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Perhaps you can remember an occasion where something was said and you felt a shudder of shame. Such a moment happened for me a couple of years ago, when I had convened a group of conservative evangelical women leaders to talk about various issues affecting the church. The conversation turned to the awful revelations of sexual abuse and misogyny within evangelical churches—sometimes carried out or covered up by those who were respected as champions of theological orthodoxy and morality. One woman in the room said, “I get the feeling that many of our Christian brothers are especially thrown by this because they are shocked by it all; what you need to know is that, while we are angry and sad, we are not shocked.” And every woman—no matter the age, denomination, or place on the spectrum of church worship “styles”—all nodded their heads along with her. They had all seen spiritual abuse and mistreatment, and they had all seen male leaders not raising the right sorts of questions, at the right time. I felt a sense of sorrow, and then a sense of shame. How could the church not see so many instances of evil carried out, blasphemously, in Jesus’ name?
THE DANGER OF LOOKING FOR SOLUTIONS IN THE WRONG PLACES One of the dangers in this unveiling time of sexual abuse is to seek to find a theological or ecclesiological or political or ideological “reason” for abuse in a way that can give the illusion that just adopting the “right” positions will give a safe harbor from such atrocities. When a Hollywood director is caught in an abusive pattern, some evangelical Christians will say, “See, this is where the ideology of sexual revolution leads; ideas have consequences.” And then when a Christian clergyman is discovered in the same sort of abusive behavior, I’ve heard some of my secular friends say that such should not be surprising since that’s where “sexual repression” leads.
When the scope of the abuse crisis in the Roman Catholic Church started coming to light, some Protestants said, “This is what happens when clerical celibacy is mandated,” while some Catholic traditionalists said the abuse was the result of the 1960s or the “looseness” of Vatican II. When the scope of sexual abuse cases in Southern Baptist churches was reported, some said this is what happens when there’s church autonomy without the accountability of bishops. And yet, the problem in the Catholic church is not autonomy or lack of hierarchy, but the reverse. The problem with such debates is not that they consider how theologies and ideologies can empower abuse—or create structures of cultures in which such abuse can grow. That is certainly true. The problem is that often these debates can give the illusion that the struggle to keep the vulnerable safe from sexual predation is a matter of exchanging one set of propositions for another, or one set of by-laws for another. Some theologies lead to horrible consequences, yes. And some church structures can lead to heightened vulnerability. But sexual abuse of the vulnerable is demonic—and the devil can use any theology, ideology, or structure. Evildoers can hide behind church hierarchies—high and low—or behind church autonomy. They can hide behind systems where leaders are mandatorily celibate or in systems where the leaders have families with double-digit numbers of children.
THE NEED FOR REFORMATION AND BEING SHAPED BY THE BIBLE That said, any revelation of a horror within the church ought to prompt the church to say, “From where did this come? Is what we have been saying or teaching yielding bad fruit?” The church, after all, ought to be always reforming. For many, it took the selling of indulgences for the construction of cathedrals to see that something had
been obscured in the gospel of grace. For others, it took seeing people in public scandal pronouncing themselves to be King David to see that “free grace” was being used to prop up the heresy of “Let us sin all the more that grace may abound.” One of the problems of our current era of evangelicalism is that we often cultivate those who are, in the words of New Testament scholar David Nienhuis, “Bible quoters rather than Bible readers.” And here I am not referring to the often-bemoaned problem of “theologically shallow” Christians, but, quite often, to those who are the most oriented around issues of “theological truth” but know the Bible primarily in terms of contemporary controversies and tribal identities rather than on its own terms, as the narrative that structures their own lives. That can lead to people who know how to marshal Bible verses to argue for or against infant baptism or for or against speaking in tongues, but who don’t have their lives and consciences shaped by the unfolding of the Bible. In such cases, then, the ideological silos become preeminent over everything and areas of biblical emphasis become exaggerated or eclipsed, depending on how they serve to prop up the arguments. I remember being seated in a church service once next to a man who doggedly argued, in every venue he could find, on his views on the “five points of Calvinism.” When the pastor of the church prayed, “And, Lord, we thank you for our Lord Jesus who is the propitiation for our sins, and not for our sins only but for those of the whole world.” After the “Amen,” this young man whispered to those around him, “What was up with that Arminian prayer?” Well, this was not an “Arminian prayer” (nor was it a “Calvinist prayer”), but a direct, literal quotation of 1 John 2:2. But, because the Arminians with which he argued often quoted 1 John 2:2 while he was quoting John 6 or Ephesians 1, this man had started to think of these passages in ways that ERLC. COM
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