BLOWBACK

from Midwest Conservative Journal by The Editor

We may well have finally seen the end of the public career of Pat Robertson. Russell D. Moore, dean of the school of theology and also the senior vice president for academic administration at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, tears into the egregious Robertson:

This week on his television show Christian broadcaster Pat Robertson said a man would be morally justified to divorce his wife with Alzheimer’s disease in order to marry another woman. The dementia-riddled wife is, Robertson said, “not there” anymore.

Robertson’s idiotic statement wasn’t just Pat being Pat. It was WAY worse than that.

This is more than an embarrassment. This is more than cruelty. This is a repudiation of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Because to a Christian, marriage means a whole lot more than merely having somebody to sleep with.

Marriage, the Scripture tells us, is an icon of something deeper, more ancient, more mysterious. The marriage union is a sign, the Apostle Paul announces, of the mystery of Christ and his church (Eph. 5). The husband, then, is to love his wife “as Christ loved the church” (Eph. 5:25). This love is defined not as the hormonal surge of romance but as a self-sacrificial crucifixion of self. The husband pictures Christ when he loves his wife by giving himself up for her.

Then Moore adds this devastating point.

At the arrest of Christ, his Bride, the church, forgot who she was, and denied who he was. He didn’t divorce her. He didn’t leave.

And if a man truly loves his wife, he could no more leave her than he could cut off his own arm regardless of what accident or disease had done to her.

A woman or a man with Alzheimer’s can’t do anything for you. There’s no romance, no sex, no partnership, not even companionship. That’s just the point. Because marriage is a Christ/church icon, a man loves his wife as his own flesh. He cannot sever her off from him simply because she isn’t “useful” anymore.

So it’s probably too much to expect someone as limited as Pat Robertson to understand truths like those.

Pat Robertson’s cruel marriage statement is no anomaly. He and his cohorts have given us for years a prosperity gospel with more in common with an Asherah pole than a cross. They have given us a politicized Christianity that uses churches to “mobilize” voters rather than to stand prophetically outside the power structures as a witness for the gospel.

But Robertson’s statement might actually be helpful if it reminds us all of something basic.

If our churches are to survive, we must repudiate this Canaanite mammonocracy that so often speaks for us. But, beyond that, we must train up a new generation to see the gospel embedded in fidelity, a fidelity that is cruciform.

Jesus tells us he is present in the weak, the vulnerable, the useless. He is there in the least of these (Matt. 25:31-46). Somewhere out there right now, a man is wiping the drool from an 85 year-old woman who flinches because she think he’s a stranger. No television cameras are around. No politicians are seeking a meeting with them.

But the gospel is there. Jesus is there.

Amen. In other evangelical news Joni Eareckson Tada, who’s been a quadriplegic for 44 years, probably won’t be dropping by The 700 Club any time soon.

Any marriage has its challenges, but add a serious disability and they can, at times, seem overwhelming. This is why God instituted marriage as a lifelong commitment – Heaven knows it requires vows, solemn and serious, to weather a couple through the demands of disability.

I was dismayed when this week Pat Robertson said to a nationwide audience that Alzheimer’s disease is a kind of death that makes divorce justifiable. When a Christian leader views marriage on a sliding scale, what does this say to the millions of couples who must deal daily with catastrophic injuries and illnesses?

The left is justifiably making hay over this controversy and the right is angry, humiliated and ripping Pat Robertson a new one. So congratulations, Pat. More than just about any American right now, you’re a uniter not a divider.

Thanks to Frank Lockwood.