God-appoints difficult providences for all who are in union with Christ, but we must expect God’s grace to be sufficient for all his people to keep the marriage vow of “for better or for worse” unless one of the two exception clauses can be met (adultery or willful desertion). Elders are to be part of the solution, not part of the problem. They are to love their flock according to understanding, which means they are to encourage the sheep under their care in the life of the cross to which we all are appointed. Elders must come along suffering spouses – labor with them indeed, yet censure those who willfully desert their spouses or pursue unbiblical divorce with a high-hand.

We synthesize particular biblical principles in order to compose theology that is biblical, practical and compassionate.
Under the gospel of Christ there exist two permissible reasons for divorce: adultery and willful desertion. (Matt.19:8,9; 1 Cor. 7:15)
Elders often have to judge whether certain acts of the flesh constitute adultery. Elders also have to decide whether certain patterns of life constitute willful desertion. This entry is concerned with the latter provision for dissolving the marriage contract, along with proper ecclesiastical oversight regarding the willful desertion provision.
Whenever a believer is loosed from the marriage bonds due to an unbeliever’s willful desertion, the believer is free to remarry even though the guilty party is beyond the pale of ecclesiastical censure by already being an unbeliever. (1 Corinthians 7:15)
In cases where both parties are regarded as believers, the only provision for divorce and remarriage is adultery. Mathew 5:32 enforces the point by teaching that if one divorces his wife for any reason other than fornication, the husband in such cases causes his wife to commit adultery. Furthermore, even the innocent woman’s future husband commits adultery by marrying her. In other words, under such circumstances not only is the husband culpable for his wife’s sin of adultery; the innocent spouse is not permitted to remarry, lest she commits adultery along with her future husband. Notwithstanding, there is good and affable news for the innocent spouse, if only sessions would do their job.
One may not divorce or remarry under the willful desertion clause as long as both parties are to be regarded as Christians by the church. Yet, if a professing Christian willfully deserts his spouse without cause in the face of Matthew 18 confrontation – then the deserting spouse should be declared an unbeliever. In such cases, the grounds for divorce would not be unbelief but rather willful desertion accompanied by ecclesiastical censure and unbelief. (1 Cor. 7:15). In other words, a believer may not divorce his spouse solely for the sin of unbelief since Scripture requires a believer to dwell with his unbelieving spouse as long as she desires to remain married. (1 Cor. 7:12-13). Nor may a believer divorce and remarry if deserted by a believer (i.e., one in good standing in the church). Rather, (aside from cases of adultery), a believer may only divorce and remarry if deserted by an unbeliever. The theological takeaway is that both conditions of (a) willful desertion and (b) status of unbeliever must be met for there to be biblical divorce and remarriage under the desertion clause.
Pervasive problem in the church:
It has become increasingly prevalent in the Reformed church today to condone divorce between professing Christians for emotional abandonment, in particularly verbal abuse. (This article does not address biblical fenceposts for such thinking. It recognizes there is biblical latitude and seeks to synthesize biblical principles in order to provide a coherent theological paradigm from which sessions might operate.)
When it is deemed by the courts of the church that a pattern of spousal abuse is tantamount to willful desertion, the guilty party should be censured to the utmost degree yielding a status of unbeliever. Only at which point may a professing believer be loosed from the marriage because now an unbeliever has departed. (Please internalize that point before reading further.)
Unfortunately, that is not what we always see, even within churches that practice discipline. Instead, we too often find an unbiblical accommodation for the offended party (assume the wife hereafter) who has suffered under emotional turmoil, which ironically can turn into a situation in which she deserts her husband without cause. (More on that later.)
We also observe instances in which the wife is not granted the ecclesiastical backing of the church that would rightly vindicate her and pave the way for a biblical release from the bonds of marriage.
In other words, one of two unbiblical accounts too often occurs. Either the suffering wife is granted at least tacit approval for divorce, yet without it having been deemed that her husband sinned enough to be excommunicated. Or else, approval for divorce is granted without her guilty husband having been excommunicated. In the first instance the abused wife is denied both the testing and privilege of sanctifying suffering; whereas under the second scenario the innocent wife is denied the peace the church was to have aided her in obtaining by ministering and declaring in Christ’s name that her unbelieving husband had willfully deserted her, and she is now loosed from the marriage.
No husband is to be considered having willfully deserted his wife to the degree in which his spouse may be loosed until there is such “willful desertion as can in no way be remedied by the Church, or civil magistrate” (WCF 24.6) In other words, whether willful desertion comes in the form of emotional or physical abandonment, a valid certificate of divorce presupposes the dissuasion of ecclesiastical and civil authorities has come to naught. Consequently, willful desertion that is sufficient for biblical divorce presupposes that one has already been officially declared outside the church, for how is it possible that one within the church – a Christian(!), can be beyond remedy?
In summary, it stands to reason that if the husband may not be constituted an unbeliever, then he has not yet willfully deserted his wife – in which case the wife has no biblical grounds for divorce. Yet if the wife has biblical grounds for divorce, then her unbelieving spouse has deserted her.
Excursus:
It is conceivable that if a spouse commits adultery and later repents, it can be biblically consistent for the innocent party to “sue out” divorce without an accompanying pronouncement of unbelief upon the spouse. The reason being, adultery is sufficient to file for biblical divorce, and repentance is sufficient to regain one’s standing in the church. Accordingly, one can truly repent prior to being excommunicated; yet notwithstanding the transgression allows the innocent party to sue out divorce “as if the offending party was dead.” (WCF 24.5)
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Written by Robert S. Smith |
Tuesday, December 7, 2021
Helping and supporting those who are navigating gender identity conflicts requires considerable wisdom and deep compassion. But unless our care is grounded in and guided by anthropological reality (as revealed in Scripture), it will neither be truly wise nor genuinely compassionate. The theological task, therefore, is paramount and necessarily comes first.

