Recap of David Gray Situation and Russell Moore Weighs in on Abuse and Divorce

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Hey guys, welcome to the Conversations That Matter podcast. My name is John Harris. We're going to talk about a

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Russell Moore article today in a follow -up to a podcast that I did last

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Friday on this whole situation with John MacArthur, David Gray, bloggers who wanna bring up this case from about 20 years ago.

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I'll give you a brief recap. I can't give everything, so I would suggest if you want details, go watch the two -hour video or listen to it.

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If you do it on double speed, it's not even an hour, but of that whole situation, and I'll explain it.

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And then we'll talk about, after the recap, the Russell Moore article. So I am still planning on doing an update on the travels that I've been going on, and probably, hopefully by Wednesday or Thursday, I'll have something for you on that.

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I know many of you are curious about that, but for right now, in the moment that we're in, there's a lot of moments we're in, by the way.

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It's very difficult to pick and choose, but really, a lot of things with inside me, a lot of emotions

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I had did not wanna talk about this situation at Grace Community Church, and a number of things that I explained in the previous podcast led me to think, all right, this is important enough.

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I probably do need to talk about it, and there's not many people talking about it, but most people don't wanna touch this situation with a 10 -foot pole.

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And so that's one of the things that compelled me to focus some attention on it, but there's a lot of other things going on.

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Obviously, we have a Supreme Court Justice, potentially, here, who doesn't know what a woman is.

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We have Tom Askew running for the president of the Southern Baptist Convention now. We have a situation with a number of organizations,

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I think the Gospel Coalition most prominently, though, where there's an attempt to revisit the

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Chicago, statement on biblical inerrancy and redo it, which

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I think is probably a colossal mistake. So, and the list goes on. There's a lot of things I wanna talk about, but I really wanna put a cap on this, and I also want to address this article from Russell Moore, because I think

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I see a pattern starting, or at least a possible pattern, and I think we should all be aware of it, especially if you're a

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Christian, going to church, loving God's word, or you're a pastor in one of these churches. What I've seen so often is, especially among those who are usually the baby boomer generation, but it doesn't have to be, there is this kind of naivete about all this.

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And what I mean by that is the social justice, Me Too, Black Lives Matter, all of that.

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There's kind of this, well, those are political things. People who support that to some extent, or people who have a doctrinal statement that's similar to mine, run in my circles, that should be safe.

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I think we've found out in the last two years, it's not safe. You can't necessarily just take for granted that the missions agency that you've always had a good relationship with is going to be bringing people to you to support that support necessarily the things that you believe.

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They may say that on paper, but then does their wokeness undermine it, or their flirtation with wokeness, their woke adjacent -ness?

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Does the conferences, do the conferences that you were in the habit of going to, are they now promoting ideas that maybe a few years ago they would have never promoted, or at least it would have been so subtle you might not have noticed, but now it's in your face, right?

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These are situations that a lot of people are going through, they're trying to navigate them, and it's totally understandable.

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And so that's one of the things that I hope to help out with to some extent, not that I'm a perfect person, but, and see everything.

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I don't, but I did see where the sausage was made in some ways, and I have put a lot of time into studying this issue.

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And so that's part of the reason we do what we do here on the Conversations That Matter podcast. And one of the directions

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I see things going in is an attack on potentially biblical counseling, elder, the authority of an elder, and also to some extent,

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I think maybe tied in with the authority of an elder and biblical counseling, but marriage itself, and the way that Christians have conceived of marriage in evangelicalism and fundamentalism, and really in Christianity in general, to be honest with you.

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It's just that so many denominations, especially the main lines have caved on a lot of this stuff, but we're seeing the undermining, we're seeing the attacks start, and I don't want people to be caught off guard.

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I don't want people in these various worlds, if you're in the biblical counseling world, for example, and if you haven't seen at the biblical counseling conferences or in the material, any attempt to navigate and hedge against the wokeness, so to speak, with the social justice and all the iterations of it, you're behind.

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It's not necessarily even you, but the organizations you're part of, they're behind. And we need to catch up.

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And hopefully you can encourage that in the organizations that you're a part of. But I think there's an attack coming, and I think it was hinted at, at least the assumptions behind what an attack like that would look like were in the article in question from last

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Friday that I spent some time examining to some extent. The idea that Christian psychology, or not even

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Christian psychology, but just psychology is superior, that biblical counseling is to be diminished, that pastors are not equipped to necessarily handle situations of abuse, whatever that exactly means.

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There's an elastic definition, I guess, to that. You could have multiple definitions, but that pastors are, you know, that's something that they need to give up to the secular world in some way, that they're not qualified, that their biblical degree, their

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MDiv doesn't qualify them, their counseling credentials don't qualify them. You need psychology to handle those really deep issues.

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I'm seeing that. Now, this has always been around, but it's being used by those who would be adjacent to the

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Christian, people who would be Christian deconstructionists, or people who would be on the more social justice train.

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It's being used by people who are connected or a part of those groups to become another line of attack.

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Against traditional Christianity, biblical Christianity, Orthodox Christianity, conservative

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Christianity. So I think we just need to be aware of that, that that is possibly here and coming and becoming more prevalent.

