William E. Heth

Review of the first edition (1984)

Hugely influential book in its day, although out of print now. Heth and Wenham attempt to challenge what they term the Evangelical Consensus or Erasmian View, that adultery invalidates the marriage covenant and therefore remarriage is permitted. Their thesis - that divorce is allowed, but remarriage absolutely is not - is built on two pillars:
1. That the marriage covenant is indissoluble.
2. Up until the 16th century (Erasmus), the church never permitted remarriage.

This is slightly undermined by the fact that lead author William Heth disavowed himself of pillar 1 shortly after the second edition came out.

The whole book is only about 195 pages, but its a scholarly work, so that is followed by 80 pages of notes, bibliographies, author and scripture indexes.

Of the main text, just under a third (62 pages) deals with the early church position. The first chapter is a fairly selective range of texts, drawn mainly from the work of Henri Crouzel, which nevertheless contradicts itself, because there clearly are instances of remarriage in the early church, some of which they mention. The second chapter purports to a modern exposition of the early church view. In fact it is nothing of the kind, it is just exegesis by some modern scholars (mainly Jacques duPont) who happen to share the authors' view. It does however contain some detailed grammatical analysis. Unfortunately, for much of the rest of the book, they repeatedly refer to their view as 'the early church view', as if they had already proven their point, which they haven't; so that gets quite annoying after a while.

The next 40% (80 pages) is their analysis of what they term the Erasmian View, which has dominated evangelical thought, and is codified into the Westminster Confession. They skip over about 1000 years of history, ignoring any exceptions and not acknowledging the existence of the eastern orthodox church. The exegesis of the Old Testament texts is surprisingly brief, considering that Gordon Wenham is an Old Testament scholar. The New Testament chapter is much more in depth, although it does repeat some of the grammatical stuff from chapter 2. The section on Paul is suitably detailed though. Unfortunately they have a habit of repeatedly using the term Erasmians to describe anybody who disagrees with them; which starts to sound rather patronising and pejorative.

The final quarter (53 pages) goes briefly through 4 other interpretations of the Matthean exception, which also do not actually allow an exception - at least in the authors' interpretation of them. These are certainly interesting, but not dealt with in a huge amount of detail.

This is certainly an important book for anybody studying divorce regulations in the New Testament from a scholarly point of view. And useful to read alongside someone like Instone-Brewer, which has a very different perspective. Although groundbreaking in its day, it ultimately fails to demonstrate that the marriage covenant actually is indissoluble, or that the early church (other than Augustine) saw it that way.… (mais)