A few months ago as my marriage fell apart, I approached the Bible with the question, What does God say about an abusive marriage? Must a victim stay married to an abuser who isn't repentant and isn't changing? I was surprised by what I found, and it was not because I twisted the arm of the Bible to say what I wanted it to say -- I was truly open to anything the Lord would reveal to me there. I was surprised to find the same thing leaping out from almost every page I read, something I'd never noticed so much before -- that the Lord is deeply angered by oppression and abuse. His freeing Israel from slavery, the Mosaic laws protecting the helpless, his condemnation of abuse of the widow, orphan, stranger, and prisoner, his special tenderness for abused women. As I read, my heart thrilled to the text and I fell in love all over again with this God, who I realized is not just a God who cares about moral matters and religious spirituality isolated from earthly realities. He cares passionately about the oppressed, he hears their cries of suffering from all over the world, and he rises up to act in justice and righteousness. He heard my cries when I was suffering and he cared. He saved me from the darkness.
The result for me was a massive Bible study which started with a simple question: Can abused women divorce Biblically? and ended up covering topics of greater breadth and depth than I ever dreamed. I wanted to share a little of this on this blog, to help women who struggle with leaving and divorcing abusive husbands. I don't write this to say that every abusive marriage must end in divorce -- I am all for staying and fighting for the marriage, for using every tool that God gives and the church supports to keep the marriage alive, if it can be godly. But a victim cannot save a marriage on her own -- if her abuser is determined to continue his behavior, deflect all blame on her, and refuse to repent and change, then what does the Bible say she should do? Stay and be destroyed? I determined to ask that question of God Himself, through the Book He gave us.
A preliminary question: Must the Bible be explicit on every application of godly standard?
First, let me start out by saying that I fully believe with all my heart that the Bible is "God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the servant of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work" (2 Tim 3:16-7). None of this nonsense that the Bible is an irrelevant outdated document that can tell us nothing about how to live our lives today. HOWEVER, I do believe that the Word is often misused and misapplied by people who don't understand how to read it. That's why it was used in the past to justify slavery, racism, etc. -- because where the Bible presented things in narrative description, people misread as approval. You have only to read the book of Judges to know that not everything presented in the narrative is approved by God.
Another misapplication is by holding it to the standard of explicitness, i.e. if the Bible doesn't explicitly allow it, it's wrong. Or its converse: If the Bible doesn't explicitly forbid it, it's okay.
For example, some churches forbid the use of musical instruments in worship because, though instruments are mentioned many times in the Old Testament, under the new covenant in the New Testament musical instruments are never mentioned. The lack of explicit use makes it wrong in their eyes.
However, most churches don’t do their hermeneutics that way. Explicitness is not usually the standard we use to interpret the Bible. A more appropriate way is to get to the heart of the matter and to apply the divine principle. I have never heard it preached that we must count the number of times we forgive our brother and when we get to 50 times, or 491, depending on how you read that passage, we get to stop forgiving. Jesus’s point was that a heart of forgiveness isn’t counting and scheming on when we can stop forgiving, but to keep "no record of wrongs" (1 Cor 13:5).
Of course that makes reading the Bible much trickier, as we don’t always know when we are supposed to get to the heart of the matter to apply a principle and when we are supposed to take it explicitly, because certainly when God commands that we are not to make any "image in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below...[nor] bow down to them or worship them" you better believe that's literal!
But there are plenty of modern issues that we must interpret divine principles in order to judge rightly -- issues like abortion, the environment, stem cell research, modern fertility procedures, homosexual marriage -- which all came up in time after the Bible was completed. None of these are explicitly mentioned in the Bible and yet we all (try to) extract divine principles to navigate these modern waters. Even on those issues there is furious controversy on how the Lord is leading us (and I certainly don't want to engage in any of those debates here!). But my main point is that we don't derive our morality from explicitness alone, but on divine principles that we exegete and then apply hermeneutically to our contexts. (See here for a definition of exegesis and hermeneutics as we usually apply to Biblical studies.)
A friend of mine also pointed out to me the practice of "proof-texting," which she defines as the "taking [of a] single verse or collection of verses to establish a doctrine, without comparing them to the whole of Scripture." The example she gives of proof-texting that is explicitly or implicitly refuted elsewhere in Scripture is that of snake-handling in Mark, when considered in isolation from “Do not put your God to the test.” She writes, "There are churches that actually bring poisonous snakes into the group and the members handle them as proof of their faith. Every now and then someone gets bit. I knew a pastor in north Louisiana who, whenever he went into a snake-infested area, he’d call the pastor of the snake-handling church to clear out the snakes for him."
