Death of the Pastor's Wife

Every time I think I can take a break from beating certain dead horses about disgraced pastors, some Righteous Gemstones reject tends to pop up and give Christianity a black eye over the same stuff over and over again. I feel like Jude. He wanted to write about great things like salvation, but he’s only remembered for his letter stating that the perverts promised in 2 Peter 2 had arrived. I was going to leave the sex stuff alone for a while, but I guess the Spirit wants me to put this show on again like the flasher on Hollywood Boulevard we recently met (I think I’ll tell you more about him in a future post).

Before anyone asks, my wife is alive, well, and shopping. The title ain’t about her; it’s a docuseries on Netflix that’s part of the national conversation at the moment. It tells the story of Mica Miller, her marriage to "pastor" John-Paul “JP” Miller, the allegations of coercive control and abuse surrounding that marriage, and the circumstances surrounding her death. Her family says his tattooed signature on her body was less a marriage than a brand. He still has a congregation. Mica’s death was officially ruled a suicide, and JP Miller has not been charged with causing her death. He has, however, faced federal charges involving alleged cyberstalking and false statements, which he has pleaded not guilty to. I don't know everything that happened in that marriage, and neither does anyone watching a show on their couch. I’m just talking about a too-mainstream theology that is being discussed in relation to this series. For that, I just need a Bible. The ideas that a wife owes her husband unconditional sexual access, that his infidelity is downstream of her refusal, that a pastor can diagnose his own spouse from a pulpit and call it shepherding —all that falls apart the second you read the actual text it claims to be standing on.

What 1 Corinthians 7 Is Actually Doing

Here's something people miss about this chapter: Paul isn't handing down commandments from Sinai. He's answering mail. The Corinthians wrote him with a stack of questions, and you can watch him work through them in real time — he even flags which parts are his own judgment and which parts go back to Jesus (7:6, 7:10-12, 7:25, 7:40). This is Paul thinking pastorally about a genuinely strange situation: a church sitting in the middle of a city that had turned sex into a form of religious devotion. Some of them were asking if celibacy was the truly spiritual path. Others were wondering if marriage should be abandoned altogether so they could focus on the church during what Paul calls "the present crisis." He's not writing a constitution. He's trying to keep people from turning either marriage or singleness into an idol.

Paul says in 1 Corinthians 7:3-4: "The wife does not have authority over her own body, but the husband does; and likewise also the husband does not have authority over his own body, but the wife does." People who want a permission slip stop reading at "the husband does". Paul isn't granting one spouse authority over the other — he's taking sole ownership away from both of them simultaneously. Loving someone involves caring about them in exhaustion, illness, grief, or plain old "not tonight." That's a genuinely radical claim in the ancient world, and it's the opposite of what gets preached from pulpits like Miller's (allegedly – I wasn’t there). Preachers commanding Christians to have mandatory sex sounds just like the temple prostitution that God abhors. 

I know that no couple’s schedule truly lines up, and I’ve written plenty of biblical defenses for a myriad of alternatives the “pastor” could have explored. They’re available in other posts on this blog. Stay away from the gross stuff the apostles prohibited in Acts 15. If you need a working definition of “sexual immorality”, look at the things the Canaanites not under the Law of Moses were still punished for in Leviticus 18 and Leviticus 20. Sex-negative ascetics and philosophers influenced our interpretation of the Bible for centuries, some things like Matthew 5:28 are mistranslated in English, etc.

The Devil Gets Blamed for a Lot He Didn't Do

“Do not deprive each other (note: this would include all marital obligations, like failing to provide food/clothing/shelter to a wife because of your preaching tour – see Ephesians 5:29) so that you may devote yourselves to prayer except perhaps by mutual consent and for a time. Then be together (note: not the more salacious “come together” in many translations) again (note: doing the Ephesians 5:21-33 things) so that Satan will not tempt you because of your lack of self-control.” 

The line about Satan taking advantage of a couple's lack of self-control gets twisted into something Paul never said: that a wife's refusal makes her responsible for her husband's affair. Adam tried the "the woman you gave me" defense in Genesis 3, and it didn't work there either. Self-control is fruit of the Spirit (Galatians 5:22–23), not a service one spouse performs so the other doesn't have to.

