Chapter XXIV. Of Marriage, and Divorce

IV. Marriage ought not to be within the degrees of consanguinity or affinity forbidden in the Word; nor can such incestuous marriages ever be made lawful by any law of man, or consent of parties, so as those persons may live together as man and wife. The man may not marry any of his wife's kindred nearer in blood than he may of his own, nor the woman of her husband's kindred nearer in blood than of her own.

What changed, and when. The sentence in bold was struck out by the southern Presbyterian Church in the United States in 1886 and by the northern in 1887. The Orthodox Presbyterian Church and the Presbyterian Church in America, born later, have not restored it.

Why. This change has nothing to do with the civil magistrate, but with a very particular case: that of the widower who marries the sister of his deceased wife. The sentence forbids it, because it puts the kindred of one's spouse on the same footing as one's own. In the nineteenth century such marriages were increasingly frequent, and the question occupied the General Assemblies for decades, especially after a minister, Archibald McQueen, married his sister-in-law and his presbytery suspended him from the ministry for incest in January 1842. He appealed to the General Assembly, and years later he was restored. The Reformed Dutch Church in America repealed its equivalent rule in 1842; the Presbyterians ended by doing the same.

What the text of 1647 rested on. The Assembly cites Leviticus 20:19,21, within the general framework of Leviticus 18:1-30. The reasoning is one of parity: if the Law forbids a man his brother's wife, it equally forbids a woman her sister's husband.

What this change shows. Here what enters is not an idea about the State, but a way of proceeding: when the conduct of the members ceases to agree with the Confession, the Confession is corrected. It must be acknowledged that, of all the changes reviewed here, this is the most debatable in one direction and in the other. Those who struck out the sentence appealed to Leviticus 18:18, which forbids taking the wife's sister "in her life time", from which it seems to follow that after her death it is lawful. Its defenders replied that that verse speaks not of the sister-in-law but of polygamy (the Hebrew expression may be rendered "one wife to another"), and that the rule of parity is the one which governs the whole chapter. There were Reformed theologians of weight on either side; as late as 1957 John Murray, a minister of a church which uses the revised text, maintained that the sentence struck out was biblical. But the sentence embodied the common interpretation of the Reformed churches, the Dutch included, and the debate was opened not by a fresh study of the text, but by the spread of a practice. That order, first custom and then doctrine, is what matters here, and it is the same that will be repeated, with a far graver matter, in the following century.

Divorce: what changed, and when. Paragraphs V and VI survived intact until the middle of the twentieth century. In 1953 the northern church in the United States replaced the whole chapter with another of only two paragraphs, which in the edition of 1958 appears without biblical proof texts. Where the Confession limited the grounds to two, the new text says that remarriage may be sanctioned after a divorce granted "on grounds explicitly stated in Scripture or implicit in the gospel of Christ", when there is "sufficient penitence for sin and failure". The southern church approved a few years later its own wording, which speaks of a marriage that "dies at the heart" and admits divorce in cases of extreme unfaithfulness, "physical or spiritual". The conservative Presbyterian churches adopted neither of the two texts and keep the paragraphs of 1647.

What this change shows. The same order as the preceding one, but now without disguise. The Confession named two grounds, and rested them on Matthew 19:8,9 and 1 Corinthians 7:15. The new text replaces them with an open criterion, what is "implicit in the gospel", which each may fill in his own way, and lays the stress on subsequent penitence and not on the ground. The change came when divorce had become frequent in North American society, and doctrine once again followed custom.