The Commentariat Speaks (32)

An anonymous Christian man recently produced this wall of text looking for advice about his marriage, appropriately entitled “A Broken Situation”. To cut a long story very much shorter, it’s a fifteen-year marriage during which the husband indulged a porn habit for many years, before finally confessing to his wife and two Christian men, all of whom are now keeping him accountable with the aid of a software package they monitor regularly. For the last three years, he’s also been part of a weekly men’s prayer-and-confession session, which he feels has been a help in keeping spiritually on track.

So here’s the catch: the porn habit ended six years ago. The monitoring and weekly confessing continues, probably until the Lord returns.

The Head of Nothing

The obvious question arises: when does the husband get to be head of the wife again? As much as it’s wonderful that the writer has, with the Lord’s help, conquered lust in that particular form, his marriage is profoundly out of order. Despite six years of demonstrable self-control, his wife still does not trust him. She wants to know and pre-approve everything he confesses to his male friends. She wants him to tell her all his temptations, including those he does not act on. He’s unsure how to respond to such requests as they make him uncomfortable, and rightly so.

Now, I’m not going to tell you this is the wife’s fault, or that she should be more trusting. I don’t think it’s her problem at all. She’s just doing what every woman does when her husband cedes his God-given responsibility to her: grabbing the steering wheel and driving the marriage. Somebody has got to, right?

Here is the thing. Some Christian men are poor leaders some of the time. Some Christian men are poor leaders all of the time. But one thing we can say with certainty from scripture is that “wives should submit in everything to their husbands” as the church submits to Christ. That is the order God has established in the home, and there are very few circumstances in which it is the Lord’s will for the wife to rule over, manage or direct her husband. (Mental incapacitation may be an exception, a history of moral failure is not.) Depending on the options she had available prior to marriage, he may or may not be the best head she might have had. One thing is for sure: he’s the ONLY head she has now, and it is the Lord’s will for him to assert or reassert godly leadership of that home.

Addicted to Training Wheels

The way the husband frames it, the main concern in the marriage is trust. I believe the real problem is headship; specifically, the husband’s failure to live it out. Lack of trust is simply a by-product of his failure to live out his God-given role in their family. Think about it: would you trust a man who rode a bike with training wheels for six years with no indication he ever planned to take them off? I wouldn’t either. That’s what he’s doing with his accountability software and confession sessions.

I find the modern evangelical emphasis on this sort of accountability questionable. Accountability implies authority. We give an account in situations where we owe one. Explanations can go downhill, but accounts only go up, to the superior authority. A child gives an account to his father and an explanation to his peers. The latter is optional. The former is not. Each of us will give an account to God. God does not give an account to us. He may give us the occasional explanation, but many times we must get by without even that.

When we look at the chain of spiritual authority hinted at in Ephesians 5 and fleshed out in 1 Corinthians 11, we see only three relevant “tiers” of authority: “the head of every man is Christ” and “the head of a wife is her husband”. Christ > Husband > Wife. A husband is not accountable to his peers or even to his wife. He is accountable to Christ, period. When he is operating under the Lord’s authority, as he ought to, then he has the Lord’s full authority to lead his wife. He may explain to her. He may ask her opinion. He may even elect to debate with her if he so chooses. But he does not owe her an account. That’s just not how biblical authority works.

Throwing Away the Crutches

The measure of our obedience to God, and therefore of our trustworthiness, is not what we do when people are looking, it’s what we do when nobody knows what we’re up to. The husband in this situation has used a couple of tools to help him get control of a bad habit that might easily have ruined his marriage: public confession and accountability software. They were the equivalent of crutches for a man with a broken leg. What would you think of a man who walked around on crutches for six years? You might think his leg hadn’t healed at all. You’d definitely think he didn’t have a lot of confidence in the healing process. But you’d never know which unless you see him walking around normally.

It is often said that trust is earned. But by biblical definition, trust — which is no different from faith — is the “assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen”. You can’t produce trust with monitoring software. That’s the precise opposite of trust. You can’t produce trust by trotting off to your weekly confession session, which is itself a red flag, producing the sneaking suspicion that the crutches have yet to do their job.

Furthermore, there are lots of things we are told to confess in scripture: wickedness, rebellion, sin, transgressions, iniquity. You know what all these have in common? They are things that actually happened. I can’t think of a single instruction to confess the contents of one’s thought life, especially those we deemed inappropriate to act on. The wife’s request for more information of that nature needs to be cheerfully, politely and very firmly declined.

If You Walk Away, I May Follow

The wife’s obsession with knowing what goes on during confession and preapproving what he says there is thoroughly understandable. I believe it is the Lord’s way of telling her husband it’s time to take off the training wheels and throw away the crutches, to recognize that he is responsible for his sexual fidelity directly to God himself. Not to his wife. Not to his Christian pals. He needs to scrap the weekly confession session, take the software package off his computer and get back to the job of leading his wife.

Let’s keep it real here. He may lead, and she may not follow. That’s up to her, and she will give an account to the Lord if she opts to reject her husband’s leadership. But a marriage held together by wifely micromanagement is not much of a marriage for either party. Trust only exists when you give its object the chance to fail.