Spiritual Violence

A certain Presbyterian minister says it is spiritual abuse to tell people that if they don't accept God's free gift of love offered through Jesus Christ, they will die in their sins, and they will not live eternally in heaven. This minister says that it is essentially spiritual violence to warn people that the consequences of not turning their lives over to God is eternal death--a loss of the joy they could have forever with God.

What a strange definition of spiritual abuse!

Let's look at an analogy. Suppose there were a road that everyone needed to take. This road has a fork, and one direction leads to a sudden hidden precipice. Suppose further that someone wants to place a warning sign at the fork saying "Look out! If you continue along this direction, you will fall off a precipice and die." Would placing that sign there be mental abuse? Would it be mentally violent? Or would it actually be helpful and saving to the people taking that road?

That is the case with those who want to tell people about God's offer of salvation through Jesus Christ. They want to be helpful and offer what is lifesaving to those who don't have it.

Moreover, it is actually spiritually abusive to deny this offer to people. The minister who claims that God does not exist (he says, "No deity exists. Not Jesus Christ, not Yahweh, not Baal, not Marduk, not Allah, not Zeus, not the Flying Spaghetti Monster, not the Wizard of Oz. None of them exist. All figments of imagination. They are fun. But none are worth the spiritual violence they cause.") does not have a shred of proof to back up his assertion. It all rests on his own faith claim that this world is all there is, his own 21st-century weltanschauung.

He is like the stubborn medieval people who couldn't see that the world was round, so they insisted it was flat. This minister can't see or feel God, so he insists God is not there. And so he becomes spiritually abusive toward his parishioners, and the readers of his blog and newspaper articles, by denying them the saving knowledge of all that God has to offer them.

True spiritual violence is done to people when God's love is kept away from them.