He Was Abused in God’s Name Too: Why Union with Christ Holds the Spiritually Abused

For someone who has been harmed in God's name, every religious answer arrives under suspicion — and it should. The harm came wearing the name of God; it quoted Scripture; it was administered by people who spoke beautifully about grace. So when an article like this one proposes that the highest healing from spiritual abuse is found in Christ, the honest reader's first instinct is to brace: here comes another lovely thing that will be used to tighten the same vise. That instinct is not faithless. It is earned, and what follows will not ask you to set it down.

So let it be said first, plainly. Nothing in the Christian faith is safe from misuse. Every good word in it has been turned into a weapon — the call to forgive, the language of grace, the doctrine of the Trinity, union with Christ itself. People have spoken the most beautiful things Christian theology contains while committing its most terrible betrayals. Nothing here is offered as a formula immune to abuse; there is no such formula, and the search for one is part of what the first two articles in this series diagnosed. If a thing could be made safe from the abuser simply by being true and beautiful, the gospel would already be immune to abuse — and it is not.

And yet here is the thing that changes everything, and it is the reason this article exists. Consider what was actually done to the One at the center of the Christian faith. Jesus is the Word of God made flesh, the most beautiful word God ever spoke — and he was betrayed by one of his own, condemned by the religious authorities of his day, mocked and tortured and executed in God's own name. They tried to distort and weaponize him more completely than any doctrine could ever be twisted — but he was not a doctrine, he was a person, and it was his own body that absorbed the attempt. No one has ever been abused in God's name more thoroughly than the One in whose name all such abuse is done. And it did not destroy him. He rose from the dead.

That is the claim this whole article unfolds: the ultimate answer for the spiritually abused is not a teaching that might be twisted next, but a Person who has already been to the very bottom of what was done to you — abused in God's name, and not destroyed by it — and who now holds those who were abused. Everything else here is an explanation of why being joined to that particular Person is the one thing the wound cannot reach past.

A word for readers who have arrived at this article first. The two earlier articles traced the fear of apostasy — the dread, underneath much of religious life across religions, that one's tradition might dissolve and its people fall away — and then watched the structures that fear builds when it acts: the legalist's tightened fence, the liberal's loosened boundary, the separatist's wall against the world. All three failed the same way, each reaching from the outside a problem that lives on the inside, until the effort to prevent apostasy became the very thing that produced it. That demolition left a precise specification for any real solution: it would have to come from entirely outside the corrupted system, and reach the deepest interior of the person, where no fence has ever reached. From outside, yet all the way inside — which rules out everything a human being or a human community can build. And note who built the machinery that killed Jesus: it was the most rigorous anti-apostasy project in history. The abuse at the center of the faith and the failure those articles traced are the same event. (And if you hold no faith at all, you are no less welcome — take what follows as an account of what Christians believe, something to sit with and weigh, with nothing asked of you in return.)

Why the answer had to be a person you could be joined to

The wound the first two articles described does not sit on the surface. It runs to the root of the person, and through communities also, wrapping around the very faculties one would use to detect it. A cure shallower than that interior cannot touch it — which forces a hard, narrowing logic. Because the problem reaches all the way down, only a God-sized solution could reach far enough. Because it is personal, living in the folds of will and affection, no impersonal God-sized force — no power or principle or law — could meet it; only a person can fully heal a person. And because it is intimate, woven into the self, the person who solves it must be joined not merely near us but into us, fitted to the human interior as though made for it. A doctor across the room cannot set a bone he never touches. Put the three together and the shape of the only possible cure appears: not God at an untouchable distance, and not merely a person beside us, but God himself come as a person — a divine person, reaching where only God can reach and healing in the way only a person can.

Everything short of that collapses, and everything else on offer is short of it. Said without contempt, as structure rather than slur: every other account of how to be kept from falling away, followed to its base, finally hands a person something to do — a law to keep, a practice to perfect, a transcendent state to reach and not lose. Ask any of them what finally secures you, and the answer is some capacity of your own: your discipline, your sincerity, your correct belief, your separation. That is the self securing the self — the closed loop that the second article watched strangle itself. There is, in the end, one proposal whose answer to "what secures me" is not some form of me but Another. And in it the thing that secures and the thing one is secured for are the same, so no gap opens between the tool and the goal for corruption to slip through.

Grace is a person

Here the wounded reader has something to un-learn, because grace was very likely handed over as a kind of spiritual credit — accumulated by doing the right things, added to or subtracted from a running account by performance, always in danger of falling short. That is not what the word means. Grace, in its deepest sense, is not a metaphysical force to be conjured and gathered around oneself. Grace is a person, and that person is Jesus — the same Jesus who was abused in God's name and rose. The gift and the Giver are one. To have grace is not to have acquired a quantity of something; it is to have been joined to Someone. The old name for this is union with Christ, and it is the hinge on which everything turns.

