Thursday, October 7, 2021

 Very good article by 

MICHAEL J. KRUGER

Why Don’t Churches Stop Spiritually Abusive Pastors?

For the last couple of months I’ve been making my way through a blog series on spiritual abuse which I am calling “Bully Pulpit”.  You can see the prior installments here , herehere, and here.

Part of the goal of this series has been to lead up to my session on spiritual abuse at the TGC National Conference.  I will be leading a panel discussion on this topic with my friends Dan Doriani and John Yates, at 11AM on April 12th. Please join us if you will be attending TGC, or you can tune-in online.

With the conference right around the corner, this will be the last installment of my blog series. But I am in the process of writing a full-length book on the subject of spiritual abuse, so you can keep an eye out for that over the next year or more.

As we come to the final post in the series, we face one of the most troubling questions of all: Why don’t churches stop spiritually abusive pastors?

In story after story of abuse, the same tragic series of events plays out. The abusive pastor engages in his destructive behavior for years and years until someone finally speaks up. But even then, most churches do nothing (in fact, many churches actually attack the victims). And even when the church does do something, it’s often a half-hearted, inadequate response. And even if the rare church finally removes a pastor for abuse, that just leads to the next question: Why did it take you so long to act? Why did you tolerate this behavior for 25 years?

The reason we ask these questions is because there is always evidence—actually, lots of evidence—for the destructive behavior of these abusive pastors. As we observed in a prior post, abusive pastors often leave a “relational debris field” or a “trail of dead bodies” in their wake. So, why don’t churches see the trail of dead bodies? Why don’t they connect the dots?

There are a lot of reasons churches don’t see what’s happening. But I would suggest there are several theological misunderstandings that have contributed greatly to the problem. Let’s look at three of them.

A Misunderstanding of Total Depravity

Reformed folks frequently talk about total depravity—how sin is deeper and more pernicious than we realize, affecting every aspect of our lives (actions, mind, will). Consequently, every human being (even pastors) have the potential to commit serious acts of wickedness.

And yet, despite affirming this doctrine on paper, it is amazing how quickly it is forgotten when it comes to cases of spiritual abuse. As soon as someone has the courage to speak up about abusive behavior, they are usually met with a chorus of rebuttals along the lines of, “I know this pastor, and he could never do this.” Or, “This pastor has blessed and helped countless people over the years. Thus, he could never do something like this.”

In other words, rather than taking the concerns seriously and investigating them carefully, they are dismissed as essentially impossible (or at least so unlikely as to not merit further consideration).

And in tragically ironic turn, the defenders of the abusive pastor will often raise questions about the integrity and the character of the victims, suggesting that they are out to “slander” or malign a person’s “good name.”

So, the doctrine of total depravity is forgotten when it comes to the pastor, but remembered when it comes to the victims.

Sadly, the events of the last year with Ravi Zacharias have shown us that even the most respected and well-loved leaders have the potential for unspeakable depravity. Ravi had his defenders, arguing that he could never, and would never, do these things. But, it turned out that he did, in fact, do them.

This doesn’t mean, of course, that we do away with the presumption of innocence. But, as David French observed in regard to the Ravi Zacharias case, “No organization can allow shock at dreadful allegations (or the conviction that, “I know him. He would not do that”) transform the presumption of innocence into the wholly improper assumption that an accuser is lying.”

A Misunderstanding of Grace

Christianity, at its core, has always been about grace. And in recent years, particularly in Reformed, evangelical circles, there has been a burst of new attention on grace—and that’s a good thing.

But, in order to accentuate the beauty of this grace, an additional step has been taken by some. Since we are desperate sinners saved by grace, it is reasoned, then it must be the case that we can make no distinctions between levels of sin. Now more than ever, then, we hear phrases like “all sins are equal,” or “all of us are equally sinners.” Such language is intended to uphold grace; it’s just another way to say that no one is any better than anyone else.

Now, the phrase “all sins are equal” is partly true, depending on what one means. If one uses the phrase simply to indicate that any sin is enough to separate us from God and warrant his wrath, then it would be correct. God is so holy that any violation of his law, no matter how trivial in our eyes, is an offense in his eyes worthy of condemnation.

