Teaching Wives to Submit to Abuse is Teaching Them to Enable Sin

One of the first things they teach you in the field of communications is that repetition is the key. If you are going to effectively communicate something, you need to be prepared to repeat it until you’re blue in the face. It may very well be your 4 trillionth time saying something, but it’s more than likely the very first time your audience has heard it.

This blog entry is offered in that vein. I’m actually a bit tired of talking about abusive men in powerful places in the church. Beating the same drum over and over can give you a headache after awhile. I would love to focus on something else— Caitlin Clark’s insane contributions to women’s sport or why lip injections are almost always a terrible idea or why fake butter is a crime against humanity. But here we are.

This time it’s a newly resurrected clip of John Street that’s got my proverbial jaw on the floor.

Since most of you probably don’t even know who John is, he’s the Chair of the Master of Arts in Biblical Counseling at The Masters Seminary. This means he spends his days training hundreds of future (male) pastors how to give “biblical” counsel on the various trials that emerge in peoples’ lives. It should be noted here that John MacArthur serves as the seminary’s chancellor, and, as I wrote about recently, JMac recklessly preaches that mental health disorders like PTSD or OCD or ADHD are not even real, which really makes you wonder what the rest of the “biblical” counseling model could offer in light of this disastrous crack in the foundation, but I digress…

In the clip, you can see Dr. Street teaching a room full of men about the alleged evils of battered women’s shelters, explaining that the “feminist” shelters encourage abused wives to escape rather than doing the godly thing and returning to fight for the marriage. He laments how awful it is that battered wives are encouraged to become financially independent and put their children in childcare. He warns the would-be pastors of how wrong it is for shelter staff to withhold the wives’ location from their abusers, claiming it leads to “sinful manipulation.”

In a sermon Street delivered on a similar topic, he told women, in no uncertain terms, that God desired them to remain in abuse even if their husbands “horsewhipped” them every day.

If I have to explain why this is problematic, I’m honestly not sure what to tell you. I lack both the patience and the crayons to explain something this basic. More than 2000 American women lose their lives to domestic violence every year. “Go home and submit even unto death” is Satan’s counsel, not God’s.

Yet this is the voice and the heart that’s training up the next generation of pastors, guys. The video is over a decade old, but it’s the same song these guys are singing in 2024, and then they’re wondering why women are leaving the church in droves. It’s called “the permanence view” of marriage, and it’s widely held throughout the church, as popularized by guys like Voddie Baucham.

We need to talk about this. If you’re a Christian, you believe marriage is a sacrament. It’s sacred. It’s for life. This is the vow you make before the Lord.

But if a man abuses his wife, he has broken his vow. If he beats her, he has made the decision to throw away the marriage. He swore to protect her, but now she needs protection from him. He has abandoned his role as her husband.

So stop.

Stop putting the burden of marriage preservation on her shoulders. Stop telling her that God requires her to jeopardize her safety and enable his sin in order to make it last forever. Stop saying stupid things like “You can call the cops and legally separate from him, but you can never divorce him.”

This is absurd. If she cannot safely cohabit with the man, what in heavens name do you think you are preserving? It sure as heck ain’t marriage. It’s not the victims that need to be policed, rebuked, admonished, and controlled. It’s the monsters that harm them.

As inevitably happens, when I tweeted about this, I fielded a message from a woman currently trapped in a violent marriage, and like most of the women who find their way to my inbox, she was wrestling long and hard about her next course of action. How long could she afford to hold out hope when the writing was already on the wall? Should she even attempt to reconcile? How would she know?

When Paul instructed the older women in the church to teach the younger in the Bible, I think he must have had situations like these in mind. Because if this poor lady had gone to one of the Dr. Street’s apprentices for counsel, they would likely have led her straight off a cliff. Unfortunately, those guys aren’t invited to understand what the heck it is they’re talking about. If it were up to me, they would not be able to graduate seminary with at least 6 months of (silent) volunteer service in a battered women’s shelter to cure them of their callous disregard for the brutality of domestic violence. What this woman needed was the hard earned wisdom of someone who’d walked this road before.

As a dv survivor myself, I think Dr. Street’s counsel is downright dangerous. This is what I would like to say to any woman trapped in this devastating spiral:

No, sisters, do not submit to being horsewhipped every day. Do not enable your husband’s sin. You will do so at your own peril and the peril of your children who are observing these dynamics and beginning to believe they are normal. Seek safety first. You cannot do anything else until your safety has been secured. It is not wrong to hide your location from your husband if he has threatened your safety. It is necessary. It is what’s best for both of you in this situation.

If you do have eventual hopes of reconciliation, you must proceed with caution and wisdom and unwavering resolve to require accountability. As my own therapist put it, “The work of restoration cannot truly begin until a problem has been fully faced.”

If he’s not broken over his behavior, if he’s still pinning part of the blame on you, it’s never going to work unless or until that changes. I learned the hard way that half ass apologies aren’t good enough. Here’s what a half ass apology might look like:

• “I’m sorry I screamed at you and broke your belongings; you just really make me mad when…”

• “Why do you still want to talk about that? I apologized for it yesterday, so you need to stop being bitter and forgive me.”

• “Man, I’ll have to be extra careful around you since you obviously can’t take a joke.”

• “I probably shouldn’t have done that, but if I really wanted to hurt you, I would have.”

• The gift in lieu of an apology

• The unfulfilled promise to seek therapy or help. For example, alcoholics do this when they make public announcements of their decision not to drink for 6 months in order to get unmerited praise and applause for their courage while secretly returning to drinking a week later.

• Insisting on changing therapists every time the current one holds his feet to the fire

Genuine apologies are accompanied by genuine remorse, not demands or deadlines on your reciprocated efforts. If someone is sincerely sorry for wounding you, they won’t resent you for having the audacity to bleed or tend to your wounds. Genuine apologies center your healing, not the perpetrator’s ego or feelings. Cheap grace produces cheap results, not real healing.

These are the types of things women in these horrible situations need to hear. They don’t need sanctimonious stories about 18th century women who endured more in the name of biblical submission. They don’t need to offer themselves up as martyrs on a cross that already bought their freedom. They need to be reminded that they are daughters of the King, and they need to be encouraged to live in such a way that indicates they believe it’s true.

God loves His people more than He loves His institutions. He has called us to live in peace and in freedom. We cannot afford to allow teaching as terrible as Dr. Street’s to continue to go unchecked or sold as righteousness to the next generation of pastors and biblical counselors. The stakes are just too high.

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