That it is received, not achieved, is what makes it different in kind from every strategy that failed, and what answers the suspicion the first article raised — that every dead religion also believed itself immune, and that the confidence of immunity was the mark of the ones that died. What makes this different from every graveyard faith that was equally sure of itself? Not that Christians are more certain, or purer, or better defended. The difference is that union with Christ is not a self-securing strategy at all. Every tradition in the graveyard trusted something it did or maintained, and so fell under the pattern, because self-maintenance is the machinery that fails. Union trusts what he did and what he holds. "No one," Jesus said, "will snatch them out of my hand" (John 10:28) — his hand, not our handhold. A faith whose safety rests on its own vigilance belongs to the graveyard logic; a faith whose safety rests on being held by Another is precisely what that logic cannot reach.

John Calvin put the core of it starkly: until a person is joined to Christ, everything Christ did "remains useless and of no value for us." The cross and the empty tomb — his death and his rising — do a person no good at all until they are joined to the One they happened to. And because grace is a person given directly, it cannot be metered, sold, hoarded, or gatekept — which is exactly what abusive religious structures do with grace when they imagine it a substance they dispense. Union has no middleman. No leader and no institution stands between a person and God, controlling access to what only God can give. That is what makes it the natural enemy of every control system this kind of care exists to help people leave.

How the seven woes end — and who they killed

All of this has a place in the story of Jesus's own life, and it is exactly where the second article left off: the seven "woes" of Matthew 23 — the public denunciations Jesus delivered against the devout religious authorities of his day — his demonstration that the most rigorous anti-apostasy project in history was manufacturing the apostasy it feared. That article stopped before the passage's final lines, where the indictment turns to grief and then to an offer: "How often would I have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing" (Matthew 23:37). Having exposed every human strategy for holding a people together, Jesus offers himself as the thing those strategies were reaching for and never grasped — not a higher wall but a body interposed between the vulnerable and the storm. And he names the one thing that defeats it: not Rome, not corruption, but "you were not willing." The only thing that finally severs a person from the One who gathers is the refusal to be gathered.

Read on a few chapters and the machinery he exposed will kill him. The anti-apostasy project, defending the faith, executes the One who was the faith's whole point — the abuse at the center of this article, carried out by exactly the apparatus the first two articles diagnosed. And even here he does not merely expose the seven mechanisms; he is what each was blindly reaching for, and to each he says a flat no and then, in his own person, a deeper yes. They locked the gate of the kingdom of God in people's faces; he says, I am the door (John 10:9). They built machinery for swearing while evading their word; he becomes the one in whom every promise of God is Yes (2 Corinthians 1:20). They kept the outside of the cup clean while the inside rotted; he cleanses from the inside out, the one direction cleansing had never run. They were whitewashed tombs, appearing handsome over dead bones; he walked into an actual tomb and turned it inside out, so that the grave that is all surface and no life is answered forever by the empty one. In every case the machinery is refused and the longing is met — not by a better fence, but by the One the fences were always failing to reach.

The same holds for the separatist communities the second article documented, and it is worth saying plainly, because those who leave them often grieve as though everything they had wanted was poison. It was not. What those communities reached for was real and good, and every piece of it is answered in Christ, only uncounterfeited. They wanted purity, a people genuinely set apart; he gives it, as a cleansing that runs from the inside out rather than a scrubbed exterior. They wanted their children kept safe; he keeps them not by sealing them behind a wall but by holding them in his hand as they learn to move through a messy world the way he moved through it himself — engaging its sin and sorrow face to face, turning none of the wounded away, yet never remade in its image, because he was always being formed by the Holy Spirit instead. They wanted the certainty of being the faithful ones; he gives it, lodged in himself rather than in their own vigilance. They wanted a true and undivided belonging; to be joined to him is to be joined to his whole body, a belonging that does not depend on shutting the world out. To each broken effort, a flat no; to each buried longing beneath it, the same deeper yes.

Why a church can confess its sin, and you can stop searching your heart

This reaches the corporate fear the first two articles raised — that communities apostatize through their own anti-apostasy efforts and cannot afford to see their apostasy, because the whitewashed tomb cannot confess without ceasing to look whitewashed. But a church whose security rests on its Head — on Christ himself — rather than on its own machinery can survive naming its corruption, because the confession does not threaten its foundation. It is why the Southern Baptist insiders quoted in the second article — senior leaders of the largest Protestant denomination in the United States, men who had helped build the institution — could say from within that its instruments of faithfulness had been turned into instruments of concealment, and the gospel did not collapse when they said it. The self-securing community must hide its rot to survive; the Christ-secured community can name it and live.

