DIVORCE AND THE BIBLE
By Colin Hamer
AuthorHouse (http://www.authorhouse.co.uk). 150 pages. £6.90
ISBN 1 4259 0750 4
This is an important and valuable contribution to the current debate about the Bible’s teaching on divorce. The central thesis is that marriage was designed by God as a picture of the relationship between Christ and the church (Ephesians 5). Hence marriage is a covenant, but (and this is the vital point) husband and wife have different roles and responsibilities within the covenant relationship. The husband is to love, provide and care for his wife (as Christ loves the church), and the wife is to submit to her husband and be faithful to him (as the church to Christ).
These distinctive roles of husband and wife mean that each party has slightly different grounds for divorce. The husband can only divorce his wife for sexual infidelity (representing apostasy on the part of the church). The wife can divorce her husband not only for infidelity, but also for lack of love and practical care (a failure to represent Christ’s loving provision for his people). At this point Hamer builds on the work of Instone-Brewer (Divorce and Remarriage in the Bible, Eerdmans, 2002), that it was understood by the Jews in the time of Christ that a woman could divorce her husband if he did not provide her with food, clothing and conjugal love. But Hamer’s important insight about the different roles of husband and wife brings new light to the subject, and gives a fresh reading of some difficult texts.
