Intimate Partner Violence and the Church
“Marriage symbolism is … personal…dramatic…eschatological. To love someone is to tell them ‘you will never die’” (Olivier Clement citing Gabriel Marcel, as to Jesus and the Church)
Introduction
Marla Bore is about 1000kms north of Adelaide on the way to Alice Springs. It was a scorching summer day and 50 degrees on the road, with lots of cars spontaneously seizing up. This was not however my most profound memory of that scorched place. An unforgettable recollection comes from watching a young Indigenous man chasing a bruised and bleeding woman into the female toilets to keep bashing her. When appealed to by the service station attendant to sto,p his assertive defence was, “But she’s my wife.” This is an extreme example of intimate partner violence, a phenomenon shamefully most present in Aboriginal Australia. (Not excluding amongst Christian leaders.) Domestic violence is at epidemic proportions in our land, with highlights of this scandal covering everything from politics to sport. Despite campaigns to do with consent (https://www.dss.gov.au/sexual-consent/5-core-concepts-of-consent) the solution to this disaster will not come through better education, but must come from the progress of the Gospel in the Church. Not “Church” as we presently experience it, but the “holy catholic/universal Church” of the Creeds and revelation of the Word of God. Intimacy broken amongst humanity in God’s (Gen 1:26-28) cannot be healed by mere external realities, like quoting Scripture. Jesus said about such deep things; ““This kind (of evil spirit) cannot be driven out by anything but prayer.”” (Mark 9:26). Presently, healing this realm is beyond us. Only a new revelation of Jesus can restore our nation.
Intimacy in Christ
The Bible has many ways of emphasising the unique inward relationship, that is, intimacy, between the Father and the Son. In 1 Thess 3:11. We encounter a phenomenon generally hidden from readers of the English Bible. “Now may our God and Father himself, and our Lord Jesus, direct our way to you”, here Paul spontaneously uses a singular verb, “direct”, whilst employing two subjects (Father, Jesus). This makes it clear that he considered the Father and Jesus as one in status, equal as God, but limitlessly close in relationship. We encounter this pattern similarly in the writing of John in Revelation where Jesus is placed on the “side of God” rather than the side of creation to avoid all signs of sounding polytheistic (Rev 6:17; 11:15; 22:3-4). It is John’s Gospel however that most famously exalts intimacy with God in Christ.
By virtue of their relationship with Jesus, believers share in the divine life. The Lord proclaims, ““If anyone loves me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him….Abide in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit by itself, unless it abides in the vine, neither can you, unless you abide in me.” (John 14:23; 15:4) We know Jesus through the Spirit, just as Jesus knows his Father. “I in them and you in me, that they may become perfectly one, so that the world may know that you sent me and loved them even as you loved me….I made known to them your name, and I will continue to make it known, that the love with which you have loved me may be in them, and I in them.”” (John 17:23, 26) Spiritually minded people have always been seized by the amazing gravity of these divine promises. In the fourth century Augustine testified, “You were more inward to me than my most inward part; and higher than my highest.” In the sixteenth century, John Calvin, whom some experts call a “mystic” (https://tftorrance.org/2010-jc-1) uttered, “he is not only outside us but also in us in such a way that we are outside ourselves.” (cf. Institutes III.11. 10). Great revivalist Jonathan Edwards probes the central point. “Christ will give himself as much to his saints as he had given himself for them”. That is, absolutely! Given this exalted spiritual tradition is correct, where has our mainstream Western Church been misled.
Idols Anger and Intimacy
Intimacy with God in Christ is indescribable closeness with the Creator, Sustainer and Goal of all. It is spiritual ecstasy of the highest sort. I will never forget some of my exalted experiences in worship as a young Christian in a Pentecostal Church where I felt I was being lifted heavenward. They were so intoxicating that I became lost in sentimental emotion. Then I fell into an equal and opposite error, I became transfixed by right doctrine and set on a path to becoming a “theologian”. There is nothing wrong with the Spirit nor the Word, but when they are separated from one another we lose contact with divine reality. (Praise God he never let me fall into the third error blocking holy intimacy, devotion to religious duty, that is, pharisaism.) These are major reasons why intimacy is rare in today’s Church. Men and women were created to know (Gen 4:1; Amos 3:2; John 17:3; Rom 8:29; ) the “holy one of God” (Luke 4:34; John 6:69), where “know” does not mean anything limited to sex but interpenetration of the deepest level of personal being. This is one reason why the most profound writers on intimacy, Jesus, John, and Paul, were all celibates (John 17:3; 1 Cor 13:12)! Behind the horrors of domestic violence is a deep idolatry that seeks to substitute God as the only true love object with the thrills of an “apocalyptic romance” (Ernest Becker) to dull our fears of dying and give us a sense of life as indelibly significant. Since no human relationship can bear the burden of godhood the result is failure and its fruit is unholy intense ANGER!! Healing the nation through the Church demands a revival of holy fear.
Holy Fear
Revivals are accompanied by a decline in ungodliness, such as cursing and alcoholism, but in relation to intime partner violence something more is on the mind of the Spirit (Rom 8:6) . It is said of Moses the man of God (Deut 33:1) that he was so terrified of God’s awesome presence at Sinai, he exclaimed, “I tremble with fear.”” (Heb 12:21). Jeremaih prophesies of a coming day of gladness when Israel “shall fear and tremble because of all the good and all the prosperity I provide for it.” (Jer 33:9). Jesus’ himself had “delight in the fear of the Lord” (Isa 11:3 cf. Neh 11:1) . Paul’s exhortation to the Church in Phillipi is clear, “Therefore, my beloved, as you have always obeyed, so now, not only as in my presence but much more in my absence, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling,” (Phil 2:12 cf. 2 Cor 7:15). The holy fear of Jesus in Gethsemane wrought fruit in the Father’s heart releasing the limitless joy of the resurrection (Luke 24:41). What transitions “boys and girls” from their “spiritual adolescence” to divine maturity is suffering as partners together for one another and others. Such holy agonies alone open up the depths of the human heart/spirit for intimacy beyond trivia. All holy beings in the cosmos are commanded to fear God (Rev 19:5).
Conclusion
We are called to be a Spirit-baptised Church (1 Cor 12:13) whose holy love of God in Jesus so drives out all intimate partner violence and issues in a present enjoyment like the Son’s intimate enjoyment of the Father in eternity (John 17; 1 John 4:17). Though, as a sinner, she could never understand, this quote is prophetically powerful of the call of God on the decrepit Laodicean (Australian) Church. “there was much greater intimacy actually in looking after somebody who is in that debilitated state (dying ) than there is in even the wildest sex.” (Blanche d’ Alpuget; Bob Hawke’s lover then wife ) Such was the rich revelation of the Father and Spirit in their care and compassion for the crucified Jesus and such can be our intimacy with the Lamb (Rev 5:-6).