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And don't be surprised when you start seeing that kind of thing, even among people who profess to believe in inerrancy and all the things you believe in, but then they make this statement or this, they hold this opinion that, well, there's certain things that biblical counseling just is incapable of addressing, or biblical counselors should not approach.

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And so anyway, lots more can be said, but I'm just, I have a gut feeling about it.

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And I thought I saw some hints of it in the article in question from Friday that I spent some time going over.

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And I just want to hedge against that to some extent. And so I see this Russell Moore article as in the same kind of vein.

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It's the breaking down of the grammatical historical way of interpreting scripture.

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It's relegating scripture. And so it's actually very interesting.

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Some of the same people who want to make all these leftist issues, gospel issues. Your church should be fighting racism by being anti -racist in the

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CRT sense, but then that's a gospel issue and we broaden that.

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But then when it comes to something like abuse, it gets so narrowed. Or when it comes to something like divorce and approaches that have been typical up until pretty recently, among those who would profess a grammatical historical approach to the

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Bible. In other words, take it literally, quote unquote, in the popular vernacular.

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There's sort of a limitation put there. There's a narrowing of the church's role in some of these things and a diminishment of the role that the church should have or the role scripture should have or the way we approach scripture or how serious we take scripture.

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So this whole thing, and I've made this argument many times, this whole social justice umbrella, ultimately the attack is going to be against Orthodox Christianity.

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You may think it's against white people. You may think it's against heterosexuals. You may think it's against men. You may think it's just against abusers, perhaps.

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In a naive way, you just possibly are taking many of these folks at their word that they just wanna really get after those who are legitimate abusers or oppressors.

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But at the end of the day, the trajectory of this whole thing is to attack Orthodox Christianity and the fundamentals of it.

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And that's why when I speak about this to various places, I have multiple quotes I bring up from the major thought leaders in the social justice tradition.

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And I show how that's exactly what they wanted because that's exactly what they said. They wanted to attack it and they wanted to replace it with something else.

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And many of them were content with a type of Christianity that was reconstructed in a different way for an egalitarian

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Christianity that promoted a utopia in the here and now. So let's start off with just some recap of the context we're in and why

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I think this Russell Moore article in part at least was written. We talked about the situation with David Gray and I went over a lot of the details from 20 years ago.

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This was a situation that took place at Grace Community Church where John MacArthur is the pastor. It ends up with John MacArthur announcing a disciplinary action, church discipline against the wife.

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And I need to say this. I kept saying Elaine, it's Eileen. Her name is

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Eileen, not Elaine. And no, I'm not dyslexic. At least I don't think I am. I've done this a few times though.

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And I think what it might be is sometimes I'm processing so much information that I look at something,

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I look at a word and I very quickly, my eyes just recognize a few letters and I start pronouncing it in my head and it just sticks every time

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I see it. And I feel kind of just like, why did I do that?

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Why did I? So anyway, I did pronounce her name wrong and not that that really has any bearing on any of the facts of the situation or any of the content really, but her name is

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Eileen. So John MacArthur disciplines Eileen from the church.

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And it's a decision of the elders. It's not like MacArthur was the one that made this decision all on his own, but it was primarily for the reason that she wouldn't take her husband back.

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And the whole issue today is that, well, her husband was since then downstream was convicted of pedophilia and abuse and physical abuse, that kind of thing with his children.

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And so therefore, and he actually was just denied parole recently. So therefore, because of this, it shows a flaw.

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It shows an issue with Grace Community Church and John MacArthur. And because this particular individual,

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David Gray, started a prison ministry, which is generally supported by the leaders of Grace Community Church, it shows that they support knowingly someone who is a pedophile.

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And I've gone through the facts of the situation. I've shown you why

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I don't think this is a fair conclusion to reach. This isn't an honest conclusion to reach. There's a lot more that's left out.

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Let me even show you, if I may, one thing here about this situation. Without going through everything,

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I just wanna show you this one thing. This was a profile on Twitter, the Master's Reject.

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I'm not totally familiar with this. I haven't really seen anything from this. I'm not on Twitter anymore. But this particular individual from the brief post, viewing some of the posts that this person put out there, it looks like it's someone who is very much against Grace Community Church, Master's Seminary, Master's College, these organizations affiliated with John MacArthur.

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And so this is before, and I pointed this out, that this information isn't new. This has been around for a long time.

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The article in question recently that made it popular was really bringing together things that had been known for a while.

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So this is one of the profiles that, in 2019 even, was bringing some of this stuff up.

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Now, there is a link here, and this, by the way, did not make it to the article in question, the recent article, about the situation that caused the controversy.

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This particular document, and I'll click on it, now it just brings you to something that you can't access.

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So you have to request access. I thought that was very interesting because yesterday you could access it, and then I put my video out, or two days ago, whenever I put the video out, you could not, you could access this.

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Now you cannot. So something changed, and I don't know if it's the video or what, but I mean, now you can't access it.

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So fortunately, I was able to get a copy, and so I have been able to post it myself, and if you want to download it, you can go to social media.

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I think I have it on Gab, Facebook, and YouTube. You can also find the other primary sources that were linked in that article, and you can read those as well, and what

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I basically said was that if you're gonna take, if you're gonna really research this situation and try to understand it, you have got to research the primary sources.

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You gotta read all of them. You can't just, the ones available, at least. You cannot just read the article and then draw a conclusion based off of it.

