Canon Law & Homily at odds

Adelphoi,

I recently sent out an extract from an official C of E Homily. Several of you noticed the reference to divorce in it and questioned me. Here is an
answer:

Canon Law & Official Homily at odds with each other!

The official Church of England Homily "Against Whoredom & Fornication" sets out a doctrine of divorce invented by Erasmus and taken up by the Protestant Reformers and eventually put into doctrinal form in the Westminster Confession of Faith of the 1640s (and thence into Protestantism generally).

Here, first of all, is the extract from the Homily, and then the section from the Westminster Confession.

"Christ our Saviour, very God and man, coming to restore the law of his heavenly Father unto the right sense, understanding, and meaning, among other things reformed the abuse of this law of God. For, whereas the Jews used, of a long sufferance, by custom, to put away their wives at their pleasure for every cause, Christ, correcting that evil custom, did teach that, if any man put away his wife, and marrieth another, for any cause except only for adultery (which then was death by the law), he was an adulterer; and forced also his wife, so divorced, to commit adultery, if she were joined to any other man; and the man also, so joined with her, to commit adultery."

Chap XXIV sec.5 "Adultery or fornication committed after a contract, being detected before marriage, giveth occasion to the innocent party to dissolve that contract [Matt.1:18-20]. In the case of adultery after marriage, it is lawful for the innocent party to sue out a divorce [Matt.5:32], and after the divorce to marry another, AS IF THE OFFENDING PARTY WERE DEAD [Matt 19:9; Rom.7:2-3]."

Both texts agree that divorce, followed by a second marriage, is possible for one and one only cause, and that cause is adultery. Further, and this is the revolutionary imput of Erasmus [as taken up by the Reformers, including the English Tyndale, Cranmer, Hooper etc., and including especially Beza in Europe], that this is possible because under the law of Moses the adulterer was stoned to death and thus was no longer alive. There the widower left behind after the death of the adulterous former spouse was free to marry for his wife was no longer alive. Now what had been the case in ancient times is treated by Erasmus as if it were the case in modern times and thus the innocent party is deemed to be single again and free to remarry.

Now it was intended to incorporate this Protestant innovation as a provision into English Canon Law in the reign of Elizabeth (and the homilist thought it was a done deal!) but the Queen did not agree to this revision of Canon Law. As it stood in the reign of Elizabeth 1, and as it was confirmed in 1604, the Canon Law of the Church of England did not include any form of divorce that gave a right to remarry afterwards. The Erasmian innovation taken up by the Protestant Reformers never got into Canon Law of the Church of England until 2002/3 when, by the voting of General Synod, it entered with a vengeance, in a way to please John Milton (d.1678) who favoured liberalisation of the divorce laws in his day.

Thus what the C of E (contrary to the Homily) actually allowed was (a) divorce in the sense of separation from bed and board, with no right to remarry (separatio a mensa et toro) in certain cases, e.g. of adultery; and (b) annulment, with a right to enter into a legal first marriage, where it was judged that no marriage had actually taken place.

(See further V.N.Olson, The New Testament Logia on Divorce: A Study of their Interpretation from Erasmus to Milton, J C B Mohr, Tubingen, Germany, 1971)

The Rev'd Dr. Peter Toon