REACT: Dr. Wayne Grudem on Divorce and Remarriage

On the Room for Nuance podcast ( @RoomforNuance ), Sean DeMars interviewed scholar Dr. Wayne Grudem in May 2026 ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VB1T2VD8TCo ).  During this interesting and wide ranging interview, Dr. Grudem discussed his change of mind on divorce and remarriage.  I respond to his comments in this episode. While I disagree with Dr. Grudem on this subject, I am grateful for his contribution to evangelical scholarship.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome back to the Divorce Your Remarriage Podcast. I'm Chris Iverson, and today we're going to be looking at some video of Dr. Wayne Grudom. He's been a professor for a long time, teaching on the Bible, and he has a systematic theology he's known for. He's worked with DA Carson and others. So he recently was on a podcast called Room for Nuance. And in that podcast, they discussed divorce and remarriage. And I'm going to react to Dr. Wayne Grudom's comments.

SPEAKER_02 0:29

What what do you have coming down the pipeline as far as writing goes?

SPEAKER_01 0:33

Okay, well, since I moved in here to this retirement community as well. Um I was able to complete a revision of my commentary on 1 Peter.

SPEAKER_02 0:46

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 0:47

And a revision of my Christian ethics book.

SPEAKER_02 0:49

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 0:50

Um, especially because I wanted his new view of divorce to be available. Okay. Um there's more than two legitimate grounds in 1 Corinthians 7 15, I think.

SPEAKER_02 1:02

There's more than two? Uh-huh. What are they? Abandonment.

SPEAKER_01 1:06

And adultery. Those are traditionally.

SPEAKER_02 1:09

And then abuse. Would you put that under forced abandonment?