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If you do that, you are gonna come, I think, to probably a wrong conclusion, most likely.

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There's a better paradigm, or at least, I should put it this way, there's a lot of hesitancy one must have once they read all of the available information, and I'll just give you a few examples of that real quick.

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So you have, I posted this on Facebook, and I'll just read what

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I posted. I said, someone doesn't want you to read the court summary of testimony in the David Gray trial from 2006, and that's because I was referencing this here.

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You know, it's available, and all of a sudden, not available. Someone doesn't want you to read this. So I don't know who that is.

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I don't know if it's this profile. I don't know who this belongs to, so I don't wanna make any unnecessary assumptions that I shouldn't here, just that it's private, so people are being prevented from looking at it, right?

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I made that point in yesterday's video that some evidence was prevented by the court from being presented to the jury.

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I thought it was significant enough to mention I've included some screenshots here of a psychologist who suspected some of the accusations showed signs of confabulation, and I explained what that was, and I'm gonna get to this, actually.

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I'm gonna probably read this for you, so hold on to the thought. If any of you are wondering what that is, just hold on to that for a second.

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Long story short, I posted a summary PowerPoint of the primary sources of which the court summary was won. Well, today, the link was blocked from public view on Google Drive.

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I've now posted it myself. Unfortunately, this source was not even linked in the original article in question that made this story so big over the last few weeks.

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It should be one of the most important sources. Basically, if someone wants to relitigate this case to attack

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MacArthur, why aren't they actually litigating it? Why are they withholding some of the most important testimony?

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Why aren't they mentioning the jury wasn't appraised of the psychologist's suspicions, especially from people who value psychology so much over biblical counseling?

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One wonders. Or the fact that Priscilla Bossingu, wasn't just the wife of a seminarian named

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George. She babysat Eileen and David's kids, kind of significant. Or the fact that a detective tried to find evidence of abuse from a guy who taught private lessons for two decades and couldn't.

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Or, and I could have gone on, the fact that the kids were being watched by the folks there at the

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Grace Community Church for visitation with David, and they seem to indicate that the kids had no problem with him.

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It's just not normal for kids who have suffered that kind of a molestation, et cetera, to be able to, it's not common to have what seems like a good relationship with their dad when they see him.

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So there's things like that, that are just left out. They're not in that original article.

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But if you read the primary sources, they start jumping out. And this whole entire case seems to be based on primary sources, or I shouldn't say primary sources, testimony, not physical evidence, but just testimony.

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You have the wife, you have the kids, and then you have David, you have a church counselor, you have members of the church.

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And like I said, members who are close, not members who are just, you know, because they went to the church, they must've been part of some group thing.

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They were just members who actually knew the family, babysat, that kind of thing. And then you have a detective.

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Then you have this psychologist. Now, this is what I wanna read for you, because this didn't show up in any of the analysis.

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And you might think it's kind of a minor point, but I think it's big enough that it should at least be mentioned. There was a refusal to admit defense experts' opinions regarding a videotape.

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Here, and I'll just read it for you. The conclusion of the defense experts' testimony, defense counsel sought to question him further regarding his opinion of what he observed on the videotape.

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He was shown a wife talking with her children. This is a psychologist. The court permitted defense counsel to question

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Esplin outside the presence of the jury as an informal offer of proof for the purpose of allowing him to preserve the record.

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However, it denied the defense request to allow Epsilon to testify before the jury in this regard.

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So there was a denial of some information. This psychologist wasn't able to present some things. Well, what couldn't they present?

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Epsilon said that the children initially seemed to be comfortable, but then seemed to be displaying anxiety and regressive behavior.

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Wife began to discuss an incident of physical abuse by a pellet. Epsilon saw evidence of confabulation.

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For example, when one child commented about the live frog being in her mouth. Another instance of confabulation he pointed to was a reference to 100 hours of being sat on or dragged.

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Also, there was a dispute between the two girls about whether they were both present during a certain incident. One of them had to be incorrect.

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Epsilon also saw evidence of selective reinforcement when wife reinforced negative tone statements. Though she tried to balance that by saying your dad loves you.

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However, the children became increasingly anxious and regressive, acting in a much more immature way than their age.

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And there was an acceleration in the negative tone statements made by the children towards the father. Epsilon was troubled by the fact that one of the children who was four years old at the time was present during the discussion about the safety plan of running out the back door if their father came to the house.

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Epsilon questioned whether that discussion was age appropriate for a four -year -old. In limiting

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Epsilon's testimony, the court stated that he was permitted to discuss and educate the jury regarding the general psychological factors that might affect the reliability of a child's statement in a typical case.

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The goal is for an expert to thoroughly educate the jury regarding the applicable general principles so the factual issues in the case become ones that the jurors can answer as easily as can the expert.

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The court noted that Epsilon had done a good job of providing the types of factors that the jury should consider.

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Now here's what I'm saying. I'm not saying that, I don't even know whether that should have been admitted into,

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I would think that would be important in a case where all you have is testimony, you don't have physical evidence.

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But okay, I don't have much of an opinion one way or the other. Should that have been, I suppose

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I could look into it more and form one, but not relevant. The relevant thing here is that why isn't it mentioned?

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Especially for people who would care a lot about psychology and think psychology is an answer, psychology is important.

