The Bible’s teachings on divorce are like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. In Christian advocacy spaces there’s this idea going around that when writing about divorce it’s okay to fit the jigsaw puzzle pieces together any old which way, so long as you come to an ethical conclusion.
An ethical conclusion —
- doesn’t entrap women in abusive marriages,
- doesn’t stigmatize women for divorcing abusive men,
- is in accord with God’s character — His justice, His compassionate love, and His commands that we extend helping hands to protect the oppressed.
“This writer put the puzzle pieces together and came to an ethical conclusion, so she must have put the puzzle pieces together properly!” That way of thinking is very common in Christian advocacy spaces. I think it’s mistaken on so many levels.
Advocates and writers who are contesting the teachings and practices that have enabled abuse in the church, please listen up! — I’m glad you’re exposing the toxic teachings which unfairly blame and shame women. And l know you don’t want to lay undue shame on Christian women who have been abused by their husbands.
But if you’ve assembled the divorce jigsaw pieces incorrectly, or you’ve not incorporated all of the pieces, the chances are you will be inadvertently saying things that will lay undue shame on Christian women who have been abused by their husbands.
Putting the jigsaw pieces together to reach an ethical conclusion is not enough.
To put the pieces together correctly, one must take many factors into account.
- The social context in which each of the divorce passages were given.
- The particular situations into which Moses, Jeremiah, Hosea, Ezra, Malachi, Jesus and Paul were speaking.
- The way divorce was legally / customarily enacted was not uniform across time and location. Divorce practices changed due to the introduction of man-made doctrines (the Pharisees) and man-made laws (the Roman Empire), and urgent need for course correction to prevent a looming disaster.
- Different types of divorce could have different financial outcomes.
- Many English versions of the Bible have mistranslated Malachi 2:16. So, when people have attempted to put the jigsaw puzzle pieces together, there has been a piece on the table which does not belong to the puzzle. That piece says “God hates divorce”. Most people don’t know that it doesn’t belong to the puzzle, so they try to make it fit. You can’t assemble a puzzle correctly if you’re trying to include a piece that doesn’t even belong!
You must also incorporate all the pieces of the puzzle.
Selecting some passages and ignoring others (the fallacy of selective evidence) might lead you to an idea that seems right because it doesn’t blame or spiritually entrap victims of marital mistreatment. But the fallacy of selective evidence won’t cut the mustard, because it doesn’t line up with God’s insistence on Truth. It doesn’t take into account the Whole Counsel of God.
Many people have put together some of the jigsaw pieces and jumped straight to the conclusion that they’ve assembled the whole puzzle.
In the past this was typically done by powerful male religious leaders.
These days, it’s also being done by many advocates who are awake to interpersonal abuse, the unjust exercise of authority, male privilege, etc. Often these advocates are married women, and they’ve never had to personally wrestle with the difficulties of putting all the puzzle pieces together to come to a just, ethical, conclusion that does not unfairly ascribe blame and sin to women. They’ve never had a dire personal need to figure out how to put all the puzzle pieces together correctly. They may have helped a relative, or helped some abused wives in their community and sphere of influence, but they’ve never stood in trepidation under the threat of God’s condemnation for divorcing their own husbands. And they don’t know what it’s like to have to keep breathing the foetid atmosphere of falsely ascribed shame and stigma that comes from church people when you divorce your own husband because he’s an abuser — and he never committed adultery during the marriage, so the adultery exception clause in Matthew 19:9 was inapplicable. Happily married advocates simply don’t have that lived experience. But I do.
My lived experience turned me into a victim-theologian. Because I love God’s Word, I wanted to complete the divorce jigsaw puzzle with no loose pieces left on the table. And I want to dispel the miasma, so that other abused wives who love God’s Word don’t have to go on hearing things that can unfairly ascribe fault to victims.
There are multitudes of different ways people have put together some of the jigsaw pieces and jumped straight to the conclusion that they’ve assembled the whole puzzle.
Dear Advocates: you probably don’t want to intensify the pain and stigma which abused Christian women suffer. Are you willing to separate those pieces of the jigsaw that you think you’ve assembled correctly?
I hope I’ve pricked your interest. 😊 I’ll soon be publishing a post about the saying “Moses allowed divorce for hardness of heart”, which is an oversimplified condensation of Matthew 19:8 and Mark 10:5. I will be showing how that the saying has been greatly misunderstood, to the detriment of victims of abuse.
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The fact that we need to fit the jigsaw puzzle of texts together raises the question of why and how the Christian church even came to a place where the assumed consensus position was (for so many years, and perhaps still is) one of “no divorce allowed, except for adultery”.
Sure, there is the tiresome excuse of “that’s what the Bible says — sorry, just gotta accept it, can’t help you there” but Christians don’t use that excuse for other behaviours, like eating shellfish, wearing mixed clothing (sure, OT), or giving away all our possessions (NT here!).
It’s obvious that the average Christian cherry-picks, but why is there a bias towards “picking” an interpretation that keeps the victim (mostly women) in a place of subservience and the perpetrator in the place of power? My (untested) theory is that there is an underlying bias and presumption in the church about the place of women in the family and in the world, and Biblical texts are simply exploited and co-opted to support that view. It seems to go unnoticed that Jesus Himself overturned more than tables — He uprooted and turned centuries of tradition on its head when He was inclusive in His treatment of women.
I have sometimes felt that arguing with Christians over texts to “prove” that abused women could divorce their husbands has been like engaging in a battle on their terms (and therefore agreeing with their presumptions), i.e., that they are simply following scriptures, and we need to show how we are doing the same. Sometimes I feel more inclined to say, “You are not even following scripture, you are simply following tradition of entitlement to have [the] power of women [taken away] and using scriptures to justify it. Until you can see that, it’s going to be futile “proving” that what I do is biblical.”
