Divorce and Abraham’s Bosom

But Christ forbids divorce. He says: “Anyone who divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery, and anyone who marries a woman divorced from her husband commits adultery.” In order to forbid divorce, he makes it unlawful to marry a woman who has been sent away. Moses, though, allowed a man to put his wife away. In Deuteronomy he writes: “When a man has taken a wife and has lived with her, and it happens that she finds no favor in his eyes because he has found something indecent in her, then let him write her a certificate of divorce, put it in her hand, and send her out of his house.” [a]

“So you see that there is a difference between the law and the gospel — between Moses and Christ.” Certainly there is. But then you have thrown out that other gospel, the one that bears witness to the same truth and the same Christ. There, while he was forbidding divorce, he gave us the answer to this very question: “Moses allowed you to give a certificate of divorce because your hearts are hard; but from the beginning it was not so.” And the reason was this: the one who had “made them male and female” had also said, “The two shall become one flesh. What God has joined together, then, let no one separate.” By that answer of his to the Pharisees he both upheld the provision of Moses, who was his own servant, and set the Creator’s institution back on its original course — the Creator whose Christ he was.

Since you have to be refuted out of the scriptures you yourself accept, I will meet you on your own ground, as though your Christ were mine. When he forbade divorce, and at the same time stood in for the Father — the one who joined male and female together — must he not have been clearing Moses’ rule rather than abolishing it? Look at it this way. If this Christ is yours when he teaches against Moses and the Creator, then by the same rule he must be mine if I can show that his teaching is not against them.

So here is my case. There was a condition attached to the prohibition of divorce he was making, and the case in view was a man putting his wife away for the express purpose of marrying another. His words are: “Anyone who divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery, and anyone who marries a woman divorced from her husband commits adultery” — “divorced,” that is, for the one reason for which a woman ought not to be dismissed at all, namely to get hold of another wife. For a man who marries a woman unlawfully divorced is as much an adulterer as the man who marries a woman not divorced at all. A marriage that has not been rightly dissolved is still standing, and to marry while a marriage is still standing is to commit adultery. So since his prohibition of divorce was a conditional one, he did not forbid it absolutely; and what he did not absolutely forbid, he allowed in other cases, where the reason he gave the prohibition is absent. His teaching, then, really is not contrary to Moses, whose rule he defends at some points — I will not yet say confirms.

But if you deny that Christ permits divorce in any way at all, how is it that you, on your side, destroy marriage? You do not join a man and a woman, and you do not admit to the sacred rite of baptism or of the thanksgiving anyone who has been married anywhere but among yourselves — unless the two of them agree to give up the fruit of their marriage, and with it the Creator himself. Well then, what is a husband to do in your following if his wife commits adultery? Is he to keep her? But your own apostle, as you know, does not allow “the members of Christ to be joined to a prostitute.” So divorce, where it is justly deserved, has a defender even in Christ.

From now on, then, Moses must be reckoned as confirmed by him, since Moses forbids divorce in the same sense Christ does, if any unfaithfulness has occurred in the wife. For in the Gospel of Matthew he says, “Anyone who divorces his wife, except for the cause of sexual immorality, makes her commit adultery.” And the man who marries a woman put away by her husband is held equally guilty of adultery. The Creator, for his part, does not separate what he himself joined together, except on account of adultery: the same Moses laid it down in another place that a man who had married a girl after forcing her should never afterwards have it in his power to put his wife away. Now if a marriage forced on a man after an act of violence is to be permanent, how much more a voluntary one, entered into by agreement! And the prophet backs this up: “You shall not abandon the wife of your youth.”

So you have Christ following the Creator’s footsteps of his own accord at every turn, both in allowing divorce and in forbidding it. You find him protecting marriage as well, whichever way you try to escape. He forbids divorce when he means the marriage to be untouchable; he allows divorce when the marriage is stained with unfaithfulness. You ought to blush when you refuse to join together the people your own Christ has joined, and blush a second time when you separate them without the good reason for which your Christ would have them separated.

I still have to show where the Lord got this ruling of his, and what he aimed it at. It will then be plainer still that his object was not to abolish Moses by some suddenly invented proposal about divorce — because it was not suddenly proposed at all. It had its root in what was said earlier about John. For John rebuked Herod for illegally marrying the wife of his dead brother, a woman who had a daughter by him. The law allowed such a marriage in one case only, where the brother had died childless; and there it actually required it, so that offspring might be reckoned to the dead man through his own brother and by his own wife. For that rebuke John was thrown into prison, and in the end was put to death by the same Herod.

