The Oversimplification of Scripture
Response to TGC's "Before You Cut Off Your Parents" article
For almost a decade, I followed The Gospel Coalition’s website religiously. Overtime, my opinions changed, so I’m no longer a dedicated reader. However, TGC is a helpful thermometer that often tells me where Evangelicalism is presently. From time to time I check in to gauge the temperature.
Today, a particular article caught my eye - “Before You Cut Off Your Parents: 3 Principles to Consider.”1 The author, Beth Claes, is a biblical counselor with a prior career in Psychology. I don’t know Beth, or her work, but I suspect if we sat down with a cup of coffee we would be friends. The following thoughts are no way meant to target her, or disregard her perspective or expertise. Rather, this article is intended to be a good faith effort at adding some nuance to the topic.
I would also like to ackowledge that she is working on the West Coast, which may bring some distinct cultural challenges. I write exclusively from the perspective of a Southerner who has always lived and ministered on the East Coast. Families tend to be honor/shame based with children expected from birth to meet unrealistic expectations. The Gospel is the same everywhere, but its application can be significantly altered to meet the needs of a particular culture. It’s quiet possible that the message in the South needs to be - “It’s okay to seperate yourself from your parents, God made you to be an individual,” while the message out West may need to be, “You should really try to stay connected to your parents because God made you to live in community.” One culture (or person) may need to hear of freedom, another duty. If any readers are from out West and can contribute to this conversation, feel free to chime in!
Beth frames her article around three main biblical principles: Honor your father and mother, forgive as you have been forgiven, and bear with others in love. The problem with biblical principles is that the exhaustive list often competes. To reduce a topic like this to three principles is to grossly oversimplify. Scripture recognizes that the world is complicated. Hebrew wisdom literature is famous for contradictory advice. Why? Because each situation is unique and may call for the opposite response. A classic example is Proverbs 26: 4-5.
Don’t answer the foolish arguments of fools,
or you will become as foolish as they are.
Be sure to answer the foolish arguments of fools,
or they will become wise in their own estimation.
Proverbs 26: 4-5 (NLT)
Do you see how Scripture gives contradictory advice here? Encountering the foolish arguement of fools demands more than one Biblical principle. It takes wisdom to match the right principle to the right circumstance. So how does this impact how we receive Beth’s advice?
Honor Your Father & Mother
Beth is exactly right - Christians are called to honor their parents (Ex. 20:12; Eph. 6:2). But Christians are also called to forsee danger and take precautions (Prov. 22:3). Unfortunately, many grown children find themselves in situations where fleeing their parents is the godliest response. Parents are not exempt from other Biblical categories just because they are parents. Parents can be righteous, godly, and holy. Parents can also be wicked, foolish, and preverse. Jesus makes very clear in the Gospels - sometimes following him means giving up your parents. When your parents pressure you to compromise righteousness to protect their sinful habits, your only option is to follow Christ. This may mean estrangment from your parents.
This leads us to another point - estrangment from parents is not mutually exclusive with honoring them. Otherwise Jesus would not have commanded it. There are a multitude of ways to honor estranged parents. Here are a few that come to mind:
Speak honestly of the things they did well;
Keep the names they bestowed upon you;
Pray for their repentance;
Grieve their absence;
When possible, refrain from airing family laundry in the local community to preserve their reputations and relationships. There are times to make your grievances open, especially when the safety of others rides on it. But sometimes it is possible to not share and in the process friendships are maintained. If you are estranged from your parents, their relationships with good friends will become even more important;
Grow in godliness and follow Jesus. Any positive character traits you posses reflects highly on your parents. As one pastor put it, “Sometimes the best way to honor your parents is to be the person they never could be. Your character is a testament to their parenting.”
Beth does rightly caveat that abusive situations “require boundaries and wisdom to safeguard against further harm.” However, she never defines boundaries or abuse. Equally problematic, one of the hallmarks of abuse, coercive control, she lumps into the “stay” category.2 But a controlling parent is one who tends to punish for lack of compliance. No amount of respect and care from a child changes that. In fact, often it only further enables the controlling behavior. “No,” is not acceptable to the controlling parent.