Headship Was Never a Throne

If you want Paul's real theology of marriage, you don't stop at 1 Corinthians 7 — you go to Ephesians 5, and you read it starting at verse 21, not verse 25, because Paul doesn't let husbands skip the setup: "be subject to one another in the fear of Christ." Then, and only then, does he turn to husbands specifically, and what he tells them to do is not preside — it's give themselves up, the way Christ gave Himself for the church. Christ's authority over the church doesn't look like control. It looks like a cross. Peter says the same thing from a different angle: husbands are to live with their wives in an understanding way, honoring them as fellow heirs of the grace of life. Fellow heirs; not property, not a temptation-management system, but equal recipients of the same grace. None of this is complicated. It's actually the simple reading. It takes real effort to twist "husbands, love your wives like Christ loved the church and gave Himself up for her" into "hand over your body on demand or you're the reason I strayed." That's not a plain reading of Scripture. That's a man building a smaller, meaner god in his own image and standing behind a pulpit so nobody would check his math. Jesus demonstrates what leadership looks like by washing feet. “Do what I say because God made me the head” sounds like Pharaoh with a wedding ring.

A Congregation Is Not a Jury

Regarding diagnosing a wife from the pulpit, mental illness is real, and it deserves real care from qualified people. Peter tells shepherds explicitly not to lord authority over the people entrusted to them (1 Peter 5:3). A church is supposed to be the safest place on earth for someone to say "something is wrong." It is not supposed to become the mechanism by which that person is discredited before she's said a word. There is an enormous difference between “My wife is experiencing a serious mental-health crisis, and I want to get her help” and “My wife disagrees with me, therefore she is mentally ill.” When the person making the diagnosis is also the person's husband, pastor, spiritual authority, social authority, and public narrator, you've got a catastrophic conflict of interest. Imagine trying to tell people you're being abused: Your husband says you're crazy, and your church believes your husband. Every attempt you make to fix the situation becomes additional evidence that something is wrong with you.

The Test That Doesn't Require a Law Degree

You don't need a seminary class in Greek to check this teaching against Christ. Just ask: does it look like Him? Jesus frees people. He doesn't build systems where somebody else's appetite becomes a divine command with your name attached. The gospel's whole claim is that believers are already loved and already secure in Christ — not that a wife has to manage her husband's self-control to earn safety in her own home. Grace produces love and self-control in the person who received it. Coercion produces fear, and, unsurprisingly, often more sin — which is precisely what gets alleged in this story.

Marriage was supposed to be a picture of the gospel — grace, not extraction; self-giving, not ownership. This other thing is a different religion using the same vocabulary. Christ didn't rise from the dead so a man could build a smaller kingdom inside his own house and call himself its lord. 

This Is Herod's Story, Not Paul's

There's a detail in the Death of the Pastor's Wife story that keeps getting flattened into "he had an affair;" the allegation is that a pastor allegedly began grooming a girl while she was still underage, later officiated her wedding to someone else, and then maneuvered her out of that marriage and into one with him. There's a much older story that maps onto this one.

Herod Antipas took his brother Philip's wife, Herodias, for himself. John the Baptist told him plainly that it was not lawful for him to have her (Mark 6:18), and it cost John his head. The pattern of "the person who names this gets punished for naming it" is not new. It is, unfortunately, one of the oldest patterns there is. Jesus, for His part, wasn't shy about what He thought of Herod either — He called him a fox (Luke 13:32), which in first-century idiom wasn't a compliment about cleverness; it meant something worthless, cowardly, and predatory dressed up in a position of authority. Jesus agreed with John the Baptist about Herod when He answered the question about “for any reason” divorces derived from Deuteronomy 24:1-4. (God got a Deuteronomy 24:1-4 divorce in Jeremiah 3, so Jesus’ teaching related to Herod’s relationship was about the incorrect application of that rule by the Hillelites. The misuse of Deuteronomy 24:1-4 for those “for any reason” divorces was what Jesus spoke against, not the application of Exodus 21 for pikuach nefesh-based fleeing an abuser that even Shammai’s followers would have signed off on.) A pastor who officiates a young woman's wedding and later engineers his way into her bed is reenacting the Herod story with a Bible in his other hand. 