And what is true of the church is true of the person. Every human community forces a cruel choice: be fully known and risk rejection, or be accepted by hiding — the very engine of the whitewashed tomb. Union with Christ is the one arrangement in which the One who sees all the way in is the same One who holds on regardless. To be known completely and loved completely at once dissolves the reason to deceive oneself, and with it the endless interior audit that high-control religion installs. For the deepest wound such religion leaves is very often a wound about assurance: somewhere you were taught to search your own heart for proof that your faith was real, and the search never ended, because it cannot. There is repenting, and then wondering whether one really repented; and beyond that, whether one truly meant it; and beyond that, whether the motive behind the motive was pure. The Catholic tradition mapped this spiral for centuries and had to develop a whole literature on scrupulosity — the state in which a soul can never be certain its sorrow was pure enough to count. Turn inward to grade the quality of your own repentance and you step onto a stair that descends without end.

The rescue is to look the other way — outward, to the Lamb of God, the one offered in the place of others, so that your standing rests on what was done for you rather than on anything you can produce. The best answer to "Am I truly born again?" — truly saved, genuinely remade at the root — is not a yes or no wrung out of self-inspection; it is a Person. Given one word to answer the question of your salvation, the word is not me; the word is Jesus.

Nowhere is this more urgent than for a parent, because nowhere is the fear of apostasy more acute than in the fear for one's child. The question — is my child truly the Lord's? — can drive a loving parent to despair, auditing a child's sincerity for a verdict that never arrives. Here too the answer is not a verdict you extract but a Person you appeal to: to bring God's covenant promises — the binding commitments he has made to his people — back to him, and to ask the Spirit to incline the child's heart and make the gospel beautiful to them. The Spirit is entirely able to make Christ more attractive to a child than anything else in the world. A parent's task is not to secure a child's heart by force or by sealing them off; it is to hold them before the only One who can secure them, and to ask. The security of the child, like the security of the parent, was never going to come from the fence.

A prayer for those who were not willing

Return to where the woes ended: how often would I have gathered you, and you were not willing. If the only thing that finally severs us from the One who gathers is our own unwillingness, then the truest prayer a wounded person can pray is the exact inversion of that sentence — not a promise to be willing enough at last, but a handing-over of the unwillingness itself. It can be prayed in words like these, as often as they are needed:

Lord Jesus, I have been the one who was not willing. I have pushed you away, and I know I will again — sometimes in anger, sometimes in shame, sometimes because people who wore your name wounded me and I could no longer tell you apart from them. Hold on to me anyway. When I run, gather me. When I wound you, love me still. Do not let me go — not because my grip is strong, but because yours is. Give me a repentance deeper than I can manufacture and a faith truer than I can feel, and be yourself the answer to every question I cannot answer about myself. Amen.

That prayer requires nothing you have not got. It does not require that you have stopped pushing him away, or that your repentance has reached some purity, or that your faith feels like enough. It asks him to do the gathering, which is the only arrangement under which any of us was ever safe.

The bottom he has already reached

One thing has to be said with great care here, because it is the thing most easily twisted into something monstrous. To say that Christ was abused and overcame does not mean your suffering was an evil you must condone, or that there is a silver lining you are failing to find, or that the harm done to you was secretly good. Those are things an abuser says. It means only this: because to be joined to Christ is to share in his life, including his sufferings, the wounds you carry are not something you must make sense of alone or climb out of by yourself. They are something the One you are joined to has himself been through — to the very bottom, in God's own name — and came back from alive. He is not naive about what was done to you, and not standing above it at a clean distance. He has been lower than you have been, in the same dark, under the same false accusation, and he is not there anymore.

So if you were hurt by a community that ran on fences, hear this clearly. The fence was never what held you, and the thing that failed you — the machinery that wounded you in the name of protecting you — was not God. It was a human strategy God himself exposed and grieved, and then let fall on his own body rather than yours. The One at the end of the seven woes is not the fence. He is the hen gathering her brood under her wings, still willing, still calling, holding on to those who cannot yet hold on to him — with hands that were themselves wounded in God's name, and are still open.

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Pathways Counseling exists for people carrying the wounds this series has described — the fear, the control, the harm done in the name of keeping the faith safe. If any of this has named something you have lived, and you would like a place to bring it, we would be glad to talk with you.

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