However, that is not the only way the phrase has been used. Others use this phrase as way to “flatten out” all sins so that they are not distinguishable from each other. Or, to put it another way, this phrase is used to portray all human beings as precisely the same.

But, this understanding is deeply problematic on a number of grounds. For one, to say all sins are the same is to confuse the effect of sin with the heinousness of sin. While all sins are equal in their effect (they separate us from God), they are not all equally heinous. In fact, the Bible clearly differentiates between sins. Some sins are severe in terms of impact (1 Cor 6:18), in terms of culpability (Rom 1:21-32), in terms of judgment warranted (2 Pet 2:17Mark 9:42James 3:1), and in terms of whether one is qualified for ministry (1 Tim 3:1-7).

Even more importantly, however, this misunderstanding of grace has been used to defend abusive leaders. If we are all equal sinners, it is argued, then we should give these abusive pastors a break. They are sinners too, just like the rest of us. To say otherwise is to put ourselves in a place of judgment over them; it is to make out ourselves to be more righteous than other people. In other words, we need to “show them grace.”

It is difficult to overstate how destructive and debilitating this sort of theological error can be. It makes the victims feel almost like they are to blame; as if its their own “unforgiving” heart that is in the way of “reconciliation.” Moreover, it utterly ignores the heinousness of the abusive itself. It forgets that some sins are worse than others. And some sinners are worse than others. And a shepherd abusing the sheep is one of the very worst. On top of this, such a misuse of grace ignores all the passages in Scripture about upholding justice, righteousness, and defending the innocent.

A Misunderstanding of Conflict

Sadly, there is an additional way that a misunderstanding of grace has been used to defend abusive pastors and further harm the victims. If we are all equally sinful, it is argued, then that must mean that the abusive pastor and the victim are equally to blame for the conflict. A wrong understanding of grace, then, is used to minimize the heinousness of the abuse, and accentuate the sins of the victim (whatever they may be).

At this point, elder boards will typically make statements like, “Well, everyone here’s guilty of sin.” Or, “There’s blame on both sides.” In other words, they have taken abuse, and turned it merely into a “conflict.” It’s no different, they say, than just Paul and Barnabas disagreeing.

If the prior error was tragic in its own right, this second one may be even worse. It’s hard to conceive of a greater abuse of the doctrine of grace, but sadly it happens all the time—ironically, in churches that most loudly profess to be about grace. What these churches have done is wrongly assumed that all sins are equal and that all conflicts are equal in terms of blame and accountability. Rather than helping, they are actually further abusing the victim.

It would be the equivalent of taking a situation where a husband abuses his wife and telling them they just need to each confess their sins and go to marriage counseling. But this would be a tragic mistake. An abuse case is not just a “conflict.” It is not an equal playing field. Of course, the wife is a sinner too. But, whatever sins she may have committed do not justify the husband’s abuse, nor should they distract the church from making it a priority to address that abuse.

Conclusion

We should remember that even if churches don’t stop abusive shepherds, that does not mean there is no hope. After rebuking the bad shepherds of Israel in Ezekiel 34, God promises that he will do something about them: “Behold, I am against the [bad] shepherds . . . I will rescue my sheep from their mouths” (v.10).

How will God do this? By coming himself to be the great shepherd: “I myself will be the shepherd of my sheep, and I myself will make them lie down, declare the Lord God” (v.15).

With such a promise in mind, the words of Jesus in the Gospels take on a new significance: “I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep” (John 10:11). In other words, Jesus is declaring that he is the Lord God keeping the promise of Ezekiel 34 to shepherd his people.

And he will do the opposite of what the bad shepherds of Israel did. They saved their life at the expense of the sheep, whereas Jesus will save the sheep at the expense of his own life.

Friday, July 10, 2015

Burning Hearts Are Not Nourished by Empty Heads


Christianity Today 26, 100 (Sept. 3, 1982). | Sept. 3, 1982 | R.C. Sproul

How can we love what we do not understand?  What do you read first when the newspaper arrives? I dive for the sports pages—an involuntary reflex action left over from a youth spent with visions of Pittsburgh Pirates and Steelers dancing in my head. The child within me still suffers more anxiety over league standings than the Falkland Islands. Old reading habits die hard. It is the same with Christian magazines and periodicals. When I first began reading Christianity Today, two columns hooked me quickly. One was "Eutychus and His Kin," the other, "Current Religious Thought." I still go first to "Current Religious Thought," for I know I will encounter some vignettes of intellectual insight to nourish my too-empty head.