Understanding Human Constitution
In his recent book, Embodied: Transgender Identities, the Church & What the Bible Has to Say,[1] Preston Sprinkle helpfully maps out the four main views of human constitution —i.e., the relationship between the material and immaterial aspects of the human person. The first is physicalism, which denies the existence of an immaterial soul or spirit. The second is non-reductive physicalism, which affirms that we are more than our bodies but denies a body/soul distinction. The third is soft dualism, which acknowledges a body/soul distinction but insists that both are necessary for human personhood. The fourth is strong dualism, which sees body and soul as fundamentally distinct substances and equates the human person with the soul, not the body.[2]
Sprinkle, quite rightly, deems views one and four to be sub-Christian. His own view (I think) seems to hover somewhere between two and three. However, in my judgment, non-reductive physicalism falls somewhat short of the biblical presentation of humanity. While its proponents are quite right to point out that both the Hebrew term nepesh and Greek term psychē often refer to the whole person rather than just the inner person (e.g., Gen. 2:7; 1 Pet. 3:20), the question is whether the Bible draws a distinction between the inner and outer person. The unequivocal answer of both testaments is that it does (e.g., Eccl. 12:6; 2 Cor. 4:16). And, what’s more, it sometimes uses both nepesh and psychē to refer to the inner person specifically (e.g., Gen. 35:18; Matt. 10:28).[3]
So that leaves us with soft dualism or, what I think is a better term, dualistic holism, the view that human beings are “integral personal-spiritual-physical wholes—single beings consisting of different parts, aspects, dimensions, and abilities that are not naturally independent or separable.”[4] It also brings us to the question I want to pursue in the remainder of this article: How does such an understanding of human constitution help us assess (what might be called) spiritual gender identity theory —i.e., the claim that a person can have the spirit or soul of one sex in the body of another?
Before proceeding, I want to stress that this is not a pastoral article; it is an exercise in theological thinking. It will certainly have important pastoral implications. But it’s not my purpose here to tease these out. Helping and supporting those who are navigating gender identity conflicts requires considerable wisdom and deep compassion. But unless our care is grounded in and guided by anthropological reality (as revealed in Scripture), it will neither be truly wise nor genuinely compassionate. The theological task, therefore, is paramount and necessarily comes first.
Assessing Spiritual Gender Identity Theory
The Implausibility of a Body-Soul Mismatch
The holism of the scriptural presentation of anthropological constitution leaves no room for a conception of human beings as “composed of two separate entities joined together in an uneasy alliance.”[5] Accordingly, John Cooper regards it as “anti-scriptural” to think of the soul as being “in tension with the body.”[6] The reason for this is that body and soul, although distinct, interpenetrate one another —we are just as much ensouled bodies as we are embodied souls. As a consequence, “[b]iological processes are not just functions of the body as distinct from the soul or spirit, and mental and spiritual capacities are not seated exclusively in the soul or spirit. All capacities and functions belong to the human being as a whole, a fleshly-spiritual totality.”[7]
My thesis, then, is this: such synthetic integration necessarily rules out the possibility of an ontological mismatch between the (visible) body and the (invisible) soul. Consequently, if a person’s body is unambiguously sexed as male, it is simply not conceivable that their soul could be female (and vice versa). Indeed, a radical elemental disjunction of this kind would effectively “destroy the unity of the human person which is at the heart of a biblical anthropology.”[8]
Terrance Tiessen’s Counter-Proposal
Nevertheless, it is precisely this kind of disconnection that has been proposed (albeit tentatively) by theologian Terrance Tiessen.[9] To make his case, Tiessen relies on a particular version of Thomistic dualism drawn from the work of J. P. Moreland and Scott Rae.[10] According to Moreland and Rae, “the human person is identical to its soul, and the soul comes into existence at the point of conception.”[11] From that moment on, the soul “begins to direct the development of a body” guided by “the various teleological functions latent within the soul.”[12] Therefore, not only is the soul “ontologically prior to the body,” but “the various biological operations of the body have their roots in the internal structure of the soul, which forms a body to facilitate those operations.”[13] On the basis of such an understanding, Tiessen draws the conclusion that the “maleness or femaleness of human beings is an aspect of the soul.”[14]
He then considers the reality of the Fall in order to hypothesise “the possibility of soul/body disjunction.”[15] He begins by drawing attention to the phenomenon of DSD/intersex. His argument is that while each person’s soul is either male or female, in some cases “abnormalities occur in the development of the person’s body so that doctors find it extremely difficult to say whether the person who has just been born is female or male.”[16] Then, by extension, he suggests that perhaps others (he cites Bruce/Caitlyn Jenner as an example), whose bodies are unambiguously male or female, might experience a total “incongruence between the sex of their soul and the sex of their body.”[17] So, while Tiessen rejects the idea that “sexual identity is a social construct” and affirms that our goal should be “to live as God has created us,” his contention is that the truth of our created sex is not ultimately found in the body but in the soul.[18]
Responding to Tiessen’s Hypothesis
In response to Tiessen’s proposal, four points can be made.
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Long after Onesimus took the letter, Paul sat in chains knowing that Philemon’s response could refresh his weary spirit. Yes, I know that we look to Christ for comfort and strength—Paul was no stranger to knowing the Lord’s presence to embolden him for the hard road ahead. But isn’t this wonderful? When Paul saw the gospel budding in another’s life, that too was a source of refreshment for him.