I am also concerned that her concept of abuse may forsake the concept of neglect. Previously, when I worked in foster care, I found that neglect is simply “passive abuse” and was often equally (if not more) damaging than outright physical abuse. Many of the wounds adult children carry come from various forms of neglect that do not bear the standard characteristics of abuse. Neglect is detrimental none-the-less.
Forgive As You Have Been Forgiven
The most amazing part of the Gospel is forgiveness. Our relationship with God is restored through Jesus Christ. But this restoration is acheived only after repentance (see Luke 24:46-48). This is also true in human relationships. Whenever Jesus discusses forgiveness in the book of Luke, it is always in the context of the other party recognizing their debt and asking for forgiveness.
“If another believer sins, rebuke that person; then if there is repentance, forgive. 4 Even if that person wrongs you seven times a day and each time turns again and asks forgiveness, you must forgive.” - Luke 17:3-4 (NLT)
What is the wounded child’s responsibility? To rebuke.3
What is the wounding parent’s responsibility? To repent.
Only then does forgiveness enter the picture. But a rebuke only leads to repentance when there is a humble heart, eager to approach relationships with the heart of Christ.
Repentance means your parent is actively seeking to put to death the old, harmful, patterns of behavior. It doesn’t mean that they suceed every time. It does mean they are trying.
Beth here seeks to propose that maintaining contact can be the instrument that brings a parent to a place of repentance. Personally, this felt like spiritual manipulation. It places the onerous responsibility of a parent’s potential repentance on the wounded child. Now the child is forced to ask the question, “If I cut contact, do I ruin my parent’s chances of repentance?”
Beth concludes this section by saying, “When we genuinely pursue a process of forgiveness, we’ll rarely arrive at the decision to cut off the relationship. Biblical love compels relational wisdom; the relationship may look different, but forgiveness will most often make space for continued connection.”
Honestly, I don’t even know what to say to this. This statement is over-generalized and frankly untrue. There are some levels of sin, hurt, and brokeness that necessarily leave a relationship severed even after the debt is forgiven, especially when issues such as addiction or abuse are ongoing. Furthermore, in some cases, a child pursues the process of forgiveness, only to be shut down by the parent. What is a grown child supposed to do when the parent flips the narrative of blame? Instead of ackowledging the fault, the parent insists that everything is the child’s fault. There is no mutual relationship at this point, and that was never the child’s choice or hope.
Stay away from fools, for you won’t find knowledge on their lips.
Prov. 14:7 (NLT)
Bearing With One Another In Love
Paul gives this commandment to the New Testament Church twice (Eph. 4:2 ; Col. 3:12). Bearing with the sins and weaknesses of other people is part of everyday life. But there are still times we see relationships severed by God’s command. One famous example is when there was gross and flagernt sexual sin (1 Cor. 5:5). But one less often remembered is God’s threat to husbands who mistreat their wives - “Treat her as you should so that your prayers aren’t hindered.” God stops listening the prayers of those who mistreat their wives. How much more does God care about the grown child who is being mistreated by his/her parents? Sometimes, love is allowing consequences to play out.
If I were talking to someone who was wrestling with whether to cut off their parents, I would want to know whether cutting people out was a common theme in their life. If this person has healthy and stable relationships in other areas of life, bearing with the sins and weaknesses of others, then I’m going to be very hesitant in writing this off as a selfish decision informed by cultural trends. The opposite is also true - if the person burns through relationships quickly and indescriminately, I’m going to listen with a grain of salt. But I’m still going to listen - estrangment may in fact be the best option. Ultimately, it’s not my choice and I cannot force another person to adopt the choices I would make.