So when the Lord brought up John — and of course brought up how he died — he hurled his rebuke at Herod in the shape of unlawful marriages and adultery, and pronounced a man an adulterer even for marrying a woman who had been put away from her husband. He said it in order to load the guilt on Herod all the more heavily. Herod had taken his brother’s wife, and she had been loosed from her husband by death no less than by divorce. He had been driven to it by his own lust, not by anything the law required — the marriage with the widow could not be lawful on that ground, since his brother had left a daughter. And when the prophet held the law up against him, he had the prophet put to death.

What I have said about this case will also be of use to me in throwing light on the story that comes next, about the rich man tormented in the world below and the poor man resting in Abraham’s bosom. Taken by its letter alone, that passage comes at us abruptly; but if we look at its sense and its point, it fits naturally onto the mention of John, wickedly killed, and of Herod, whom John had condemned for his impious marriage. It sketches in sharp outline how the two of them ended — the “torments” for Herod and the “comfort” for John — so that even now Herod might hear that warning: “They have Moses and the prophets there; let them hear them.”

Marcion, however, wrenches the passage to a different end. He decides that both the torment and the comfort are the Creator’s repayments, held in reserve in the world below for those who obeyed the law and the prophets, while the bosom and harbor in heaven he assigns to Christ and to his own god. Our answer is that the very passage that confounds him plainly distinguishes Abraham’s bosom, where the poor man lives, from the place of torment below. “The world below,” I take it, means one thing and “Abraham’s bosom” another. A “great gulf” is said to lie between those regions and to block any crossing from the one to the other. Besides, the rich man could not have “lifted up his eyes,” and from a distance at that, except toward a greater height, and across that whole distance through the vast reach of height and depth.

So it must be plain to any man of sense who has ever heard of the Elysian fields that there is a definite place called Abraham’s bosom, and that it is meant for receiving the souls of Abraham’s children — even those from among the nations, since he is “the father of many nations,” and they have to be counted part of his family — who hold the same faith he himself believed God with, without the yoke of the law and the sign of circumcision. This region, then, is what I call Abraham’s bosom. It is not in heaven, but it is higher than the world below, and it is appointed to give the souls of the righteous an interval of rest until the end of all things completes the resurrection of everyone, with “the full recompense of their reward.”

That completion will then be made plain in the promises of heaven, which Marcion claims for his own god, exactly as if the Creator had never announced them. But Amos tells us of that “ascent into heaven” which Christ “builds” — for his own people, of course. And there is that everlasting home Isaiah asks about: “Who will tell you of the eternal place — who but the one (Christ, that is) who walks in righteousness, speaks of the straight path, hates injustice and lawlessness?” Now although this everlasting home is promised by the Creator, and the ascending steps up to heaven are built by him, and it is he who further promises that Abraham’s seed will be as the stars of heaven — which is certainly a promise of heaven — why should it not be possible, without doing that promise any injury, that “Abraham’s bosom” means some temporary lodging for faithful souls, where an image of what is coming is already sketched out, and where some bright foresight is given of both the judgments?

If so, then here, heretics, while you are still alive, is your warning: Moses and the prophets declare one God only, the Creator, and his one Christ only, and both awards — everlasting punishment and eternal salvation — rest with him, the one only God, who kills and who makes alive.

“Ah, but the warning our God gave from heaven ordered us not to listen to Moses and the prophets, but to Christ. ‘Listen to him’ is the command.” True enough. For by that time the apostles had heard Moses and the prophets quite sufficiently, since they had followed Christ because Moses and the prophets had persuaded them. For not even Peter could have said “You are the Christ” unless he had already heard and believed Moses and the prophets, by whom alone Christ had so far been announced. Their faith had in fact earned this confirmation — a voice from heaven telling them to listen to the one they had already recognized as preaching peace, announcing good news, promising an everlasting home, building the steps up into heaven for them.

Down in the world below, though, it was said about them: “They have Moses and the prophets; let them hear them!” — those who did not believe them, or at any rate did not really believe that after death there were punishments for the arrogance of wealth and the glory of luxury. Moses and the prophets did announce those punishments, but they were decreed by the God who takes princes down from their thrones and lifts the poor off the dunghills. Since, therefore, it is entirely consistent for the Creator to hand down sentences in both directions, reward and punishment, we shall have to conclude that there is no diversity of divine powers here, but only a difference in the actual matters before us.