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Why not mention that the jury wasn't able to hear what you just heard? So in this case, and so you have leaders of the church coming to a different conclusion than the jury came to.

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That's part of the reason that this situation exists. And from what

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I've heard, from someone else who was investigating this, they said that this individual,

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David Gray, had a public defender that just wasn't on his game. It was bad.

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And that there was another, I guess, high profile case going on close by, very similar situation.

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And that the speculation is maybe that impacted the jury. I don't know. Maybe, maybe not.

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But at least people should know about some of these things, some of this evidence that, or at least testimony that, since the whole thing's based on testimony, that you haven't heard.

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All right? And that's really all I'm saying. I don't even know if the guy, maybe he is guilty. But the more and more

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I look into this, the more questions I have about it, and the more I wonder just about this whole process, and the more

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I seem to understand why people who were closer to the situation at the church may have come to a different conclusion than the jury later on down the line, or given the attitude that David allegedly had and seems to have based on possibly, have at least based on his social media presence, there seems to be a humility and an attitude of repentance for the things he did admit to doing.

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So he denies some things, the things he was charged with, but he admits to other things in the process of counseling. And so there was an attitude,

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I think, among the leaders of Grace Community Church of forgiveness for those things, or at least grace for those things, and understanding that we're all sinners, and that the

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Lord has changed each of us. And then in addition to that, a mistrust of that procedure, that legal procedure.

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So that's a recap for you of kind of where we're at. There's just a lot of facts to consider if you're trying to re -litigate this and come up with some kind of an answer.

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And the unfortunate thing is there has been a trial by social media based on partial evidence, based on a select and very purposely sequenced pieces of evidence that would lead someone to conclude that David Gray is the worst person imaginable, he's horrible, and anyone who would have ever seen it any other way is just in the wrong.

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And it should not have our support or our trust. And so what

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I'm saying is that there's just not enough to draw that conclusion. In fact, if you bring in everything, even the things that have been left out, of that analysis from the articles in question and bloggers who are going after John MacArthur, you start to find out this is more nuanced.

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So that's the situation we're in. That's kind of the recap. But there's one more thing I wanted to say. I put on one of the slides in the last podcast,

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Grace Community Church response, and then I read a statement from Grace Community Church. Supposedly, I didn't actually say it was from Grace Community Church, but many people took it that way.

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And I can see totally why they did. There's a picture of the auditorium there at Grace Community Church, which is just,

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I mean, I do this with a lot of my slides just to kind of make them look pleasing to the eye so it's not just text there. And then the caption says it all,

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Grace Community Church response. I said in the video, people watch the video, this is just simply a statement that some people are getting when they contact some of the elders.

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This is what they get back in their email. That's all I wanted to relay to you.

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I never said it was an official statement from the church, but I can see why people took it that way.

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And of course, when it's screenshot and put out there on Twitter, a bunch of people apparently took it this way, that this was the official response to Grace Community Church.

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It's not, they don't have an official response. There is no response. If anyone goes out and quotes, this is

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Grace Community Church's response, they should know better. And especially if you're someone who's a journalist, right? And you're gonna take a video from a third party as fact, if that's a response, that would just be wrong.

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You would have to go to the source. This isn't, I'm not a primary source for Grace Community Church. I mean, that should be obvious, but anyway, because there was some confusion there,

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I just wanted to clear that up for everyone. This is just a statement some of the elders have sent to people who have asked.

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And so that's why I'm putting it out there. And it's not an official statement from the church.

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It doesn't represent the institution. So anyway, I thought it was very under, it was a statement that I thought was phrased well for the position they're taking.

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At least it explains why they don't wanna break counselor confidentiality and why they're not going to make a statement.

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That's basically what the statement is. Here's a statement on why Grace Community Church isn't going to make a statement.

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So that's it for the recap. Let's talk now about the article today, which we're gonna review from Russell Moore in Christianity Today, divorcing an abusive spouse is not a sin.

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Not only is it morally justified, it also aligns with Christ's heart for the vulnerable.

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Interesting subtitle there. I notice this a lot with social justice activists. They tend to interpret scripture, or I should say, they tend to insert their views into scripture by means of general principles, especially ones tied with some kind of an emotional appeal.

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So this is one of the reasons why loving your neighbor became the battle cry during the

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COVID situation. You need to do all these things because it's about loving your neighbor.

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And it's just assumed that there's a particular interpretation of loving your neighbor, which is doing the recommended, or in some cases, the required actions from the federal government or from local municipalities and state governments.

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It wasn't telling your neighbor the truth. It wasn't protecting your neighbor's liberties. It was, you need to get the job.

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You need to wear the mask. You need to shut down your business, all that kind of thing, right?

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So you can see general principle was used to then Christianize a whole range of behavior that we could easily argue, and I argued on this podcast, wasn't necessarily the morally

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Christian thing to do in this particular situation. This happens with a lot of other things as well.

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The immigration debate, right? That's used a lot. What's God's heart for the oppressed?

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What's God's heart for immigrants and refugees? Focusing on general commands often can deal with specific texts.

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If there's a barrier for the social justice activists in a specific text, oftentimes the appeal will be made to some general principle that supposedly overrides that text.

