Responding to Abuse in Christian Homes

A Challenge to Churches and their Leaders

Nason-Clark, Kroeger

• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Year: 2011
• eBook ISBN: 9781498273893
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Domestic abuse is a horror. It lurks beneath the surface of our collective existence, sometimes raising its ugly head where least expected-in the church or within families of faith. Are we-individually or collectively-ready to respond? What can, or should, congregations and their pastoral leaders do? And, as we survey the Christian landscape across the United States and Canada, are we as the community of faith stepping up to the challenge presented by violence in the family?There is no easy answer to the problems that surface when abuse impacts the Christian family. But each of the authors contributing to this volume believes fervently that it is imperative that followers of Jesus and their spiritual shepherds respond to the cries for help. To respond well necessitates both knowledge and a willingness to act.This book is here to help. It represents a collective effort to bring all of us a step farther in our journey of walking with Christ over a sea of troubled waters. None of us know as much as we should, but all of us can learn from one another. Throughout the collection we provide an opportunity to examine a diversity of perspectives, with the hope that each will in some way advance our understanding of the complexity of domestic violence issues in our midst-within our churches and the communities where our churches minister.

Part One

The Call to Peace and Safety

1

Let us Grow up unto Him in all Things

Catherine Clark Kroeger

The walls and rafters of Wolsey Hall reverberated with the impassioned hymn singing and fervent worship responses at the fiftieth reunion of the Yale class of 1949. This was the generation who had won World War II, and now they were gathered in a memorial service. Though many had been lost, those who remained found joy in this heartfelt expression of their indomitable faith.

They were a small part of the men who returned from military service at the end of the World War II, while most of the women had stayed at home praying for them. Those men had found God in fox-holes and battle fields, on the high seas, above those seas and under them, in prison camps and hospitals, in foreign lands and dreary office jobs at home. As they re-entered civilian life, they brought a new Christian commitment that invigorated existing churches and spun off tens of thousands of vibrant new ones, along with thousands of parachurch organizations to further the Gospel. Theirs was a determination to live out Christian conviction in every aspect of life.

Funded by the GI bill, a host of new developments sprang up with housing for veterans, together with places of worship filled with their burgeoning families.

The new evangelicalism reached into the political realm as well, beginning with President Jimmy Carter, who announced unabashedly that he had been born again. All of us were swept along in the zeal and the new affirmation of faith, rejoicing in the reawakening that we had prayed for so very long. All of us were determined that Christ should be lived out in our family relationships.

In such a situation, it is possible for the pendulum to swing too far in a misunderstanding of the biblical mandates. Admittedly there were some misguided efforts, and some that were attuned to special needs. In St. Paul, Minnesota during the seventies the first shelter in the nation opened “for battered women,” a phrase that I had never heard before. This was not all that was happening in the city.

A harsher reality sets in

The Civic Auditorium in St. Paul was filled to capacity as a supposed expert held forth for a whole week on how to build constructive relationships within the family. At the time, he was enormously popular with the Christian public. The event had been widely promoted by churches and parachurch organizations, and I too had been encouraged to attend. I sat there, along with many thousands of others, watching as the “expert” drew a diagram of a man and woman standing side by side in a dating relationship. Then, while sketching the downward swoop of an arrow, he explained that after marriage, the woman dropped below her husband to a servant status.

There followed another cartoon of the husband as a hammer pounding down on the wife, who was depicted as a chisel hacking away at the children. There were as well other symbols that were harsh and violent, such as the military image of a chain of command. I could not bring myself to attend the last two nights, but friends told me that they were present when women were instructed to praise God for their husbands even when they were beating them.

Within the following week, I was speaking with the Christian education director of a church located near a psychiatric hospital. There a single psychiatrist was treating three patients who required hospitalization as a result of their attendance at those meetings. Another therapist told me that he too had been busy treating both male and female clients in the aftermath of that particular program. Time moved on, and the “expert” lost a good deal of his popularity, but some of the impressions that he created lingered. Was it not the Apostle Paul who warned us “not to go beyond what is written” (1 Cor 4:6).

I attended another event sponsored by the Greater Minneapolis Association, this time at First Baptist Church in Minneapolis. Here another family life expert explained how he had repeatedly knocked his teen-aged son to the ground in order to gain his compliance. This was followed by an example of having forced his daughter into the car when she was unwilling to attend a week night prayer meeting. One could not miss the implication that sometimes force and violence were useful tools in promoting orderly family life. Veterans understood very well how to command, control, and coerce; and we came to consider this a biblical pattern.

