Barbara Roberts

Hi everyone. I think:
1. Sadly, John Piper does not appear to have sufficient understanding of the underlying dynamics of domestic abuse. The suggestions he makes about how the wife should answer her husband’s proposal/demand for group sex is syrupy and totally unrealistic in that it portrays a wife who feels none of the outrage or horror a godly woman should quite rightly feel at such a proposal or demand.

2. Piper seems to discount the sinful evil of verbal abuse, by calling it ‘verbal unkindness’. He thereby discounts and minimizes the pain felt by victims of verbal abuse, and his advice could (perhaps inadvertently) encourage them to remain in denial about the seriousness of what they are suffering in their marriages.

3. The thee examples of abuse: ‘group sex’ and ‘verbal unkindness’ and ‘a slap’ are inadequate and insufficient to describe domestic abuse.
   a) The example of group sex is so ‘out there’ that most victims will never identify with it. They won’t recognize themselves as suffering sexual abuse, but their own marriages may in fact have lots of sexual abuse in the form of non-consensual sex obtained by the abuser’s manipulative threats or subtle pay-back techniques if the wife does not give in to the husband’s requests, plus his denigration of her sexual wishes and preferences, his unwelcome sexual gestures, jokes, put-downs, leers, etc, etc.)

b) The example of ‘verbal unkindness’ is such a minimized way of putting it. Although victims will identify with that phrase verbal unkindness (“Yes, I get that from my husband!”) it does nothing to help a victim define it as abuse. The mention of ‘enduring it for a season’ is not helpful. There needs to be much more discussion of how it becomes abuse if it is persistent and if it is designed to obtain and maintain control over the other spouse. Without such clear pointers, the phrase ‘verbal unkindness’ is about as helpful as throwing a cheap flotation ring to a person who may be drowning in an ocean, many hundreds of kilometers from the nearest land or ship.

c) The example of ‘a slap’ is unhelpful too. It perpetuates the myth that violence is just being hit. Any discussion of physical violence in the context of domestic abuse needs to include the commonest forms of physical violence: pushing, shoving, poking, elbowing, using size to intimidate (standing over you), threatening to hit, tripping you up, hitting physical objects other than you but with the implication that “it could be your next time”, hurting pets, etc. After mentioning these kinds of things, it’s safe (and wise) to go on and mention hitting you bodily, punching, slapping, pulling hair, displaying weapons, using weapons, strangling, smothering, beating up, rape. And then you need also to mention the physical abuse by deprivation: denying you medication or medical assistance, depriving you of sleep, food or suitable shelter, locking you in or out of the house, etc. If you only mention the more brutal types of violence, you leave out many victims, who will think “That doesn’t apply to me, my husband’s never punched me… he’s only pushed me, hit me with the back of his hand, elbowed me hard in the ribs once …”

My other concern about Piper’s remarks is that while he rightly says the victim should tell the church, and the church should reprove the husband, he does not give nearly enough detail about how the church should discipline the husband, and whether there is any place for getting help from secular services as well, or indeed whether the church should asssist the victim to get such secular help, for example, a protection order.

I know it was a very short video, and therefore it’s not fair to judge it as Piper’s full and final words on the subject. But I think even a short piece of advice could be handled much better. I hope Piper and those like him will be prepared to learn more about how to handle domestic abuse wisely.

On another tack, I am regularly disappointed when the discussion about ‘how should we handle domestic abuse?’ becomes reduced to verbal volleys where people just accuse each other of not agreeing on the interpretation of the biblical roles of husband and wife.

I wish we could, as a community, start disentangling the debate about gender roles from the debate about how to handle domestic abuse. Sure, there is overlap between the two issues, but many people on both sides of the gender-roles debate are muddying the discussion of domestic abuse (IMO) by trying to reduce it simply to a roles debate, and throwing mud over the fence at the opposing camp for their supposedly ‘wrong take’ on ROLES, rather than realizing that the paramount need is for Christians to understand what abusers actually DO to their victims and the deep dynamics of what really transpires in domestic abuse.

BTW, if anyone wants more ideas about how to handle domestic abuse in a Christian context, click on my name above and you will be taken to my website Not Under Bondage.