SPEAKER_00 1:14

Okay, so let's go through the exceptions that they're talking about. So Jesus has a teaching in the New Testament where he calls divorce and remarriage adultery. He calls it adultery seven times in the New Testament. In two of those situations, in Matthew 5.32 and Matthew 19.9, he has an exception clause. The exception clause says except for fornication. And the question is, what does this exception clause mean? What does he mean by the word fornication there? And what does it allow you to do in the case where the exception applies? So the early church view was that the exception referred to adultery. So, for example, if a man and a woman were married and she cheated on him, she was unfaithful, that her infidelity permitted him to divorce, but not to remarry. That's how they read it. Now you do run into a problem, I would say, when you get to Matthew 19, 9, because it seems like whatever the exception permits you to divorce, it also permits you to remarry. That would be the plain reading of the text. But the early church didn't view it that way. They thought you could only divorce, but you could not remarry. And they were native speakers to Koine Greek, and we are not. So that's an argument used for that uh perspective. That's a perspective shared by for, for example, uh Andrew Das is a person who holds that perspective. Okay, now the early church would say though, if somebody does enter into a remarriage that Jesus would call adultery, that that's a uh ongoing state of adultery. And so like the early church had many councils where they would get together and they would say, you know, if somebody is in this uh remarriage situation, they're denied Eucharist, you know, communion for life, or they would be excommunicated for life. Whereas other kinds of sins or whatever, you'd be penal, you have a you have a penance or you have some kind of penalty for a year or five years or whatever. This was not that. This was for life, indicating that they understood that a remarriage is a continual state of adultery against the first spouse. And that's what Mark chapter 10, verse 11 says. If a man divorces and he remarries, he commits adultery against her, that is, against his first spouse. So it's very simple. The idea is if somebody divorces, that divorce does not end the marriage. People divorce because they think, oh, this is going to end the marriage and give me then permission, moral permission, to go ahead and marry somebody else. But by Jesus calling the remarriage adultery, what he's saying is the divorce doesn't do what you think it does. The divorce does not end your marriage. That when two people are married, they're married for life. That's not just a hope or an aspiration or a wedding card or just things you say at a wedding. It's a fact. People are joined, they are married for life. That's the essential teaching there from Jesus. But then you have these two exceptions, right? In Matthew 5, 32 and Matthew 19, and what does this mean? And so the early church said, well, it means adultery, you can divorce, but you can't remarry. One possibility is that they interpreted it, interpreted it that way because they were overly influenced by a writing called the Shepherd of Hermas. It's a long story. I don't want to get off on that tangent, but just so you know, that's a possible reason why they interpreted it that way. There are some other interpretations. Now, my view is that the exception clause, when it says accept it be for fornication, there, what Jesus is referring to, what he's saying is if you remarry, your remarriage is invalid. And the sex in that remarriage is fornication between the two. And the reason why Jesus would use the word fornication there is to emphasize the invalidity of the marriage. That's why he would choose that word. He's really referring to an antecedent reality. The antecedent thing is that you're in an invalid marriage. Therefore, the sex in that marriage is fornication. And then when Jesus calls it adultery, he's referring to a different antecedent reality, which is you're still married to your first spouse. Therefore, the sex is adultery. So the sex in an adulterous remarriage and an invalid remarriage would be both fornication between the two and adultery against the first spouse. That's my view. But that's not Wayne Grudum's view. His view is that the fornication there in the exception clause refers to infidelity. So back to the situation where a man and a woman are married and she is unfaithful, she cheats on him. Then Wayne Grudum would say the man can divorce his wife and he can remarry. That's the typical Protestant view that we brought in with Luther. And then Calvin agreed with it, and it got enshrined in the Westminster Confession of Faith. The Anglicans didn't agree. So there's, there was, there's always been dispute in Protestantism about what's going on with this exception clause. There is no, you know, universal view. There was a majority view, and Wayne Grudham has that majority view on adultery. So I and I disagree with that. I would say two people are married, they're married for life, that's it. And if somebody divorces and remarries, it's a continual state of adultery against their first spouse. They should divorce the adulterous remarriage because it's an invalid fake marriage. Okay. All right. Now, what is this second exception? He talked about abandonment. So in 1 Corinthians chapter 7, Paul writes to the Corinthians a number of things related to marriage. And in verses 10 through 24, that's the part where he's really focused on marriage there. And in verse 15, he talks about a situation where a believer and an unbeliever, they're married. The unbeliever leaves, and Paul says that the believer who has been abandoned, that believer is now not enslaved. And so the question comes up: what does not enslaved mean? And Wayne Grudham interprets it as do most evangelicals, and not enslaved means not married. There's a number of problems with this interpretation. The first problem is that the Greek word used for not enslaved is different than the Greek word for used for marriage. When they talk about the marriage bond, that's the Greek word deo, whereas the Greek word for not enslaved is duola, which is never used for marriage anywhere else. Paul uses this other Greek word should indicate he means something different by not enslaved. He doesn't mean not married. He's using a different word there. Nevertheless, people say, well, it's still a similar kind of concept where you're bound to somebody, but it's not really a similar concept at all. I mean, if someone's getting down on one knee, he doesn't say, you know, will you be enslaved to me? You know, at a wedding ceremony, they don't say, you know, I pronounce, I now pronounce you slave enslaved. We're gonna, we're ordering a slavery cake for our slavery ceremony. Nobody, nobody does that, right? Because we don't think we don't call marriage slavery because we don't think it is slavery. Slavery was bad. Paul understood that it was bad. And so he's not calling marriage slavery. So that just doesn't make any sense. So he doesn't mean not married when he says not enslaved. What does he mean? Well, he's talking about the practical encumbrances of a marriage between a believer and an unbeliever. There's a lot of difficulties there. And Paul actually explains what he means six verses later in verse 21, 1 Corinthians 7, verse 21. Paul talks about actual slavery. And he's he's speaking about that by analogy to back to verse 15. And what he's saying is, listen, if you're enslaved, you can get your freedom. Go ahead and uh don't become, don't become slaves again. So don't become re-encumbered. But now you're free. What are you free to do now that you're not enslaved? You're now free to serve God unencumbered by this difficult relationship. And that's what Paul's talking about in 1 Corinthians 7, 15. And that contextually with the chapter makes a whole lot of sense. The Corinthians aren't looking to be married, they want to be celibate. If you look at 1 Corinthians chapter 7, starting in the very first uh verses there, it's very clear he's writing to an audience that doesn't, not only do they not want to be remarried, they don't want to be married at all. They want to be single and celibate. This is the this is the part of the Corinthian church to whom Paul is writing. And so in verse, in verse 15, it wouldn't make any sense to infer that Paul's talking about, oh, congratulations, you can remarry. It'd be a very strange thing to tell somebody who doesn't want to be married in the first place. The other weird problem you have is if you read Matthew 532, Matthew 19, 9, even where it has the exception clause, even if you think that means adultery, Jesus' audience would think that, well, all other cases outside of adultery, you cannot remarry. He says, you know, if you divorce and you remarry, it's adultery, except fornication, whatever that means. But outside of that exceptional scenario, you can't remarry because it would be adultery. So abandonment would be inside, would be one of those other scenarios. So to get around this problem, evangelicals will say something like, Well, in verse 15 is written in the context of verse 12, and that's really talking about believers married to unbelievers. But Jesus, when he is speaking, he's talking about believers married to believers, so they try to disassociate the two. But that doesn't work. Jesus was speaking in Matthew 19 to the Pharisees who were not saved. They were there to tempt him. Jesus was telling them their remarriages are adultery. Unsaved people. He's applying the rule to them. There is no way you can read Matthew 5, Matthew 19, Mark 10, or Luke 16 and come to the conclusion that Jesus' rule about divorce and remarriage was only to believers married to believers. No, that's just not the case. And nor does Jesus limit it in any way. Also, Jesus uh roots his teaching on divorce and remarriage on creation, which applies to everybody. So Jesus' teaching was for everybody. It wasn't just for believers married to believers or the external church or any of those kind of theories. And so then to say Paul then has another exception for abandonment would be to make Jesus contradict Paul. And that's not happening in the scriptures. Now, Wayne Grudham's going to talk about another exception that he thinks he finds in 1 Corinthians 7, 15, and that is for uh abuse, things like that. So here's what I would say. I would say that if somebody is in an unsafe environment, they have a right to retreat. If their kids are in an unsafe environment, they have a right to retreat from that unsafe environment. That allows them to separate, and that and that can solve the problem of the safety problem. Sometimes, though, they'll also need to divorce. So in Corinth, to the people who to whom Paul is writing, the Roman law at the time, if somebody separated, they were auto-divorced. If they moved out, they were auto-divorced. So I would say if divorce is required to achieve safety, then divorce is per is permissible for that because people have a right to go ahead and retreat. The reason why we ordinarily would not want to divorce is because of Matthew chapter five, verse 32. It says there that if a man divorces his wife, he causes her to commit adultery. So he is culpable because she is likely to go ahead and get remarried, and that would be adultery. So that's why we're generally going to be against divorce. But in the case of safety, what's really happening here is the person is pushing the other person away. So they are abandoning them in the sense that they are pushing them away through their violent acts. And I have a whole video on how I kind of walk through that. So I would say that there's uh an ability to separate for safety reasons and even to divorce if that's necessary to secure safety for a spouse or their children. But they're still actually married to the person. God joined them together. So they are in fact married. And so a remarriage would still be adultery. And the way to understand this is if you have a sibling, let's say you have a brother, your brother is your brother, your family. It's a fact. And the same way you can't unsibling your sibling because of their conduct, so you also can't unspouse your spouse because of their conduct. You cannot talk to them, you cannot be around them, you can avoid them for safety reasons, you can do all of those things. But but in reality, they're still actually family. And the way you know that marriage is family is from Genesis chapter two. So there it says uh that Adam said to Eve, This is now bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh. Part of that bone and flesh language is family language. We see that in the Old Testament, for example, in Genesis 29, where Laban says to uh Jacob, are you not my bone and flesh? And they're family and bone and flesh, that's what that meant, that they're family members. So that's what marriage is. People get married, they're family, and so they're family as long as they both live. And that's why Jesus was appealing back to Genesis in the beginning, because the only way you're going to get back to the moral law on divorce and remarriage is by going back to the beginning, going back to first principles. Two people get married, they're joined together by God, uh, and that is for life. So now let's hear how Wayne Grudham then continued, uh, changed his view after he did some more research on First Corinthians chapter seven.

