Reconstructing Christian Sexual Ethics 02.5: Covenants and How to End Them

The Church has dramatically altered its teachings on divorce in the last century. The Church has, at times, taught that divorce is only allowable in situations of sexual unfaithfulness. This position is based on some of the words of Jesus, which is a far better foundation than some Church teachings we've talked about on this blog. In recent decades, some churches have loosened this teaching to allow for divorce in cases of abuse or desertion.

It is not presently my intent to re-litigate those changes. Instead, I will consider divorce as one instance of the larger phenomenon of ending a covenant. By understanding the end of covenants more generally from a perspective of Christian virtue ethics, we may also hope to learn about divorce in particular.

Mortals, by definition, eventually die. All covenants involving mortals must therefore end. Those ends can fall into three categories. I'll use the language of covenants with two parties, but the same principles apply to multi-party contracts without loss of generality.

• Covenants can end naturally
• Covenants can end bilaterally
• Covenants can end unilaterally

Creating covenants builds the virtue of Peacemaking and building relationship. Keeping covenants builds the virtue of Faithfulness and Endurance. A covenant ending naturally or bilaterally can perhaps be virtue-neutral on both scores. But a covenant ending unilaterally, being broken, is virtue-negative. That means to be the moral choice, breaking a covenant would have to be virtue-positive along other directions. Either the covenant itself is virtue-negative, or the covenant is preventing actions that are virtue-positive.

Here are some thoughts about situations in which keeping a covenant might be less virtuous than breaking it:

• Humility before God 
• Your covenant is incompatible with your service to God in some fashion. If you have a covenant to serve in one religion, then convert, for example.
  
• Drive for righteousness and justice
  
• Your covenant makes your life less like God wants it to look.
  
• Your covenant makes the world less just, less like what God wants it to look like.
• Embrace of knowledge, wisdom, and truth
  
• Your covenant was made in ignorance, was rashly considered, or you were deceived.
  
• Love and respect 
• Your covenant requires you to place your needs before those of others.
• Forgive and build peace, covenant, and relationship
• Your covenant damages relationship and community, or prevents more valuable relationship and community from being formed.
  
• Patience and hope
  
• Your covenant was made under inappropriate pressure.
• Kindness, mercy, and generosity
  
• Your covenant causes harm to others, or prevents good being done for them.
  
• Faithfulness and endurance
  
• You have conflicting covenants.

I don't see any way that the virtues of Joy, satisfaction, contentment, gratitude; Integrity and self-control; or Endurance might justify breaking a covenant. But I may just be missing something.

So back to our first paragraph, where does divorce fit into this? If we reject the legalistic idea of Jesus giving us some list of check-boxes, and instead work from the virtues Jesus taught us, when might divorce imaginably be net virtue-positive?

• Embrace of knowledge, wisdom, and truth
  
• Your marriage was made in ignorance, was rashly considered, or you were deceived.
  
• Forgive and build peace, covenant, and relationship
• Your marriage prevents a more valuable relationship from being formed. An example might be when children are involved, one parent has abandoned them, and the other parent chooses to remarry.
  
• Patience and hope
  
• Your marriage was made under inappropriate pressure.
• Kindness, mercy, and generosity
  
• Your marriage causes harm to others, or prevents good being done for them. This might be the case in a situation of abuse, for example.
• Keep in mind that among its many other problems, allowing your spouse to abuse you without push-back is unkind to your spouse, not to mention literally everyone else in their lives they may also abuse.
  

Interestingly, sexual unfaithfulness doesn't seem to have a place in this virtue scheme! The one time the Church has traditionally taught divorce to be allowable seems to be virtue-negative in at least some cases. As we often saw in the gospels, living like Christ may actually place higher demands on us than following the legalists. God has infinite faithfulness, even when we break our end of the covenant.

Now, what about bilateral divorces or other covenant-endings? There's less faithlessness involved at that point, so the details of the particular circumstance would need to be evaluated to determine whether such a situation was virtue-positive or negative. I see no reason that a bilateral divorce would necessarily be either. Still, since creating and keeping covenants is generally virtuous, covenants should only end with deep consideration. Since marriage is a living prophecy, exemplifying the love of God for His people, it should perhaps only be terminated if it cannot fulfill that function. But then, the number of people with good marriages who want divorces is presumably vanishingly small.

 

We can also apply some of this reasoning to non-marriage relationships. As relationships progress in stages of deepening commitment, the ability to end those relationships becomes more limited, almost by definition. What if one partner gets a job offer somewhere else? Or if one partner becomes unwell? How the partners react is dependent on their level of commitment. This is why a person should be slow and deliberate about progressing through relationship stages; that which is hard to undo should be hard to do.

 

Part of developing a relationship ethic should include some thought about the conditions when relationships end, with discussion of those circumstances between the partners before the end is suddenly upon them. We should never take ending a covenant before its time to be a casual thing.