I'm not a theologian or a scholar, so I'm not going to go into further depth here, but are we agreed there, at least in part? We don't put the Scripture to the test of explicitness in order for the truth contained within it to be applied to our lives?
Now, to the topic.
Let’s consider some conditions in which divorce is not explicitly allowed by the Bible -- i.e. the Bible does not explicitly say, "If xyz happens, you can divorce."
Basically I came up with this list by asking the question, other than adultery and abandonment (the two "conditions" in which many people in the modern church interpret that the Bible explicitly allows divorce), what are some possible scenarios in which your marriage could make your life completely horrible? I'm sure someone out there could add many more colorful scenarios because there are so many ways to suffer. As Tolstoy said in Anna Karenina, "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."
The purpose of this list is NOT for you to say, "Oh yes, you should DEFINITELY divorce in that circumstance." I don't think that way myself; I deliberately listed scenarios that represent a range of where I think it falls in the "justifiable for divorce" spectrum. Without more details, how can one tell? Can the marriage be saved? Will counseling, medication, intervention help? How dangerous is the situation? Are she and the children in a safe place? Who is helping or not helping in the scenario?
The purpose of the list is to give you pause. To cause struggle in the heart as one faces the serious suffering of the spouse and children. For every honest Christ-follower who loves God and people, I believe that there is something seriously wrong if there is no pause, if the immediate answer to each of these scenarios is, "NO. Divorce in this circumstance is never, EVER allowed. No discussion. No struggle. I don't even need to take this to the Lord to ask." True compassion as I see in Christ would struggle on behalf of the suffering spouse and children in each scenario. Put someone you love in each scenario -- a daughter, a sister, a dear friend -- and then tell them that they must live with that spouse forever without a moment's hesitation in your heart, without even a pause to go and think and pray about it. I don't believe the church is called to be heartless in this matter, to prioritize a piece of paper that legally binds two people together (because in most of these cases, the marriage ISN'T acting out as a true marriage), over the safety of women and children. That is not the attitude I see in the Lord Jesus.
Every serious Christian must humbly take each scenario, when rooted in reality, not in a hypothetical way (because the details matter), to the Lord and Scripture again. I don't think God ever intended for our Christianity to be a fruit of the knowledge of good and evil -- once you've taken and eaten, once you've been a Christian for x number of years, once you've read through the Bible a few times, once you've gone through seminary, you've got all the answers and you don't need to talk to the Lord any more to ask for His wisdom. We dishonor God and the Scriptures when we assume that we don't need to keep dialoguing with the Lord. Faith isn't something you arrive at -- it's a relationship. Every new moral question, as we face it, we take back to the Lord and to Scripture. There is a deep arrogance when we assume we know all the answers before we've really spent time struggling with the questions.
I am also not arguing just yet that in any of these scenarios, divorce is allowed by the Bible. Each of those scenarios need to be examined specifically and held up against the Word. In future blog posts I intend to take abuse as my scenario and look at it. This is just my introduction, so if you feel like I haven't made any argument yet, it's because I haven't. I'm just setting up the foundation. I'm asking you to be humble, put down your gloves, and walk with me in this journey of looking again at the Text and admitting to God, "We need Your wisdom. Speak to us through Your Word. We don't have all the answers. Show us the way."
So many people who have confronted me with judgment about my pursuing divorce knew very little of the relevant Scriptures (and also didn't even ask me for my story). They had no idea what the Bible says about divorce, marriage and covenant. They had just ingested somewhere the idea that marriage was inviolable, and had decided that they needed no more study or searching or asking of the Lord before they came down in judgment upon me and urged me to go back into a destructive situation. A few who knew their Bible a little better knew about the two "exceptions" of adultery and abandonment. But very, very few knew what Mosaic law said about it, or remembered the contexts in which Jesus and Paul spoke about marriage.
Church, I'm not asking you to agree with me. I'm asking you to do your homework before you condemn me and thousands of other abused women who have turned to divorce to escape their abusive spouses. Part of that means listening to the victim's story, and doing your homework about abuse (I recommend Lundy Bancroft's book Why Does He Do That?). Part of it means taking it to the Lord and the Bible, and really struggling to do good exegesis. Part of it is a deep commitment to truth. Part of it is a deep commitment to compassion and justice.
If I've convinced you to take a second look, I'll see you at part 2.
