thought of the day.147

Jesus, Peter and the Legacy of Battering

If we are to believe the bible, Peter was one of a select few specially chosen by Jesus to accompany him throughout his ministry. One would think he would have been profoundly enlightened by such an experience. That he would have become a defender of justice, a friend of the downtrodden, a light in the darkness. Instead he was the darkness.

Peter used the idea of God to justify oppression. According to him, the wife suffering beneath the blows of a cruel husband or the slave suffering beneath the blows of a cruel master shouldn’t try to change their situation but accept it. Peter says God is in fact pleased when people endure the pain of undeserved beatings. Their suffering is actually God’s plan for them. (1 P 2:19-20) (1 P 4:19) He said wives make themselves beautiful by submitting themselves to their husbands like Sarah did by obeying her husband and calling him master. (1 P 3:5-6) Peter had such low regard for females he described Lot (who offered his two virgin daughters to an angry mob of sexually depraved men to do with as they pleased (Gn 19:6-8)) as a “good” man. (2 P 2:7-8)

An example of how these toxic texts poison life is seen here in Protestant reformer, John Calvin’s response to a battered woman pleading for help:

“We have a special sympathy for poor women who are evilly and roughly treated by their husbands, because of the roughness and cruelty of the tyranny and captivity which is their lot. We do not find ourselves permitted by the Word of God, however, to advise a woman to leave her husband, except by force of necessity, and we do not understand this force to be operative when a husband behaves roughly and uses threats to his wife, nor even when he beat her.…We exhort her to bear with patience the cross which God has been seen fit to place upon her; and meanwhile not to deviate from the duty which she has before God to please her husband, but to be faithful whatever happens.”