A Voice for the Abused #1: Gary Thomas speaks against making victims stay

Conservative churches, who should recognize the heart of God and God's love and compassion for the victims of injustice, often are the hardest ones on the victims of domestic violence. It ought not be this way. But not every church leader takes the rigid line that a woman should suffer continually under the abusive hands of the man who swore before God and human witnesses to love and cherish her. Gary Thomas speaks out against requiring a woman to stay in an abusive marriage:

God Hates Domestic Violence

The church leaderships that say "No divorce," even in cases of abuse, are often looking at the Bible as a handbook, with step-by-step rules for life. Using the handbook approach, they often miss the big picture of who God is and what overarching themes he has revealed to us.

It is true that God never intended divorce when he designed marriage. He may ordain it, now that we are after the Fall, but it was not a part of the original design. It is true that as marriage reflects God's relationship with his church, it reflects the permanence of that relationship. But all symbols break down in this broken and fallen and corrupted world. Man is sinful. God is not. God alone, in his perfect goodness and perfect love and perfect humility, is able to unilaterally hold together a union such as his with his imperfect bride, the church. In a human marriage on this side of the Fall, however, marriage is not a unilateral relationship. It is bilateral--both parties have a role. Both parties make vows and are expected to keep them. Even if not kept perfectly, the essence of the vows must be kept.

There is no way the essence of the vow to "love, honor, and cherish" or to "nourish her as his own body" (paraphrased from Ephesians 5) is being kept when a man abuses his wife--when he lives out a pattern that does her harm out of some ungodly need within himself. 

When the church leaders of the day tried to trap Jesus about the certificate of divorce Moses allowed men to give, Jesus referred them back "to the beginning." In the beginning, before the Fall, it was not this way. God instituted marriage before the hardness of heart that would destroy it existed. Is it possible that the issue of marital abuse is never specifically stated as a means for divorce in the Bible because of that redirection Jesus gives us to "the beginning"? Is it possible that abuse is so far from the purpose of the institution of marriage, from the relationship between God and his church that is being reflected, that it doesn't even belong on the table for discussion? 

Paul too refers us back to Genesis, before the Fall, but does so more subtly. Ephesians 5:29, the very model of marriage, refers to how a man is to care for his wife: For no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes it and cherishes it, just as Christ does the church, because we are members of his body.

No Bible reader can miss the connection Paul is making here to Adam's first words upon seeing the woman who was taken from a rib in his own side and formed to be his in one-flesh union. Genesis 2: 22-24: And the rib that the Lord God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man. Then the man said, "This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman because she was taken out of Man." Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.

In the beginning, there was no abuse in marriage. Even after the Fall, God predicts that the relationship is strained, but still, abuse does not come into the discussion. The woman will crave deep, meaningful relationship with her husband and the two will struggle to find it (Genesis 3:16). (Such is the basis for the need of marriage counseling and the myriad books we have to address communication issues in marriage today.) Man will protect himself from that deep relationship, as pride has entered in now and he is no longer "not ashamed." He will be tempted to use his strength and position to "lord over her" instead of keep her by his side as his equal partner in dignity, purpose, worth--but even so, that "lording over" does not open the door for the kind of activity and intent to destroy that abuse has in it. (Jesus reiterates the error in this attitude when reminds his disciples in Matthew 20: 25 that "lording over" others is a trait of the pagans, and that "it shall not be so among you" who believe. But nothing in either statement, Old Testament or New, suggests that the "lording over' included ongoing abuse.) No, even "lording over" did not encompass destructive abuse. The first such destruction we see in the Bible comes not from a husband to a wife but from brother to brother when Cain kills Abel. We are to be shocked and horrified that it is possible for such hatred and self-promotion to exist between brothers, but it is not suggested that it even can exist between husband and wife. Adam and Eve's marriage after the Fall remains, and continues to produce life rather than death.

From a biblical perspective on abuse in marriage: It ought not to be so. 

Abuse is such a distortion of God's plan for marriage that it does not even earn a place at the table of discussion when anomalies in marriage are being discussed. As both Jesus and Paul refer back to the beginning to define marriage, we can be confident that they were speaking of marriage as God intended it, and not an anti-Christian relationship that has destruction of the most beloved at its heart instead of loving union, even in this ongoing imperfect world.