Just my initial thoughts. But yes, I am interested in the rest of the series. 😊
[Some minor editing done to clarify Anonymous’ comment. Editors.]
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Anonymous,
For your safety and protection I changed the screen name you submitted with your comment to the screen name you’ve used most recently on our blog. 😊
If you’d prefer a different screen name, please email me at reachingout.acfj@gmail.com
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Anonymous,
You raise some good points in your comment of 29th July 2025. 😊
You wrote (29th July 2025):
That.
You wrote:
That.
You wrote:
That.
You wrote:
(Anonymous’ name in brackets was added by me.)
No offence to you intended, Anonymous 😊 , and not to sound hopeless — because I’m not 😊 , I’d say your untested theory has been proven many times over. One has only to read the many stories of abuse, etc. in the church.
And you’re right about Jesus Himself, that He did more than just overturn just tables….that He uprooted and turned many centuries of tradition on its head, including that He was inclusive in His treatment of women. So many people often forget that.
You wrote:
(Anonymous’ name in brackets was added by me.)
You made a REALLY good point here, Anonymous. 😊 Although having said that — and no offence to you intended, Anonymous 😊 — it’s still VERY important and necessary to have those conversations(s). And the same thing could probably be said of other religions.
You wrote:
(Anonymous’ name in brackets was added by me. The brackets were in Anonymous comment.)
That.
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Adding on to my comment of 30th July 2025….
Barb,
I LOVED your post. 😊
I spent a LOT of time building puzzles….and I loved every minute of it. 😊 So when you wrote about building a puzzle, making sure all the pieces of the puzzle fit in the spot their supposed to fit, not incorporating pieces that don’t belong, etc., I could totally understand. 😊
You wrote (in your post):
I like your term “victim-theologian”. 😊
You wrote (in your post):
{The bold was done by me.)
The fact that you love God’s Word has always been obvious to me. 😊 I love the way you write about His Word, possible interpretations, clarify interpretations and words, etc. 😊
You wrote (in your post):
(The italics were in Barb’s post.)
You’ve DEFINITELY pricked my interest. 😊
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Hi, Finding Answers, I got the term “victim-theologian” from Ruth Barron who is one of my cyberfriends. I think she coined the term. It’s great, isn’t it! 😊
Ruth is a survivor of abuse. She was abused as a child by members of her own family, and as an adult she’s suffered layer upon layer of spiritual abuse and neglect by Christian organisations.
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Hi, Anonymous, thank you for your comment! 😊 😊 😊
I am 100% certain that there’s an underlying bias and presumption in the church about the place of women in the family and in the world. I am 100% certain that biblical texts have been exploited and co-opted to support the view that women are ‘less than’ men. This has been going on for centuries. The men who led the Protestant Reformation (particularly Calvin and his followers) were blind to this problem. They rightly rejected many of Rome’s false doctrines, but they left intact the false theology that women are ‘less than’ men in the church, the family, and the world. Arguing with Christians who have the underlying presupposition that women are ‘less than’men is certainly a hard battle, because they always filter everything through their presuppositions about male entitlement.
I think Anna Anderson is doing superb work exposing this faulty theology. She writes on Substack annaanderson.substack.com She’s brilliant! I haven’t had time yet to read all her articles, but here is one I have read which I think is brilliant: Patriarchy and the Lost City. Another of her brilliant articles is Magic and Mediators, which is a guest post at Aaron Haan’s substack.
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This is EXCELLENT, friend! Very, Very, Very good. And you are very correct that advocates, even those of us who have experienced different types of abuse, simply don’t have the lived experience to identify and clearly address the issues faced by women divorcing abusive husbands.
It is so important that the voices of those with experience in facing a particular issue be heard. This is why I have come to stress what I call “victim theology”. Recently, Barbara asked for a definition of this term, but I did not have time to answer then.
What is victim theology?
“Victim theology offers answers to the questions that victims are asking; traditional theologizing typically fails to answer this set of questions. Victim theology is theology that recognizes the reality of the contexts and trauma experienced by victims and also acknowledges that victims’ voices offer a theological perspective that is valuable, needed, and is too often silenced. Victim theologians are those who have been victims of abuse who acknowledge the fact that they are victims but who refuse to allow their status as victims to be vilified or shamed. Instead, they rightly insist that the shame belongs to abusers, to those who shelter or abet abusers, and to bystanders who look the other way, dismissing abuse as unimportant. Victim theology enables Good Samaritans to take positive action: holding abusers accountable, giving respite and support to victims, and providing protection to the vulnerable. Because victim theology recognizes that in the context of abuse the victims are the sinned-against whereas the abusers (and those complicit with abusers) are the sinners, victim theologians offer more robust and better balanced theologies to the Church regarding the reality of abuse in her midst.”
— Ruth Barron & Joshua Barron
A shorter summary is:
“Victim theologians are those who have been victims of abuse who acknowledge the fact that they are victims but who refuse to allow their status as victims to be vilified or shamed; instead, they speak theologically into their own context — abuse in the Church — offering robust and better balanced theologies to the Church regarding this reality.”
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Ruth Barron,
You wrote (4th August 2025):
(Barb’s name in brackets was added by me.)
Thank you for acknowledging this, Ruth Barron. 😊 There are so many advocates and pseudo-advocates out there who believe that having lived experience of abuse in one or more areas of their life and / or one or more times in their life makes them an expert of every area of abuse.
You wrote:
That.
You wrote:
(The bold is in Ruth Barron’s comment.)
I love your definition. 😊
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