I do not believe that an abuser can never be a Christian. God can — and sometimes does — give abusers regeneration, i.e., the new birth which Jesus describes in John 3:3. In my observation and experience, this occurs rarely; but I believe that it can occur. As an imperfect mortal, I have no right to declare that God cannot regenerate a person who has habitually and strategically mistreated other people. God is sovereign: He does whatsoever He chooses.
In saying this, I do not wish to impart false hope to victims of abuse.
Those of you who have followed this blog for a long time will realise that I am now taking a different stance to the one Jeff Crippen took, which I went along with from 2012-2017 when Jeff and I were co-leading this blog. After this post is published, I will be adding updates to the old posts and pages at this blog which taught that an abuser can never be a Christian. And where appropriate, I will be altering the FAQs.
Many victims have been pressured to believe that God will (or has already) given their abuser regeneration. Many victims have been pressured to trust and believe that an abuser who professes to be a Christian must been born again. This pressure is wrong. I encourage victims of abuse to resist such coercion.
There is a widespread but mistaken idea that victims ought to stay with the abuser because “marriage is a mission field” and the victim of abuse is the person in the best position to evangelise the abuser. People who are teaching this idea are coercing victims into being a martyr to the abuser’s mistreatment, and laying false guilt on victims who leave their abusers. Because the abuser harbours deep disrespect for the victim, and punishes the victim for even subtly resisting his abuse, the victim’s efforts at evangelism are extremely unlikely to make any impact on the hard heart of the abuser. The victim’s efforts are more likely to intensify the abuser’s scorn for the gospel message. If and when the victim decides to leave the abuser, that is more likely to bring the abuser to admit and repent of his sin and seek help from God. But if the victim leaves him, there’s no guarantee he will come to the Lord in genuine repentance. (Note: I know that sometimes the genders are reversed but I use the male pronoun for the abuser because that is the most common scenario.)
I do not endorse the notion that an abuser who verbally professes to be a Christian must be a Christian.
I do not believe that any of these things prove a person is a Christian:
- regular church attendance
- regular Bible reading, knowledge of scripture
- prayer
- ordination or holding any leadership position in a Christian organisation
- being baptised, at whatever age, whether by immersion or by sprinkling
- the display of “christian virtues”
- short or medium-term repentant behaviour that gives the impression of reformation of character.
A person can have a “story faith” but not be regenerate.
If an abuser is genuinely born again, he will feel and respond rightly to the Holy Spirit pricking his conscience calling him to forsake his sinful behaviour and attitudes. And where possible he will make reparation to those he has mistreated, showing especial respect to the person or people he had chosen to target with his abusive behaviour.
If an abuser thinks he is born again and he feels these pricks of conscience but resists them, the more likely it is that he is not truly regenerate. The more he habitually and trenchantly resists being sanctified, the more likely it is that either he was never regenerate, or that he has become reprobate.
At this point in time I am not taking a public stand on the controversy about “once saved, always saved” versus the idea that a truly regenerate Christian can lose their salvation. I can find passages in scripture which support both viewpoints, and I suspect that this is one of the seeming-paradoxes in Christianity which I may never fully comprehend till God winds up this world like a scroll and brings in the New Heavens and New Earth.
When you (or I) are following Christ, we are encouraged to discern over time whether another professing believer’s conduct and character is becoming sanctified in accord with the fruit of the Spirit. I encourage all Christian victims of abuse to exercise their individual liberty in Christ to form their own discernment about another person who professes to be following Christ. To exercise discernment we are encouraged to use scripture, biblical common sense, prayer, our internal neurobiology (both hemispheres of the skull-brain, plus the heart-brain, and the belly-brain which is the ‘gut feeling’ that comes from our intestines) and the guidance of the Spirit.
Can a non-Christian abuser reform without becoming a Christian?
One final point. I have heard what I believe to be a few plausible accounts of genuine character reformation by non-Christian abusers who have reformed (or are genuinely reforming) their abusive behaviours and attitudes. One example is Ivan Clarke (link opens in YouTube and I have pasted Ivan’s bio at the end of this post). Often, the accounts I find plausible are backed up by the testimony of the partner of the reformed (reforming) abuser. In the accounts I believe are genuine, the abuser had been badly abused in childhood, often in their family of origin. In order to reform from acting abusively, the abuser has to change his abusive attitudes and conduct, and work on healing the trauma he suffered in childhood. Practising strategies to stop the abusive conduct, and healing the abuser’s childhood trauma, seem to take place in conjunction: neither can be skipped or skimmed over.
