November 6, 2014
In a project that many Christian feminists would find too frustrating, Samantha Field decided to read and review “Real Marriage,” a book about traditional marriage that was penned by Mark Driscoll and his wife, Grace. As we might expect, team Driscoll ends up giving bad advice, pushing double standards that favor husbands at the expense of their wives, and perhaps even enabling abuse, all under the guise of being “biblical.”
Ms. Field, however, is gifted when it comes to critical thinking, and her review is aided by her experience as a person who has suffered from abuse at the hands of a spouse. As such, she sees right through the interpretive miscues the Driscolls make when referencing the Bible, and she calls readers’ attention to subtle themes that first appear as common sense but are actually pretexts for trouble.
“…hardly anyone in our culture understands what abuse actually is. We have the vague thought that it’s black eyes, broken arms, women who ‘fall down stairs.’ But the reality is that my abuser called me [horrible names] every single day for almost three years and I never thought it was abuse because he wasn’t hitting me.”
The website, Patheos, is featuring Ms. Field’s five-part review on the book, “Real Marriage,” but the posts were originally featured on her personal blog, Defeating the Dragons. Her evaluations are pointed and intelligent, but Field’s language is not delicate, so please be prepared for some otherwise uncomfortable verbiage.
Ms. Field’s Patheos feature can be found here.