The result for me was a massive Bible study which started with a simple question: Can abused women divorce Biblically? and ended up covering topics of greater breadth and depth than I ever dreamed. I wanted to share a little of this on this blog, to help women who struggle with leaving and divorcing abusive husbands. I don't write this to say that every abusive marriage must end in divorce -- I am all for staying and fighting for the marriage, for using every tool that God gives and the church supports to keep the marriage alive, if it can be godly. But a victim cannot save a marriage on her own -- if her abuser is determined to continue his behavior, deflect all blame on her, and refuse to repent and change, then what does the Bible say she should do? Stay and be destroyed? I determined to ask that question of God Himself, through the Book He gave us.
A preliminary question: Must the Bible be explicit on every application of godly standard?
First, let me start out by saying that I fully believe with all my heart that the Bible is "God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the servant of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work" (2 Tim 3:16-7). None of this nonsense that the Bible is an irrelevant outdated document that can tell us nothing about how to live our lives today. HOWEVER, I do believe that the Word is often misused and misapplied by people who don't understand how to read it. That's why it was used in the past to justify slavery, racism, etc. -- because where the Bible presented things in narrative description, people misread as approval. You have only to read the book of Judges to know that not everything presented in the narrative is approved by God.
Another misapplication is by holding it to the standard of explicitness, i.e. if the Bible doesn't explicitly allow it, it's wrong. Or its converse: If the Bible doesn't explicitly forbid it, it's okay.
For example, some churches forbid the use of musical instruments in worship because, though instruments are mentioned many times in the Old Testament, under the new covenant in the New Testament musical instruments are never mentioned. The lack of explicit use makes it wrong in their eyes.
However, most churches don’t do their hermeneutics that way. Explicitness is not usually the standard we use to interpret the Bible. A more appropriate way is to get to the heart of the matter and to apply the divine principle. I have never heard it preached that we must count the number of times we forgive our brother and when we get to 50 times, or 491, depending on how you read that passage, we get to stop forgiving. Jesus’s point was that a heart of forgiveness isn’t counting and scheming on when we can stop forgiving, but to keep "no record of wrongs" (1 Cor 13:5).
Of course that makes reading the Bible much trickier, as we don’t always know when we are supposed to get to the heart of the matter to apply a principle and when we are supposed to take it explicitly, because certainly when God commands that we are not to make any "image in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below...[nor] bow down to them or worship them" you better believe that's literal!
But there are plenty of modern issues that we must interpret divine principles in order to judge rightly -- issues like abortion, the environment, stem cell research, modern fertility procedures, homosexual marriage -- which all came up in time after the Bible was completed. None of these are explicitly mentioned in the Bible and yet we all (try to) extract divine principles to navigate these modern waters. Even on those issues there is furious controversy on how the Lord is leading us (and I certainly don't want to engage in any of those debates here!). But my main point is that we don't derive our morality from explicitness alone, but on divine principles that we exegete and then apply hermeneutically to our contexts. (See here for a definition of exegesis and hermeneutics as we usually apply to Biblical studies.)
A friend of mine also pointed out to me the practice of "proof-texting," which she defines as the "taking [of a] single verse or collection of verses to establish a doctrine, without comparing them to the whole of Scripture." The example she gives of proof-texting that is explicitly or implicitly refuted elsewhere in Scripture is that of snake-handling in Mark, when considered in isolation from “Do not put your God to the test.” She writes, "There are churches that actually bring poisonous snakes into the group and the members handle them as proof of their faith. Every now and then someone gets bit. I knew a pastor in north Louisiana who, whenever he went into a snake-infested area, he’d call the pastor of the snake-handling church to clear out the snakes for him."
I'm not a theologian or a scholar, so I'm not going to go into further depth here, but are we agreed there, at least in part? We don't put the Scripture to the test of explicitness in order for the truth contained within it to be applied to our lives?
Now, to the topic.
Let’s consider some conditions in which divorce is not explicitly allowed by the Bible -- i.e. the Bible does not explicitly say, "If xyz happens, you can divorce."
- Your spouse goes insane.
- Your spouse tries to kill you.
- Your spouse keeps a gun and doesn't actually shoot you, but constantly tells you someday he or she is going to blow your head off.
- Your spouse murders your child.
- Your spouse commits some other terrible crime, and does not get caught and you can’t prove it to police.
- Your spouse commits a terrible crime and does get caught and is in prison for life.
- Your spouse repeatedly takes and squanders all your money and leaves you destitute and the children destitute. (Have you ever read or seen The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio? If so, don't tell me it didn't make you angry.)
- Your spouse is an addict, refuses to seek treatment, and brings home his habit as well as much criminal influence, which in turn affect the children.
- Your spouse marries another woman against your will – not adultery, but polygamy, claiming it is "allowed" in the Bible. (Let's assume that the state, which prohibits polygamy, looks the other way, or that you live in some country or state that allows polygamy.)