The Bible is far from barren prose on ancient parchment. Instead it ripples with life, it rises and falls with the breath of God, it ebbs and flows as the Spirit wields it with surgical precision.
Consider the short book of Philemon nestled toward the back of your Bible. Not even a book really, more accurately, an intimate insight into the gospel, seen through the lens of friendship and exposed by the expert penmanship of Paul as he pleads with a dear brother.
Receiving a hand-written letter by post is fast becoming a novelty these days, but imagine for a moment Philemon’s surprise to have this letter couriered to his own hand by none other than Onesimus, the very slave who ran from him some time earlier. Or imagine, if you can, the moment Onesimus crested the hill overlooking his one-time master’s estate—clenching the scroll he carried as though it was his greatest treasure, heart beating with unusual haste, hopeful for Philemon’s blessing, fearful of the consequences of his escape. If you can imagine neither of these, I wonder if you can picture Paul as he etched these 25 verses from his own prison, glancing up at his new friend and child in the faith, Onesimus. Casting his mind back to his precious friendship with Philemon, Paul allows his heart to flow onto the scroll rolled out before him.

So if you consider me your partner, receive him as you would receive me. If he has wronged you at all, or owes you anything, charge that to my account. I, Paul, write this with my own hand: I will repay it—to say nothing of your owing me even your own self. Yes, brother, I want some benefit from you in the Lord. Refresh my heart in Christ.  (Philemon 17-20 ESV)

The entire letter is rich with implications that blossom from the stump of the gospel, but even in these few verses lay a bouquet that should awaken our senses to the aroma of grace that is found in Jesus.
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