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So I'm just saying that may happen in this article as we read it. If we're just talking about Christ's heart for the vulnerable,

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I'm gonna wanna know, okay, like what exactly though, specifically is

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Christ's heart for the vulnerable? Chapter, verse, give me where you're finding this.

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Or is it going to be, well, my idea of what the world ought to look like and what we ought to accept is gonna end up being the same as Christ's heart for the vulnerable?

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We'll smuggle it into that somehow. Over the past couple of weeks, I've received a lot of questions about divorce in the case of abuse.

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At least some of those questions most likely come from the reports of a church disciplining a woman for leaving her allegedly abusive husband.

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Of course, we just talked about that situation. In case you or someone you love is in that situation, let me start with my conclusion.

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You are not sinful for divorcing an abusive spouse or for remarrying after you do.

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Now, I'm gonna be very curious to see what his argument is here, right? We're gonna have to see Bible verses. We're probably gonna have to see studying the context in which those verses were written.

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What would the original audience have understood? What did the author intend to communicate? Let's correlate it with other passages.

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Let's do a Bible study, right? That's what I would think. Let's see what Russell Moore gives us.

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The reason this is even a question for people is because they know that the Bible says God hates divorce and the scripture of marriage is a covenant, meaning to embody a sign of the union between Christ and his church.

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Jesus spoke very strongly against divorce, even framing the law of Moses' allowance of divorce as a temporary concession to hard -heartedness, not as God's plan for marriage.

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When a minister in a more traditional wedding service pronounces the couple married and says, "'What

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God hath joined together, let no man put asunder,' this minister is citing the words of Jesus himself. Even those in the church who rail at the outside world on issues that are unclear in scripture often tend to mute themselves on divorce where the

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Bible speaks emphatically. Usually this is just one more case of tribal culture war identity politics.

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There are more divorced and remarried people inside our churches than there are people with other issues."

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Now, interesting phrase he uses here. He attributes the silence on divorce in his mind, or at least the ways in which people in the church tend to avoid the topic of divorce to identity politics.

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It almost feels like what J .D. Greer called conservatives cancel culture, or people who promoted cancel culture because they left his church and that was canceling him.

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It's like, dude, you don't understand what cancel culture is. I don't know if the word means what you think it means.

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That's identity politics? Okay, well, in what sense is that identity politics? I'm actually genuinely confused on this.

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I don't know why. That would be called identity politics, but I digress. That's all true.

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Even so, I believe the Bible treats the question of divorce in cases of abuse, not as a matter of sin for the innocent spouse.

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Some people in the Roman Catholic communion, for instance. Now, I'm gonna stop right here. Why is he referencing

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Roman Catholics? I'm not saying it's wrong to reference Roman Catholics. I'm wondering though what his purpose in doing it is.

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As you're gonna see in this article, Russell Moore is gonna bring a bunch of arguments to support his conclusion that you can divorce an abusive spouse.

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And a lot of it's going to be the logical constructs. It's gonna be different groups of people who say things.

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This one right here could be possibly an appeal to authority. You're not gonna see hard work done in what the scripture actually teaches though.

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That's what is gonna be missing from this. So the first group, the Roman Catholics, they hold that there is never any moral reason for divorce.

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Yet even then, the dispute is over whether any institution has the authority to pronounce the marriage dissolved.

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In that case, the dispute is not over whether a spouse should stay in an abusive situation.

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I don't know a single faithful Catholic priest or bishop who would say that a person should stay in an abusive environment.

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Is it weird to me or is it just me? Or do you notice as well, those listening, that evangelical elites really have stars in our eyes when they talk about Catholics sometimes.

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They really compare themselves to Catholics, want to be like Catholics. I don't know what it is.

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There's some kind of a thing they have for Catholics. But they would counsel, he says, in such situations, a removal of the person and his or her children, and if the threat of abuse persisted, would keep them away from the home, even if that meant for life.

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As most of you know, I don't hold to the view that divorce is in every case a sin. Along with most evangelical Protestants, I believe that there are some narrow instances in which the sin of a spouse dissolves the marriage covenant and that divorce is warranted in those cases.

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Almost everyone in this view would see unrepentant adultery as one of those expressions, and most of us would see abandonment by a spouse as another.

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Now, there are those, I have to say, who range on this. There are those, my ethics professor at Southeastern believe that divorce was always wrong in every circumstance.

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I've met a few people that also believe that. I've met people who believe that abandonment is one of the issues from a non -Christian spouse that can lead to divorce, or a divorce is permissible under such circumstances.

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I've also met people who say, no, that's not correct. It's just adultery.

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The thing is, with all these views, and I know there's probably all three represented in this audience, there is an effort made to figure out what the scripture teaches, and you're wrangling over Bible verses, you're trying to figure out what is

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God's heart for this to pick a line from Russell Moore, because that's where we find God's heart, right?

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What does God want? What does he teach? And that is a worthy pursuit. I think things change though, and we're about to see them change.

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Let's keep going here. The Apostle Paul, and what I mean by change is that Russell Moore isn't operating from that particular set of priorities.

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The Apostle Paul, Russell Moore says, counseled new Christians in the first century that they were not obligated to leave their unbelieving spouses, 1

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Corinthians 7. Those marriages were not unholy because of the spouse who worshiped some other God, and they were made holy by the one who worshiped the living

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God. While God has called us to pursue peace and reconciliation with all people, Paul wrote that in the case of a spouse who walked away, abandoning the marriage, the remaining spouse should let it be so and not consider himself or herself bound, strongly implying the freedom to remarry.

