Is Domestic Abuse Just a Satanic Deception?

By Danni Moss
Copyright protected, all rights reserved

This came up in a comments conversation, and it is, unfortunately, a commonly-held idea. So I thought it would be worth expanding a bit and giving a spotlight of its own. Thanks for sharing, Hannah!

HANNAH:

I came across another [person who doesn’t understand. She said wives] are easily deceived just like Eve. [She] almost hinted that women THINK they are being abused, but generally they are just manipulating to make sure they get their way.

MY RESPONSE:

Why would this woman be under the impression wives are “easily deceived” “like Eve?” I do not see a single thing in Gen. 3 that says Eve was particularly vulnerable to deception, as opposed to Adam.

Nothing at all was said to Eve regarding her “weakness” or sin, other than being given her consequences for disobedience. God held her responsible for her choice but did not offer any additional comment or chastisement. It was simple consequences for action, as is always the case for sin.

But in Gen. 3 Adam was rebuked for listening to Eve – instead of obeying God. In his case, this was a sin of idolatry. He chose to obey his wife over God, when God had personally given Him instructions and he had a direct relationship with God on the subject. I believe this rebuke is clearly because of his idolatry, not because of the gender of the person to whom he listened! God takes idolatry very seriously.

At the same time, there is nothing in this passage to support the idea (extrapolated from the text by some preachers) that men who listen to their wives are panty-waists.

Adam was the person to whom God had given the instruction about what to eat and what to avoid – not Eve. We are left completely in the dark as to what Eve did or did not know about what God told Adam, other than that God said she wasn’t supposed to eat of that tree. So we really cannot make guesses as to her guilt or innocence of motive beyond the text. All we have is what is in the text. She knew better, she chose to do it anyway, and she was given consequences as a result of that choice.

God did not offer any additional rebuke to Eve. However, God did rebuke Adam. That rebuke was not because Adam failed to be a good leader to his family (as some pastors like to say). It was not because he failed to be a “big enough man” (as some pastors like to say). It was because Adam committed idolatry – plain and simple. He obeyed man rather than God. God Himself had given Adam a direct command and Adam chose to follow someone else.

Elsewhere in Scripture it says Eve was deceived and Paul expressed concern that Satan could deceive the Corinthian believers in the same way (II Cor. 11:3). Again, there is no implication here that this was a “woman” problem, as opposed to a “man” problem. In fact, Paul was addressing Christians of both sexes — he obviously didn’t think this was a “wives” or “woman” problem!

THE reason this woman has the idea women are easily deceived is because preachers preach that garbage from the pulpit as if it were from the Bible. They support it with passages like the “weaker vessel” verse, etc. and say women are morally weaker than men. This is utterly unsupportable by the Word and takes verses out of context to create a new doctrine out of whole cloth.

However, preachers today do not come by this idea out of their own heads. This is a long-standing, unbroken tradition from at least as far back as St. Augustine in the Catholic church. St. Augustine stamped large on the theology of the church regarding the roles of men and women.

Unfortunately, Augustine’s beliefs on the subject of marriage were colored by two utterly unreliable – and extra-biblical – sources. He viewed his own parents’ dysfunctional marriage as an ideal. His mother absolutely submitted to his father’s rages and taught other women to blindly and unquestioningly do that same. He also thought highly of the philosophy of Aristotle, who espoused the idea that women must be subjugated to men for the sake of the function of community. Aristotle lived before Christ and certainly did not acquire any of his ideas from any Judeo-Christian text.

But these two sources — the marriage of Augustine’s parents and the philosophy of Aristotle — were the unspoken mold that held the hand that wrote the theology of marital roles still being taught in Protestant churches today. (As time allows I will eventually write more extensively on this subject later.)

The person who said “women who think they are being abused are just deceived” is merely regurgitation the male domination/female subjugation doctrine she has been fed from the pulpit as if God said it, and she completely believes it. Unfortunately, she is far from alone in her deception.