Jason Meyer, the successor of evangelical superstar John Piper as senior pastor of Bethlehem Baptist Church, resigned last week.
In 2015, Meyer preached a sermon on domestic abuse that lots of Evangelicals shared and promoted. Even today, people on twitter are referring back to that sermon in their comments on his resignation.
The sermon was “Fooled by False Leadership.” Both a video and the text are available online. Please note that the posted text is not a literal word for word transcript, so please refer to the video for the actual specifics of what was preached.
With Meyer stepping down, this is a good time to look back at perhaps his most famous sermon. It contains some good points but was also deeply troubling in many ways. A thorough analysis would take many thousands of words to detail, but I will share some highlights that will hopefully make you question what you are hearing.
Where Did Meyer’s Description of Abuse Come From?
Meyer defines abuse as: “A godless pattern of abusive behavior among spouses involving physical, psychological, and/or emotional means to exert and obtain power and control over a spouse for the achievement of selfish ends.”
Where did he get this definition of abuse from? He is giving a sermon, with 2 Corinthians 11:16-21 as the sermon text. He spends about 20 minutes discussing the passage prior to beginning his discussion of domestic abuse. The abuse section of the sermon is even labeled “Application” in the online text.
Does his definition of abuse come from this passage (or anyplace else in the Bible)?
Compare Meyer’s definition with the United Nations definition of abuse: “A pattern of behavior in any relationship that is used to gain or maintain power and control over an intimate partner. Abuse is physical, sexual, emotional, economic or psychological actions or threats of actions that influence another person”
They are very similar. Note especially the use of the phase “power and control” in both. This is a clear reference to secular feminist ideology which says abuse about is about power and control, such as the well-known Duluth Model. There is even a famous Duluth Power and Control Wheel.
Meyer’s sermon presents a framework and examples of abuse developed by John Henderson. It includes multiple types of abuse (mental, emotional, physical) and activities within each type categorized by severity. Thus this model is a grid, which someone helpfully posted online.
While a structurally different framework, you can see that the individual items in Henderson’s model pretty much map readily to the Duluth wheel.
Watching the sermon, you’ll note that when outlining the material on abuse, Meyer makes virtually no reference to the Bible.
Meyer’s categories are also not biblical categories. For example, he says there is a difference between “normative sinfulness” and “abusive sinfulness.” I’m not aware of such a distinction in scripture.
Also, none of the Henderson framework items used in Meyer’s talk…