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An abusive spouse, in fact, has abandoned the marriage. Abuse is much worse than abandonment.

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Now, here's where the switch happens that I just mentioned earlier. Involving the use of something holy, marriage, for satanic ends.

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Abuse of a spouse or a child is exactly what God condemns everywhere in the Bible, the leveraging of power to hurt the vulnerable.

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While abuse is worse than abandonment, it is no less than abandonment. Now, let's stop here.

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He gives us a definition of abuse. What is it? Leveraging a power to hurt the vulnerable.

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Let me give you a scenario. You have a husband, he's more powerful, right? Especially the social justice warriors, they would think that, right?

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Men, more powerful. He's a male. And let's say that his wife burns dinner and the husband says, wife, you burn dinner.

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It doesn't taste that good. And the wife gets hurt. Her feelings are hurt. And let's say the husband apologizes even, but the wife is hurt and she's vulnerable.

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She has, you know, emotionally, she's weaker. She's physically weaker and she decides,

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I'm gonna get a divorce. Now, would that be biblical? Of course not. Would that be permissible under Russell Moore's logic?

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You could say, well, Russell Moore would never counsel them to get divorced over that. Yeah, he probably wouldn't. But would it be possible under this definition?

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What is abuse? If it's just leveraging a power to hurt the vulnerable, which by the way, now is a blank check.

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I just told you about a situation in the Southern Baptist Convention where it looks to be an adultery situation, but then it was categorized as abusive because it was a male professor and a female student.

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Therefore, even if it's adulterous and happened over the period of a decade, it must be, I mean, great efforts were made to meet at various locations and all of that.

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It has to be abuse because you have someone with power and then someone without power. So that means it's abuse.

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That's the new definition, by the way. So people who don't have power, you know, that happens a lot, by the way, people who don't have the authority or the power or any of that do sneak attacks.

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They manipulate things. I mean, they're able to make your life miserable sometimes. It's not like it takes power to do that.

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Power makes it easier, but you don't need power to abuse someone. But this is the new definition of abuse.

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And it's pretty elastic. It's pretty broad. And it can range from the scenario I just gave you to something like actual physical rape and physical abuse where there's scars and bruises and that kind of thing, right?

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There can be, there's a range here. So his whole argument is abuse is worse than abandonment.

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It's worse. So if God is okay with divorcing over abandonment, then he must be okay with divorcing over abuse.

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That's the argument here. There's no Bible verse. It's just that it has to be that way because, well,

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I think abuse is worse than abandonment. Now, bring it back to that same situation, right? Let's say the wife divorces the husband and, you know, she's hurt over it.

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And let's say there's a parallel scenario and it's not, well, we'll just say the husband abandons his wife.

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Let's just say it's abandonment, right? The husband walks out, same couple, but the husband decides I've had it with these dinners.

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I'm walking out. I'm abandoning my wife and he's the breadwinner. And now she's got to take care of the kids. She's got to figure out where to get money for food.

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And which scenario is worse? The husband making a comment that hurt her feelings or the husband leaving her to her own ruin?

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Think about that. Which is actually worse? Russell Moore's making the argument here that it's, as a category, abuse is worse than abandonment.

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But abuse is the leveraging of power to hurt the vulnerable. It's so broad. So this is a problem.

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This is going to lead to the, it already is the deconstruction of marriage. That's what this is. It's the deconstruction of marriage.

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You can, for even something that could be considered frivolous, but in the minds of the social justice pack, it's going to be considered abusive, just get a divorce.

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I mean, who hasn't felt like they've had their feelings hurt in a situation? I mean, come on. And in this case too, would the husband ever be able to divorce the wife?

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I mean, what, unless she's bigger than him or has a higher paid position than him? If it takes power to hurt.

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So this is just convoluted. He says, if one spouse abandons the home, the

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Bible reveals it is not the fault of the innocent party. And if a spouse makes the home a dangerous place for the other spouse or their children, that is not the fault of the innocent party either.

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In those cases, divorce is not a sin, but it is, first of all, a recognition of what is already the case, that the one flesh union covenant is dissolved and the abused spouse should feel no less, no condemnation at all in divorcing.

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Suggesting that marital fidelity entails subjecting oneself or one's children to abuse is akin to implying, based on Romans 13 command to submit to the governing authorities that Jesus was immoral for urging those in danger in Judea to flee to the mountains in the time of great tribulation.

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God forbid. Okay, let's stop here for a minute. So let's say someone is in physical danger of permanent damage of life -threatening situation of some kind and they run, right?

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They flee to the mountains, they run for cover and it's the husband or something or the wife, maybe it's the husband running from the wife and they're in trouble, it's an emergency, they gotta get out.

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That is different than divorce. Divorce would be a permanent alteration of the relationship.

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It would be the breaking of the covenant. The ability to enter into a covenant with someone else of a similar nature.

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So it's, you can have all this, you can have, yeah. We're escaping, we are, we're getting safe, we're separating from the spouse.

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It doesn't necessarily mean that now you can just get divorced. All right, so this wouldn't,

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I'm just pointing out, here's the scripture he's trying to bring in here, but it just, it doesn't actually support what he's arguing for.