I do not believe most of the accounts I’ve heard in which the reformation has only been evident for months or one or two years. In the accounts I hear, I look for at least several years of evidence, preferably with corroboration from the partner and / or from seasoned professionals who are well-experienced in assessing and treating abusers who want to reform. In my experience, non-Christian professionals are often more astute than Christian professionals at assessing and treating abusers and former abusers.
As I said already, God is sovereign. In His providence, He can cause a non-Christian abuser to reform his abusive conduct and attitudes into genuinely respectful conduct and attitudes with all people. But as far as I can tell, God’s sovereignty means He might or might not regenerate the former abuser as described in John 3:3.
Post updated 17 July 2024. Link to Ivan Clarke video added.
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Further Reading
Ivan Clarke’s bio from YouTube: “Ivan Clarke has many years of experience as a counsellor, clinical & educational consultant, and group leader in the Strong Aboriginal Men’s Program. Ivan was the senior Aboriginal counsellor with Link-Up NSW specialising in supporting stolen generation clients with alcohol and other drug issues, trauma, grief and loss, dual diagnosis and mental health issues prior to starting with the Education Centre Against Violence in 2011. In the last 10 years Ivan has worked in the social welfare / counselling field at the WHOís Rehabilitation facility, Foundation House and the Salvation Army Foster House before joining Link-Up NSW.”
William Tyndale discusses faith in his Prologue to the Book of Romans
What it means to have a “story faith”
If you want to know a bit more about our internal neurobiology, I mention it in this post: Facing, digesting and metabolising the feeling of shame for having done wrong.
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There are actually studies done on [whether or not]: can an abuser change their ways. Interesting results are that if they stop abusing physically, they will continue to abuse in other ways. They may reduce some aspects but their core belief is that they have a right to abuse in some way. It is their nature and belief system. Since we all know that emotional abuse is the worst in impact, there really isn’t much to hope for.
If anybody has been completely redeemed it would seem they were not a true abuser like what most of us know, one who uses their entire energy and life to destroy another or most likely many others.
Gaslighting those around the victim is also an abuse to the general public. This can lead to horrible disillusionment when the truth comes out, if they accept it. Abuse seems to be “normalized” out there, it is in your face constantly as people seem to accept being a bully is a strength, as we see in leadership and in politics. People are encouraged to be cruel to each other either in offensive or defensive ways which really waters down our message that abuse is wrong. We are lucky to see repentance and if we see it we are even luckier to see anything real or lasting.
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Thanks for you comment, Sarah. :)
I agree that there are studies showing that if an abuser stops physically abusing, the abuser tends to continue (or increase) the emotional abuse and other covert forms of abuse. I agree that the abuser’s core beliefs are what needs to change, if there is to be true reformation.
I put this sentence of yours in a separate paragraph, because I think it is really important:
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Hi, Barbara,
(It wouldn’t allow me to reply to your response to my comment down below so I’m responding here. I don’t know how the comment nesting system works on WordPress.)
I entirely agree with everything you’ve said. That is definitely the case with abuse. I think my point was trying to respond to a previous comment from someone else that said:
What I was trying to say was that such a framing, to say that they weren’t actually an abuser because they were capable of change, risks a sort of “No True Scotsman” argument. I don’t want to say that someone wasn’t an abuser because they were able to experience change — yes many abusers won’t, because of the hardness of their own hearts, but just because someone has managed to change doesn’t mean they weren’t an abuser in the first place, the nature of their actions and the impact on the person in question (as a result of the place their heart was in during their abusive behaviour), testifies to the fact that it was abuse. If we say that abusers categorically can’t be regenerated because of the nature of their heart and way of thinking, then all we end up doing is saying that for those who have genuinely been regenerated that what they did wasn’t abuse in the first place, when it quite clearly was.
My point was meant to be quite narrow in scope, in response to that particular line. I hope I didn’t suggest anything more than I did, that the mentality and the like aren’t important factors in what makes abuse what it is. Understanding that is absolutely important in understanding the nature and dynamics of abuse and why it impacts people the way it does. But ultimately I didn’t want to say that these things meant that an abuser couldn’t ever be regenerated, such that if they were, then they weren’t an abuser in the first place, because to do so would be to deny the awful impact on victims of the actions of people who have abused but are later regenerated.
We care about abuse ultimately because of the way it impacts the person abused, and so I want to be able to say that no matter how much a person’s heart was able to be changed, that abuse was still abuse.
[Paragraph added to enhance readability. Editors.]
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Sarah,
You wrote (10th July 2024):
That.
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My worry with saying that if they were able to be reformed then they weren’t a “true abuser” in the first place is that it puts the focus on what makes abuse abuse in the wrong place. What makes a person an abuser is not primarily their nature or their belief system, how they’ve decided to “use their entire energy and life to destroy another”. This is helpful to understand the dynamics of abuse, what tends to cause it etc. But what makes abuse abuse is the nature of the action and the impact on the victim. It doesn’t matter what caused it, what matters is that it deeply deeply harmed and violated the person in question.