SPEAKER_01 13:37

If the husband leaves, let him leave. In such cases, believing brother or sister is not enslaved. Um and I was able to track down examples of the Greek phrase enthois to utois in such cases. Where it applied to more than a single example, uh kind of example. So in the Jewish writer Philo in the first century, he talked about the plagues that came on the Pharaoh and the Egyptians when they had the Israelites captive in Egypt. And he said Philo said, the Egyptians woke up and found the firstborn sons were all dead. And as often happens in such cases, they feared that another disaster was about to come. As often happens in such cases, never ever never before had it ever happened that a firstborn son was killed in every family. Okay, right. So I think in such cases there must mean in cases of similar seriousness or severity. So I go over to first Corinthians 7 15, and Paul says if the husband leaves, let him leave.

SPEAKER_00 15:13

Okay, so I would not make uh I would not broaden in such cases to mean as much as much as uh that phraseology would. Um so what Paul is talking about there is abandonment. And so in such cases, would need to be something that is analogous to abandonment. Now, the reason why I think abuse is analogous to abandonment is because suppose you have somebody who's married, and like say she's at work and she comes home from work, and then the man, you know, beats her up and she gets out of the house, she leaves the house, uh, gets out of the house, and then she tries to come back in and he beats her up again, and so she gets out of the house in order to retreat from him. He's basically abandoning her. Like just because he's the one pushing her out of the house through his physical violence, that doesn't mean, you know, the fact that he stays in the house and she's outside because he's beating her up or whatever, that doesn't make it so that she's abandoning because of her physical location, creating an unsafe environment is analogous to uh abandonment. And I would say say the same thing with kids. I mean, parents have a responsibility to care for their children. And if one spouse is doing something bad to the kids, then they need to be able to, you know, retreat with the kids. So I think retreating from violence and being abandoned by somebody are uh are analogues, and therefore that they that falls under in such cases.

SPEAKER_01 16:32

For pastoral advice, that's a decision the pastor needs to make in each case or the elder boy needs to make in each case.

SPEAKER_02 16:39

So an example of that would be something like significant abuse. Yes, very much so. Wow. Okay. Good. I'm glad you got to work on that.

SPEAKER_00 16:48

So yeah, so even though I disagree with Dr. Wayne Grudham's main view on divorce and remarriage, I do appreciate his contribution on the in such cases. I do think that is really insightful and helpful. And actually, it's funny because it's right there in the text. It says in such cases. And so that should lead us to think there maybe there's a more than just the one case there. And so he did the research in the background to find out that is, in fact, how that phrase is used. So go ahead and get my book, Divorce Your Remarriage. Thanks for watching. Let me know your comments and your thoughts and go ahead and like and subscribe. And I'll see you guys next time.