42:39

According to a 2015 survey, okay, so now we're on surveys. The overwhelming majority of Protestant pastors would say that divorce in cases of domestic violence is morally legitimate.

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Okay, so now we're talking about domestic violence, which I guess would be a form of abuse, but remember, Russell Moore's definition could be a whole lot more than just domestic violence.

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It could be much more minor than that, but okay. Domestic violence, that's morally legitimate. Yet I would even go further to contend that in many cases, divorce not only is allowable as it would be for adultery or other forms of abandonment, but is necessary, wow, to protect the abused person from further harm.

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Okay, this is just Russell Moore's opinion. He's trying to bring in, hey, you know, a lot of pastors would kind of go with me, at least part of the way on this, but I'm gonna go even further.

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This is the Russell Moore opinion. We don't have any backing in scripture yet. We don't have nothing.

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It's just opinions. We don't even have a firm footing for what exactly would constitute this other than kind of a blank check.

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Both the church and the state have a role in making sure that the abuser does not bully the abused person, which often happens through the deprivation of income or housing.

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So we'll listen to that one. Now the state in this particular situation is responsible for making certain that the abused person is taken care of.

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Now in ancient Israel, this would have been, what would this have been? We have an example of it with the story of Rachel and Boaz, right?

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You would go and you would glean, right? You would work for it. That is not the case in our particular situation, but this is

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Russell Moore's, progressive tendencies are coming out a little bit in this.

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A divorce usually involves societies acknowledging that the marriage is over, helping to divide resources and providing some ongoing protection, often through restraining orders or police files for those who have been abused.

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If you're a minister, you can almost guarantee that someone in your pews or in your immediate community is experiencing domestic violence.

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Sometimes the victims will have internalized the abusive rhetoric of the abuser and blame herself for bringing on the abuse to her and her children.

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Okay, none of this is arguments for his conclusion. This is all stuff that pulls our heartstrings.

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This is all stuff we don't, I mean, it's a horrible situation so we would want to make sure that that situation doesn't happen or if it does happen, it's temporary and people can get out of it.

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And one of the ways out is divorce. Sometimes the one being abused will believe that there is no other option but to stay, feeling trapped in the marriage.

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In the case of domestic violence, the church has a responsibility not only to alert the relevant civil authorities, but also to bear the abuser's burdens by arranging a safe place of refuge and meeting other needs.

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Now it's interesting in the situation that sparked this whole thing, Grace Community Church actually did provide that temporarily for the individual accused or who was thought to be the victim of abuse possibly.

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And then they went through a counseling process and then it came to the time when, according to the documents we have, the couple, in the minds of the counselor, ought to have been restored into the same house and the marriage was restored and one party didn't want that.

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And so that became the issue. So there was never a problem with, yeah, like a temporary separation, but it's supposed to be temporary.

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There's no, it's to fix something that's broken. It's not with the intention of permanently breaking the marriage and then having the ability to and possibly going and forming relationships with other people.

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So there's new covenants. The very least that one can expect from one's church is not to be condemned as a sinner for escaping danger.

46:40

Well, that's just a straw man. No, who in the right mind is condemning anyone for escaping danger?

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No one, no one. Who do you know? Is it like one person out there, that three people out there?

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You'd be surprised, John. There's so many churches. Okay, maybe you're in a cult. Maybe get out. This is so rare.

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This would be, and no one would consent to this, at least publicly, that I can think of.

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I realize there might be some churches out there, some where there's wacky churches, there's wacky cults, there's wacky groups of people that have held wacky beliefs.

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We were just in Texas looking at the site where the Branch Davidians were destroyed by Janet Reno back in 1993.

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They had some wacky beliefs. David Koresh thought he was the only one that should basically have sexual relationships with the women in the compound and the other husbands weren't allowed to.

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I mean, look, this is wacky. It's weird. It's a cult. I get that, but generally speaking, in any kind of mainstream sense, is there anyone who would say that?

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One's church, a church would condemn someone for escaping danger.

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That's not the case with Grace Community Church. They didn't condemn this individual, Eileen, for escaping danger.

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They were against the divorce though, and that's the issue at hand, and that's what Russell Moore has yet to argue for.

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Recognize that abusers often weaponize spiritual language to cover the abuse. They might suggest that the abuse spouses are unforgiving, or I think this could be a shot at Grace Community Church.

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They recognize, let's see, the abuser's unforgiving if they leave or that they would be sinning against Jesus if they were to pursue divorce.

48:27

Quoting out of context biblical verses all the time. Well, Russell Moore's not even quoting Bible verses to support his view.

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They have a leg up on him if they're quoting out of context verses. As the steward of the oracles of God, the church has a mandate to call such misuse of scriptures what it is, the taking of the

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Lord's name in vain in one of the worst ways imaginable. Divorce for domestic violence is not a sin. It's about sin all right, but it's the sin of the abuser, not the sin of the abused who decides to divorce.

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The abused in our churches and in our communities need to see us applying the Bible the right way, and they need to see us embodying

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Jesus Christ who protects the vulnerable. Again, you can see that Russell Moore, people need to see us.

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People really need to see something coming from us that's gonna show them that we're behaving rightly.