Obviously such instances of warped instruction are now an embarrassment to many of us who participated in the events, or acted on the advice of those gurus. But the influence is still with us.

Other Christian leaders adopted some of the concepts in a more modified form, concepts nevertheless that could lend themselves quite readily to abuse. Usually the argument is made that these concepts are biblically based, but here is where we must examine what is being propounded. There is much that we need to rethink. As a good Christian mother, I spanked my children, but now I regret having used corporal punishment. As we deal with delicate issues of domestic abuse, it is important to deal carefully and faithfully with the Word of God.

Moving on in Christian thought

Commencing in the seventies, there began to be a growing awareness of the widespread existence of domestic abuse. Originally many of us maintained that no such evil was to be found among those who had been born again; but the evidence proved us wrong. It was evident that the Gospel called us to minister to both victims and perpetrators inside and outside of the fold of faith. All too often there has been a vast gulf between those grappling with a profound social problem and the voice of the church.

Clearly Christians needed to rethink what the scriptures and the Fathers of the church were telling us about family relationships. Misconceptions have led to tragic forms of abuse and misery that call for correction. None are more susceptible to misinterpretation than the biblical statement that man is the head of woman. How often it has led to abuse! This was recognized very early in the life of the church. One such voice was that of the greatest early biblical exegete, St. John Chrysostom. He perceived that women are often wonderfully attuned to the concerns, needs, and emotions of those around them, and have a gift of responding sensitively and sympathetically. Their gifts enable them to create an environment of care and loving support for the entire family. But abuse and brutalization deprive a wife of the ability to give freely of herself to those around her. Chrysostom wrote:

For when she has been subjected to her husband through force, fear, and violence, it will be more unbearable and unpleasant than if she commands him with total authority. Why do you suppose this is? Because this force drives out all love and pleasure. If neither love nor desire are present, but instead fear and duress, how valuable can the marriage be henceforth?1

For someone can subdue a slave through fear, but even he will soon try to escape. But your life partner, the mother of your children, the source of every joy, must not be bound through fear and threats, but by love and a kind disposition.2

Christianity is not a faith about who should be the boss but about each one of us assuming the role of a servant (Phil 2:3–8). How often we fail to notice that the practice of Christianity requires mutuality. We are told to be subject one to another (Eph 5:21). Indeed, the word allelos (“one another”) occurs no less than one hundred times in the New Testament! Our trademark is to be meekness, humility, and a concern for others. We might think of Jesus’ declaration:

You know that those who are regarded as rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their high officials exercise authority over them. Not so with you. Instead whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first must be slave of all (Mark 10:42–43. cf. Matt 20:25–28; Luke 22:24–27).

Jesus said that we would know a tree by its fruits and that we must beware a message based upon a mistaken ideology (Matt 7:15­–20; 12:33; Luke 6:44). He called for a differentiation to be made between those commandments that are truly given in the scripture and those that develop from human misconception (Matt 15:6–9). If we have embraced a theology that requires further development, now is the time get on with the work of reconsideration.

Beware the twisting of scripture into a launching pad for selfish gain

After a spate of eight domestic murders in Massachusetts during a span of thirty-one days, a front page article in the Boston Globe declared:

These were cases with much in common, for this kind of killing is among the least random of crimes: Assailant and victim, by definition, know each other intimately. Power, and the unnatural need for it, is the recurrent motive.3

The article states that authorities were seeking a pattern and could find none. Yet the journalist herself sees a “recurrent motive” in “power and the unnatural need for it.” We have heard a thousand times over that issues of power and control lie at the heart of domestic abuse, but the concept of an unnatural need for power could move our thought in new directions. Have we been guilty of promoting a doctrine of male privilege that permits domination, possession, and even the power of life and death? Surely Vienna’s famed psychiatrists demonstrated the lust for power that dwells within our sinful human breasts, but have we in the church of Jesus Christ exacerbated that lust? Have things been said in church contexts that have led to unnatural extremes? Have we been swept along when we should have been considering the biblical warnings?

Sometimes we have b...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Contributors
• Introduction
• Part One: The Call to Peace and Safety
• Part Two: Barriers to Peace and Safety
• Part Three: Removing the Barriers and Bringing Peace