We live in what may be the most anti-intellectual period in the history of Western civilization. We are not necessarily antiacademic, antitechnological, or antiscientific. The accent is against the intellect itself. Secular culture has embraced a kind of impressionism that threatens to turn all our brains into mush, and the evangelical world has followed suit, developing an allergy to all things intellectual. The kind of debate waged between Luther and Erasmus or Edwards and Chubb would be unacceptable today. Their reasoning was too acute, their polemics too acerbic, their critiques too rapier-like for our modern comfort zones. Debates, if they are held today, are won by charm and a benign smile rather than by lucid argument. Satire is almost extinct, the verbal gladiators who used it having perished with the fathers.

To be sure, William Buckley persists, but he is an anachronism, a refurbished antique whose style is so uncommon that some mistake him for something new. How I pine for the days of yore when Ad Leitch responded to Tillich's recasting of traditional categories of divine transcendence from "up-there" to "down-there" on the depth dimension of the Ground of Being. Does anyone remember Leitch's article in the early sixties about the impact Tillich's theology would have on church architecture? He said that instead of steeples pointing heavenward we would have to have our church services while assembled in a cavernous open pit. Our search for the Ground of Being would occur not while singing "Rise Up, O Men of God," but rather ''Go Down, Moses." Kierkegaard, after evaluating the state of the church in nineteenth-century Europe, wrote, "My complaint is not that this age is wicked, but that it is paltry: It lacks passion." The Dane should be alive today. Passion we have —it is reason that is in eclipse.

Christianity is an intellectual faith. This does not mean that it flirts with intellectualism or restricts sainthood to an elite group of gnostic eggheads. But though the Word of God is not limited to intellectuals, its content is addressed to the mind. There is a primacy of the intellect in the Christian life as well as a primacy of the heart. How can that be? To speak of the primacy of both mind and heart sounds like a neo-orthodox creed, a dabbling in dialectics. How can two distinct things have primacy at the same rime without resorting to contradiction? Must there not be one ultimate primacy, or at least a primus inter pares? We can, I think, have two primacies if they hold their primacy in different relations. The primacy of the intellect is with respect to order. The primacy of the heart is with respect to importance.

 We know that the disposition of the heart toward Christ is of supreme importance. If our doctrine is correct, our intellectual understanding of theology impeccable, it is to no avail if our heart is "far from him." If the head is right and the heart is wrong, we perish. On the other hand, if the head is confused, the understanding muddled, and the doctrine fuzzy, there is still hope for us if our hearts beat with a passion for God. Better the empty head than the empty heart.

Why then bother with religious thought, or speak at all of the primacy of the mind? Precisely for the sake of the heart. How can we love what we do not understand? How can we worship an unknown God? If the character of God remains an enigma to us, all our singing, praying, and religious zeal becomes a useless passion, a beating of the air. Religion degenerates to superstition and liturgy becomes a form of magical incantation.

There is a content to the Christian faith. That content is directed, by way of order, to the mind. The New Testament calls us to be childlike, but not with respect to understanding. It is the plea of the apostolic heart that we not be ignorant in our heads. God has made us with a harmony of heart and head, of thought and action,  God the Holy Spirit superintended a Book that is to be read, whose verbal content is to be so understood and digested that our hearts may burn within us. As the ankle bone is connected to the knee bone, so there is a marvelous circuitry fashioned by God that flashes back and forth from head to heart. The more we know him the more we are able to love him. The more we love him the more we seek to know him. To be central in our hearts he must be foremost in our minds. Religious thought is the prerequisite to religious affection and obedient action.

We must have passion—indeed hearts on fire for the things of God. But that passion must resist with intensity the anti-intellectual spirit of the world. The entrance of that spirit into the house of God is like a Trojan horse, concealing within its belly the troops of the enemy who would beguile us with contentless religion, thoughtless action, and vacuous zeal—fire without; light. Its only legacy will be a tomb for a forgotten deity inscribed with the; epitaph, "To an Unknown God."