Final Thoughts
In tort law there is a helpful concept - “Sometimes people are doing the best they can….but their best still isn’t enough.” If a person’s best is below the standard of reasonable care, liability remains. I’ve found this concept helpful in parental relationships too. I can realize with gratefulness that my parents did the best they could. But I can also ackowledge sometimes that best wasn’t enough. The question is, can the parent admit that their best wasn’t enough and take the active steps needed to change?
Another concept important to this conversation is the ability to distinguish between “garden variety sin,” “wickedness,” and “evil.” These are very different categories and demand very different responses.4
The thing that annoyed me most about this article was that it put the entire burden on the child. I’ve seen several articles coming over the airwaves that discuss this trend, each article placing the burden (or in some cases blame) on the child. But I have yet to see an article directing responsiblity towards parents.
I have been blessed to watch many of the Christian parents I know ackowledge their shortcomings and apologize to their children. One man I was talking to over lunch told me that he has apologized to his grown children from raising them in a fundamentalist church enviroment. His relationship with them was already built on mutual trust and love, and his apology only furthered his credibility with them.
Another aspect I’ve noticed is missing from this conversation is the grief that comes from estrangment. Can estrangment bring great freedom? Yes. But it truly is a form of death and the grief is deep and complicated. It is certainly no easy button. I once heard a wise pastor’s wife say, “Sometimes you have to amputate a limb to stop an infection. You may walk with a limp this side of heaven but at least you are alive.” If someone has made the choice to walk with a limp of this nature, perhaps approach with compassion and curiosity before condemnation. You might find the infection was far worse than you could imagine from the outside.
Finally, I ackowledge that sometimes children make drastic moves, like estrangment, that are disproportional to the harm inflicted. I’ve seen this happen. It is unfortunate and unjust. But so is oversimpling Scripture and slapping “Biblical principles” on a broad class of people without taking individual nuance into account. Doing so only heaps guilt and responsibilty on the already wounded party.
Are you wrestling with your relationship with your parents? Know that the God of the universe is big enough and wise enough to hold the tensions of your individual circumstances. His goal for you is life abundant. In some situations life abundant may mean maintaining difficult relationships in some form. I have seen several friends do this with incredible strength to maintain boundaries and grace to maintain contact. In others, life abundant may mean severing ties that were never meant to be severed. I have also seen this play out with incredible grace, humility, and true freedom. Estrangment was God’s form of rescue.
Whatever your path, He will lead you on the one in which you should walk. Seek Him and let the whole counsel of Scripture guide you, not just a handful of cherry-picked Biblical principles. Scripture is a true guide, but the key to the map lies in hermenutics.
https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/before-cut-off-parents/
Full sentence here, “If your parent tends to be controlling or overly opinionated, you can learn to maintain your convictions and plans while still demonstrating respect and care for her.”
The nuance this sentence demands could be an entirely seperate article. Two quick thoughts. First - if a parent is actively threatening your personaly safety or security, you do not have to rebuke in person (if at all). Second - Jesus also calls us to be shrewd. There are some people that rebuking is equivilant to “throwing your pearls before swine.” If you know that a rebuke is only going to lead to you being trampled (Matt. 7:6), this is God’s wisdom alive and well in you. In this type of scenario I wouldn’t recommend pursuing this process. I would encourage you to distance yourself and simply pray for their repentance.
Adam Young gave me these categories -
One of the things that is in the background with pretty much everything TGC does is a smuggled authority dynamic that is rarely acknowledged. All of those “Points” change if there is an assumption that the parent still has some sort of “God given” authority role. Then what is implied is that “honor” is “obedience”, “forgiveness” looks like continuing to have a submissive relationship, and “bearing with” means not demanding they actually change their behavior. If you leave out the authoritarian dynamics you have something that sounds very vanilla but in actually is quite coercive.
I think you’ve done a great job of adding realism and nuance to what can be very complicated relationships. My friend’s dad is an angry man and most of their meetings end with dad blaming son for all of the world’s problems. My friend loves his dad, wants to honor Jesus with his life, but chooses to be cautious about how he engages. I think that’s wise. Thanks for sharing this. It’s helpful.