note has made a decision and not shown its working, which is the same thing that happens at Junia and at the household codes.

The 2016 Orthodox council: "the Church does not allow for her members to contract same-sex unions or any other form of cohabitation apart from marriage." The Catholic catechism holds that homosexual acts "are intrinsically disordered" and "under no circumstances can they be approved", in the same passage that says homosexual persons "must be accepted with respect, compassion, and sensitivity" and that "every sign of unjust discrimination in their regard should be avoided". A declaration of December 2023 allows same-sex couples, though not their unions, to be blessed, "without officially validating their status or changing in any way the Church’s perennial teaching on marriage".

In 2015 the General Convention of the Episcopal Church amended the canon titled "Of the Solemnization of Holy Matrimony" to read "Of the Celebration and Blessing of Marriage", striking the definition of matrimony as "a physical and spiritual union of a man and a woman" and the declaration that the parties hold marriage to be "a lifelong union of husband and wife", and rewriting the rest in terms of "the parties" and "the couple". It took effect on the First Sunday of Advent that year.

The word is porneia, and what it covers in a sentence like this one is an open question. The study cited here argues for one reading of it: intercourse during betrothal or marriage with someone other than the husband. Whole systems of church law rest on which reading is taken.

This is the clearest case on the page of an argument that turns on the meaning of a single word, which makes it the useful one to understand first.

One of the two words is rare enough to be argued about on its own. It appears twice in the New Testament and nowhere earlier, and it is read either as a compound Paul made from the words for male and for bed, or as a Jewish coinage already taken from the Greek of Leviticus. The other is the ordinary word for soft, used elsewhere in the New Testament for fine clothing and here for something else.

What divides the readings is what follows from that. One takes the word as coined from the Greek of Leviticus 20:13 and as condemning every man who takes the active part in sex with another man.

The other takes the exploitative setting to be part of what is being condemned, so that a committed relationship between equals is not what the texts describe. John Boswell argued that case at length in 1980; David Wright’s rebuttal that asks in its title whether the word means prostitutes at all came in 1984, and the argument has not closed since.

The shortage of evidence about the words is real rather than convenient.

Mark gives no exception. The grounds the Westminster Confession allows, quoted above, answer to the exception in Matthew and the case Paul marks as his own.

One side takes that as proof the tradition has always read this material with judgment rather than literally, and can again. The other takes it as the example of a concession that went further than it was meant to. The same history supports both, which is why it keeps coming up in arguments about this.

The two words are hard in opposite ways, and it is worth not running them together. Arsenokoitai is rare: the lexicon gives it under another spelling, glosses it "sodomite", and cites only an epigram in the Greek Anthology and this verse, and scholars report no earlier use. Malakoi is the opposite of rare. It is an ordinary adjective meaning soft, and Perseus’s own corpus alone returns it in nearly two hundred works, Homer, Herodotus, Thucydides, Plato, Xenophon, Aristophanes and Sophocles among them, with the New Testament as one entry.

So one word has to be reconstructed from almost nothing, and the other has to be narrowed from a very wide ordinary sense to whatever Paul meant by it in a list, though the lexicon already files this verse under a narrower sense it equates with pathetikos, passive. Neither difficulty is the other. That is a statement about the evidence, not a way of avoiding the question, and it is why this is filed as unknown rather than as settled by anyone.

The churches that have not changed understand themselves as holding a given form of marriage that is not theirs to alter, and say so in those terms as well as in prohibitions: for the Orthodox council marriage is "the oldest institution of divine law", and the Catholic catechism says the Church "does not have the power to contravene" the bond it describes.

The Episcopal Church, which has changed, understands itself as reading the same scripture by the same apostolic process the church has always followed, and reaching a different result: the report its Standing Commission on Liturgy and Music put to the 2015 convention sets the question beside older arguments over "divorce and remarriage" and "the institution of slavery".

A reader who wants to understand the argument rather than win it has to be able to state both of those without sneering. That is harder than it sounds.