Customer Reviews

Pastoral Care of Battered Women

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Clarke takes a radical feminist approach to the pastoral care of battered women. While acknowledging that stress, alcoholism, poor family communication, male unemployment, low male self-esteem, female learned helplessness, female vulnerability, a background of violence in the male's family, and a male's immature "love-hate" relationship with his mother are contributing factors in wife abuse, Clarke believes the primary cause of wife abuse is the belief in the traditional patriarchal family where the husband is viewed as the head and primary provider and the woman as the homemaker and caretaker of the children.

Partly at fault is the theology of the church. She hates what she calls "literalist biblicism" which interprets the Scripture literally and takes the Bible for what it says. Rather, she traces many of the avowed feminist interpretations of passages without doing any exegesis of the Scriptures themselves. She dislikes the polarization of male and female qualities as well as theologies of the Fatherhood and Sonship of God, both male qualities. She would rather do away with all parental models of God, and center in on "God as my friend." ("How special," replies the Church Lady.)

Clarke even dislikes the biblical motif of Christ as suffering servant, saying that this doctrine too often implies submission, especially for women. Clarke contends, "Jesus' self-giving love was from a position of power, as male and as rabbi, and not from a position of subordination" (p. 76). Failing to make a distinction between power and authority, Clarke needs a good dose of Forbes' Religion of Power or Campolo's The Power Delusion.

Though Clarke does make some helpful comments to pastors working with battered women, they are too cursory and clouded over with feminist overtones to be of much use. She would rather outlaw the spanking of children, firearms, TV violence, and provide every woman with economic independence from her husband. I am surprised that Howard Clinebell not only wrote the forward, but seems to concur with her beliefs.