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What God has joined together, let no man put asunder. Yes and amen, but sometimes Jesus also would have us recognize that man should not force together what

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God has put asunder. Sometimes the path to divorce is not a way to destruction, but a road to Jericho.

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We should look to see who is beaten on the roadside and be for them who Jesus told us to be.

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So that's his other sort of attempts to bring up a

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Bible imagery, not even, but it's so lame. It's just not, there's no actual dealing with specific

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Bible verses here to support his case. It's all based on somewhat of a logical construct that what we know abuse must be worse than abandonment.

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So that must be Christ's heart for the vulnerable right there. And then let's just condemn all the churches who don't allow divorce or don't recognize divorce in the case of abuse.

50:10

This is a pretty bad article. It's just bad, bad for so many reasons. It's not well -argued, it's just, it's a very emotionally driven without proving the case.

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It also leads to, I could easily see many people reading this and leading, and they could end up in their minds, using it as justification for frivolous divorces, you know, because his definition of abuse is so general, could mean almost anything.

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It's just the deconstruction of marriage. I don't really know what else to say about it. That's what it is. There's no, there's nothing hopeful in this.

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The only thing that this leaves you with is let's condemn the churches specifically, the one that's not being referenced, but is being referenced, right?

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Not overtly, but John MacArthur's church. Let's condemn churches that don't allow divorce in the case of abuse.

51:14

And the thing is, there are abusive relationships that I'm sure

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Grace Community Church would allow divorce in the case of, or would recognize that a divorce is permissible, sexual misconduct.

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Pornia, the word Jesus used, would be one of those things. And so that would be a specific kind of abuse, but that's a breaking of the covenant.

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And that's the reason for it. It's a breaking of the covenant of marriage. The situation actually that is being debated right now with Eileen Gray and David Gray from 20 years ago is actually a good example of probably what a lot of conservative churches would do, at least in the initial steps, which is, okay, there's a situation.

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You've separated. The kids are safe, you're safe. Church is committed to keeping you safe.

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We got a security escort. We're providing places for the kids to meet while being observed with the husband.

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We're on top of it. Let's figure out what the issues are and let's work through them. If you're both committed to that, we can do that.

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There is room for repentance. There's room for change and progress and all of that.

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And let's make that the goal here. If that didn't happen, let's say there was no indication that there was any form of repentance, it was still very much in the minds of the people involved, a situation where there would be danger for the mother and the children, then you bet that church, if they're knowing, they know this, they're informed of this, they're aware of this, they're not gonna want them in the same home.

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They're not gonna want a war zone going on where you could end up with permanent damage or death or something like that, they know.

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But it doesn't mean that they're gonna support divorce either. It means that they're going to work on trying to persuade the spouse to repent and trust is gonna have to be built over time because there isn't a biblical case one can make as just seen from the pathetic non -case

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Russell Moore tried to make. There really isn't a case you can make that abuse in and of itself, and whatever that means,

53:26

Russell Moore's elastic term for it, just exercising some kind of, hurting someone because you're in a more powerful position.

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There's no verse you can go to and see, well, because that situation arises, therefore then you must be able to have a divorce.

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You must be able to break the covenant. You can now go and you can covenant with someone else and you can be physical with them.

53:56

No, you're not gonna find that at least in scripture. So if we're trying to be biblical, then you're not gonna come to Russell Moore's conclusion.

54:05

My fear, if there's a fear in this, but my concern, all right, my concern in this is that Russell Moore's logic is being employed by Christians.

54:16

It's one of the reasons there are so many divorces. It's because there's prenuptial agreements and there's,

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I just don't feel the way that I felt and I feel abused by you because, or I feel attacked by you and I'm constrained by you because of some selfish reason, or something that could be worked through, but you don't give, you don't attempt to work through it and you just use that as an excuse.

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And I am concerned that the value for marriage, the honor that is given to marriage is held in less and less esteem.

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It's not regarded very high. And Russell Moore's showing how he doesn't, it seems to regard it even that high, not as high as he ought to.

55:07

So I don't know, I could probably ramble on for a long time about this. I don't wanna keep doing that though. That's my response to it.

55:14

This was promoted by a number of people, including the person who wrote the article in question last week, as you know, amen, go, you know?

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And I'm just like, this is cringy to me. It's showing some true colors.

55:31

It's showing that even some of the motive perhaps behind this attack on John MacArthur, there's underlying theological things going on in this whole thing.

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Being upset about biblical counseling and the priority it's given, being upset about how a high marriage is held, that these things are somehow constraining, that these things hold society back or hold people back because people are trapped in these situations that are bad.

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And does anyone wanna fight for their marriages anymore? I know there are many who do, but is that number going down?

56:10

I think it probably is. And it's because of stuff like this. All right, I have no more to say. I'm gonna have to land this plane.

56:16

More coming, like I said, I still have, I have some notes in front of me, actually, of things I wanna review just from the trip that I was on and some other things

56:24

I wanna talk about. We're gonna have someone actually come on the program. Probably the next podcast is gonna be some testimony from Russia, from a missionary.

56:36

Actually, they wouldn't have gone to Russia. They went, I believe, to Moldova. So they were in Ukraine.

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I got the wrong direction here, so they didn't, the Russians are the reason they actually left

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Ukraine, but they're missionaries in Ukraine and they have connections still in Ukraine, and they're gonna give us an update on that particular situation.