So you can imagine that you might have someone who didn’t abuse because they had an irreversible worldview, because it was in their nature, and thus that it’s more possible for them to be genuinely renewed. But that doesn’t mean that what they did wasn’t genuinely wrong, that it wasn’t genuinely abuse or that they weren’t an abuser, because the nature of the action and the impact on the person in question is still the same. Thus, whilst it may be true that this is often the case for most abusers, we shouldn’t define abuse on this basis, to do so would be to take it out of the experience of the victim, and we thus shouldn’t say that by their very nature abusers can’t be regenerated.
[Paragraph break added to enhance readability. Editors.]
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Hi, franticraner, I’m not sure how to respond to your comment. Maybe I’ve not understood what you said.
I define abuse as a pattern of coercive control (ongoing actions or inactions) that proceeds from a mentality of entitlement to power, whereby, through intimidation, manipulation and isolation, the abuser keeps their target subordinated and under their control. My definition addresses both the harmful actions (the pattern of coercively controlling behaviour) and the mentality (the beliefs) held the individual causing the harm.
The Bible says “nothing is impossible with God” which I take to mean that God can, if He chooses to, soften a very stony heart and bring a very wicked person to regeneration. However, the Bible also says that we each have free will, which means that person can resist and rebel against God. The more the person has habitually suppressed his conscience, the more likely it is that he will continue resisting God, because he has chosen to deeply entrench his habit of rebellion.
Since abusers are so secretive about their real beliefs and motivations, and since they lie so much, to us and to themselves, we look at the pattern of their behaviour. We don’t assume that they are telling the truth if they say, “When I was abusing my partner, I didn’t have a mentality of entitlement.” If that individual is genuinely forsaking his sinful patterns of behaviour, if he has truly committed to walk the narrow path and give up his abusive conduct, he may at some stage realise that he had had a mentality of entitlement. It’s not okay if he fakes such a realisation — that would be him masquerading repentance.
I’m not sure I understand this sentence of yours:
Feel free to tell me if my comment doesn’t hit the mark of what you were saying. :)
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A study of the pharaoh in the Exodus showed me something valuable and fascinating. In the original Hebrew (or was it Septuagint?), the pharaoh hardened his own heart so many times during the early plagues, that the Lord Yahweh then went ahead and gave him over to his own hardened heart, hardening it further and seemingly permanently.
Our English translations seem to mix up who hardened the pharaoh’s heart when, whether himself or Yahweh God. It’s much clearer in the original text.
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Welcome back, Laurie! 😊 And thank you for writing about the Pharaoh during the Exodus….so many people make assumptions about who (or is that Who?) hardens an individual’s heart. Do we — or can we — really know?
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Reaching Out,
You wrote (10th July 2024):
That.
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I agree with your position. It is my experience with many abusers that this is truth. Abusers hide within the community of the “church” and disguising themselves as “Christians”. You will know God’s people by their love – through their actions. Don’t be deceived. Forgiveness does not mean reconciliation — remember that.
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Just Jesus, Jodie & B,
You wrote (10th July 2024):
That.
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Adding on to my comment of 10th July 2024….
I was thinking of the part of Just Jesus, Jodie & B’s comment that I quoted….as well as what Laurie wrote about Pharaoh, Exodus, and hard hearts (10th July 2024)….and Barb referred to “Story Faith” in her post (and included the link to her post on “Story Faith”).
Perhaps readers would appreciate the link to Barb’s Blindness Series Digest? 😊
Barb….Mentioning — and linking to — your excellent Blindness Series Digest is the only thing I could think of to “improve” your post. 😊
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I appreciate you sending this to me and for making this a public post. This stands out to me the most:
This was the most true in my situation and probably the only thing that’ll bring an abuser to repentance. If my ex-wife hadn’t left, I very well could’ve continued to abuse her. I know your blog’s opinion on Paul Hegstrom, but one quote from his life movie “Unforgivable” that stands out to me the most is the counselor stating to John Ritter (Paul) “nobody is better at self-deception than men who batter women.” This statement is true, but there’s no escaping an empty house.
The pain of losing someone I loved (by my own actions) is my motivation. Though I’m not working to bring her back, that pain keeps me going to remember the pain I’ve caused to others. I also know that I’ll stand before God one day and give an account face-to-face with Him about my actions. Even moreso account for the fact that I had a form of godliness but denied the “power” thereof. I had everything I needed to live faithfully but chose to be in denial and be prideful.
Thanks.
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Thanks for commenting, Joseph.
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