- Your spouse is in a coma and is stable on life support, but doctors say there is little brain activity and he/she will likely never wake up, but will likely outlive you. You wait years, but based on his preexisting request and your own respect for life, will never decide to pull the plug.
- Your spouse engages in gaslighting (crazymaking) and is about to have you committed to a mental institution.
- You are a victim of child marriage, sold by your parents at age 10, by a man who brutally rapes you. (True story of Yemeni child bride Nujood -- read her story.)
- Your spouse beats you violently.
- Your spouse beats the children violently. The state will take the children from you if you stay with him.
- Your spouse verbally and psychologically abuses you and the children.
- Your spouse is a Satanist and ritually abuses and tortures animals.
Basically I came up with this list by asking the question, other than adultery and abandonment (the two "conditions" in which many people in the modern church interpret that the Bible explicitly allows divorce), what are some possible scenarios in which your marriage could make your life completely horrible? I'm sure someone out there could add many more colorful scenarios because there are so many ways to suffer. As Tolstoy said in Anna Karenina, "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."
The purpose of this list is NOT for you to say, "Oh yes, you should DEFINITELY divorce in that circumstance." I don't think that way myself; I deliberately listed scenarios that represent a range of where I think it falls in the "justifiable for divorce" spectrum. Without more details, how can one tell? Can the marriage be saved? Will counseling, medication, intervention help? How dangerous is the situation? Are she and the children in a safe place? Who is helping or not helping in the scenario?
The purpose of the list is to give you pause. To cause struggle in the heart as one faces the serious suffering of the spouse and children. For every honest Christ-follower who loves God and people, I believe that there is something seriously wrong if there is no pause, if the immediate answer to each of these scenarios is, "NO. Divorce in this circumstance is never, EVER allowed. No discussion. No struggle. I don't even need to take this to the Lord to ask." True compassion as I see in Christ would struggle on behalf of the suffering spouse and children in each scenario. Put someone you love in each scenario -- a daughter, a sister, a dear friend -- and then tell them that they must live with that spouse forever without a moment's hesitation in your heart, without even a pause to go and think and pray about it. I don't believe the church is called to be heartless in this matter, to prioritize a piece of paper that legally binds two people together (because in most of these cases, the marriage ISN'T acting out as a true marriage), over the safety of women and children. That is not the attitude I see in the Lord Jesus.
Every serious Christian must humbly take each scenario, when rooted in reality, not in a hypothetical way (because the details matter), to the Lord and Scripture again. I don't think God ever intended for our Christianity to be a fruit of the knowledge of good and evil -- once you've taken and eaten, once you've been a Christian for x number of years, once you've read through the Bible a few times, once you've gone through seminary, you've got all the answers and you don't need to talk to the Lord any more to ask for His wisdom. We dishonor God and the Scriptures when we assume that we don't need to keep dialoguing with the Lord. Faith isn't something you arrive at -- it's a relationship. Every new moral question, as we face it, we take back to the Lord and to Scripture. There is a deep arrogance when we assume we know all the answers before we've really spent time struggling with the questions.
I am also not arguing just yet that in any of these scenarios, divorce is allowed by the Bible. Each of those scenarios need to be examined specifically and held up against the Word. In future blog posts I intend to take abuse as my scenario and look at it. This is just my introduction, so if you feel like I haven't made any argument yet, it's because I haven't. I'm just setting up the foundation. I'm asking you to be humble, put down your gloves, and walk with me in this journey of looking again at the Text and admitting to God, "We need Your wisdom. Speak to us through Your Word. We don't have all the answers. Show us the way."
So many people who have confronted me with judgment about my pursuing divorce knew very little of the relevant Scriptures (and also didn't even ask me for my story). They had no idea what the Bible says about divorce, marriage and covenant. They had just ingested somewhere the idea that marriage was inviolable, and had decided that they needed no more study or searching or asking of the Lord before they came down in judgment upon me and urged me to go back into a destructive situation. A few who knew their Bible a little better knew about the two "exceptions" of adultery and abandonment. But very, very few knew what Mosaic law said about it, or remembered the contexts in which Jesus and Paul spoke about marriage.
Church, I'm not asking you to agree with me. I'm asking you to do your homework before you condemn me and thousands of other abused women who have turned to divorce to escape their abusive spouses. Part of that means listening to the victim's story, and doing your homework about abuse (I recommend Lundy Bancroft's book Why Does He Do That?). Part of it means taking it to the Lord and the Bible, and really struggling to do good exegesis. Part of it is a deep commitment to truth. Part of it is a deep commitment to compassion and justice.
If I've convinced you to take a second look, I'll see you at part 2.
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