The Westminster Divines on Divorce for Physical Abuse

The mandate of Philadelphia Presbytery’s committee was very narrow: to seek to know whether physical abuse of a spouse might have been in the thinking of the Westminster Assembly as it formulated its position: “…yet nothing but adultery, or such willful desertion as can no way be remedied by the Church or civil magistrate, is cause sufficient of dissolving the bond of marriage….” (Westminster Confession of Faith, XXIV,6). Of particular help in this study have been the article by David C. Jones, “The Westminster Confession on Divorce and Remarriage,” Presbyterion XVI, 1(Spring 1990), 17-40 (see also Minutes of the 18th General Assembly of the PCA, 1990, pp. 139-162) and the book by Roderick Phillips, Putting Asunder: A History of Divorce in Western Society (Cambridge U. Press, 1988), although the reader of this 640-page book should be forewarned that the index is not complete (William Ames, Robert Cleaver, John Dod, William Gouge, Herbert Palmer, and William Perkins are not included in the index but are referred to in the text at least on pages 111-112, 118, 126, 309, and 326-328). The Problem. The problem confronting a study of what may have been in the thinking of the Westminster Assembly is that the whole question of divorce was in flux in the Reformation era, particularly and prolongedly so in England, and the most highly regarded guides on such ethical questions could be understood as ambivalent.