By Ogova Ondego
Published June 6, 2023
“Oh God, Peter … Please stop!”
Kate begged, recoiling from the epithets her husband was vomiting at her.
“Stop what? Bitch! What did I ever see in you, Princess Ugly Face?”
Peter wanted a reason to hit her, but Kate was being careful.
“Darling …”
“Stop ‘darling’ me, Jezebel, the Princess of whores. You got me? A cheap whore, that’s what you are,” Peter persisted but Kate started moving to the kitchen.
That was what Brother Peter wanted to justify his action: that Kate had walked away while he was addressing her!
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Peter’s slap split Kate’s lower lip and the vicious blows all over her body left Kate sprawled on the floor. Unconscious.
That was the position she was found in by the church visitors on a Sunday evening.
When he heard knocks, Peter ordered her to answer the door. But little did he know the damage his blows had done to Kate. She could not move and it was too late for Peter as he had already opened the door for the visitors. With rolled up sleeves and perspiration all over his face, Peter said his wife had slipped while going to the kitchen. The look on the faces of the visitors indicated they did not believe him. The females in the group rushed to Kate’s side. They knew what it meant to be battered by a man who claimed to love them.
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Wife-beating seems to be accepted, even among Bible-believing Christians, as a by-product of marriage. This beating of wives permeates racial, ethnic, religious and socio-economic differences.
“The most oppressed wives are the best educated professional Christian women,” says a counselling psychologist in Nairobi.”Their misplaced loyalty to husbands with criminal tendencies causes them to tolerate battery silently.”
She argues the only wives who weep publicly after beatings are usually those from low-income earning families and that is why the public has erroneously come to associate spouse abuse largely with people of the lower class.
In ancient Israel, the birthplace of Christianity, wives were little more than chattels. In Roman times, the husband had absolute authority, including the prerogative of life and death, over his wife.
Writing in On Being magazine of Australia, Peter Rutledge says that even when Christianity penetrated Europe, the view remained that physical punishment of a wife was a husband’s right, sometimes even an obligation.
No doubt these views were brought to Africa alongside the Gospel by early missionaries. Christianity presented little challenge to any erroneous ideas and practices African societies had towards their wives.
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It should be stressed that in Africa men can have a string of mistresses and even desert their wives at will, but wives, who do not have similar ‘privileges’, are expected to wait for their husbands to return to them. Any wife going against this expectation may be subjected to verbal and physical abuse.
To many Africans Christianity appears to support wife-beating. That may explain why zealous Christian leaders like Brother Peter can strike their wives and not be reprimanded by their churches. Hey, did you know that adultery, desertion and wife-beating cannot be used as grounds upon which to seek divorce in many countries across Africa?
Dispute as you may, but it appears that many of those described as being ‘Church Fathers – St Augustine, Martin Luther, John Calvin, John Crysostom – believed in husbands disciplining their wives?
While John Crysostom taught that husbands had the right to strike their wives, St Augustine is reported to have believed that some women may need to suffer abuse – even rape – in order to learn humility. Martin Luther, the church reformer, on the other hand, is said to have occasionally boxed his wife on the ear when he believed she needed it.
“We do not find ourselves permitted by the word of God … to advise a woman to leave her husband except by force of necessity, and we do not understand the force to be operative when a husband behaves roughly and uses threats to his wife, nor even when he beats her,” argued John Calvin.
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Asked whether wife beating can ever be justified, a Nairobi pastor who doesn’t wish to be named says “Scriptures must be fulfilled. Violence against women is a sign of the end times which we can’t do anything against,” he says, citing 2 Timothy 3:1-5, a prophecy about moral degeneracy and violence to be expected in the last days, to back his assertion.
“Biblically speaking, it is wrong for a husband to beat his wife who is considered to be a part of his own body,” Dr Mutinda, then an Assistant Chaplain at Daystar University told us some time back. He argued that cultures the world over put women down.
“I recently witnessed a bizzare incident. While handing over his daughter to her husband during a church wedding ceremony, the father told his daughter not to misbehave or she would be disciplined by the husband,” Dr Mutinda told us.
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Can a wife seek divorce on grounds of physical abuse?
Whereas Dr Mutinda argues that abuse can never justify divorce, Dr Muutuki, also of Daystar University, says it can. Dr Muutuki argues that wife-beating is not part of the marriage contract.
“A wife can divorce her husband if he beats her,” he says.”Marital abuse violates the marriage contract.”
J Carl Laney, writing in The Divorce Myth, says that “As tragic as marital infidelity may be, they do not constitute grounds for divorce. These were all first century problems that Jesus could have addressed and made allowances for, but he did not choose to do so.”
Rutledge, like Muutuki, believes that marital abuse constitutes a violation of the marriage contract.
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“Marriage is … a solemn covenant between two willing people who promise to become each other’s loving companions for life. It is not a Master-Slave relationship.” Rutledge argues that a wife’s being submissive to her husband is not a subordinate role but a supportive sharing of her life with her husband.
“When a husband acts in violent and abusive ways that demonstrate he will not love, honor, nurture, and keep his wife in the covenant that he freely entered into, does the bond still exist?” poses Rutledge.
Rutledge contends that divorce is the last tragic solution to a marriage destroyed by adultery, desertion and abuse.
Before resorting to divorce, Rutledge stresses, “pastoral counselling and church discipline ought to be exhausted before the drastic step of separation. Divorce among professing Christians is a violation of an accrued trust and must never be accepted as normal or desirable.”
The arguments that suffering abuse in marriage is character-building and sanctifying to the woman, Rutledge says, is a distortion of the biblical teaching of suffering for righteousness’ sake.
Rutledge says pastors should be willing to bind up the sheep’s wounds and protect them from the attack of savage wolves, whatever guise they may come in.