This raises a question that 1 Corinthians 5 forces us to ask directly. Paul's instructions there — about a man in an incestuous relationship with his father's wife — are blunt: don't even eat with someone claiming to be a believer while living in unrepentant sexual immorality (5:11). He's talking about whether that person gets treated as a functioning, in-good-standing member of the visible church community. If that's the bar for ordinary church membership, then the bar for eldership which explicitly requires being "above reproach" isn't even close. A man who allegedly groomed a minor, broke up her marriage, and then remarried her (which the Bible calls adultery, regardless of legal marital status) isn't a borderline case for continued pastoral ministry. He's not clearing the bar for attendance in good standing, let alone the pulpit. (And yet, there are still about 15-20 people that would still rather listen to this dude and give him their money than read my blog. “Farther along, we’ll know all about it. Farther along, we’ll understand why”).

Two Commandments

Jesus didn't leave us guessing: believe in Him (1 John 3:23), and love one another (John 13:34, and see how Paul later folds "the entire law" into loving your neighbor in Romans 13:8–10 and Galatians 5:14). Every other question — submission, headship, sexual ethics, church discipline — gets looked at in light of those two commands. So when someone tries to justify coercive sex inside a marriage using verses about a wife's "duty," the correct response is not a deeper dive into marital duty. It's to ask whether the act in question was loving. Rape is not loving. Sex obtained through fear, pressure, spiritual threats, or manufactured guilt is exploitation, and calling it "duty" doesn't change that. Whatever verses get quoted in defense of it, they lose the argument the moment you ask Jesus's own question: does this look like love? Putting a Bible verse next to coercion transforms Scripture into a weapon, and that is exactly the sort of thing Jesus spent His earthly ministry opposing.

David Managed Restraint Just Fine (Mostly)

It's worth pointing out that Scripture doesn't actually teach that sex is mandatory, or that men are helpless before their own desire and need a compliant woman standing by to keep them in line. David is recorded providing food, shelter, and such for the ten concubines Absalom had publicly defiled — without resuming sexual relations with them (2 Samuel 20:3). He housed and cared for them to hold up his end of the deal, not as leverage for what he wanted. (The people who read Exodus 21’s food, clothing, and lodging as requiring mandatory sex while insisting that the spies merely “lodged” with Rahab the prostitute are weird, and yet somehow, they’re the majority.) And notably, when the historical summary of David's reign comes around in 1 Kings 15:5, the text singles out the Uriah affair as the one place David turned aside from God's commands — which tells you the biblical writers were perfectly capable of holding a man accountable for exactly this kind of failure, rather than treating male desire as an unmanageable force of nature that women exist to regulate. He was not criticized for not having sex with the concubines.

What Marriage Is Actually a Picture Of

Ephesians 5 tells us marriage exists, in part, to depict Christ and the church. Acts 17:25 reminds us that God is not served by human hands, as though He needed anything — He is the giver, not the recipient, of every good thing. If marriage is supposed to picture that kind of relationship, then a husband who treats his wife as a resource to be extracted from has inverted the entire metaphor. Christian marriage isn't supposed to scream "I am owed something." It's supposed to scream grace — a husband who gives without needing to be paid back, in the same shape as the God he claims to represent.

Look at 1 Corinthians 13 and compare it to the controlling behavior alleged in the docuseries. Love is patient, love is kind, love does not envy, does not boast, is not arrogant, does not act unbecomingly, does not seek its own. It doesn't take much imagination to translate "does not act unbecomingly" and "does not seek its own" into modern terms: love doesn't stalk. It doesn't send a stream of threatening or manipulative texts. It doesn't post revenge porn to punish them for leaving. A marriage that looks like exploitation was never a picture of Christ and the church. It was never headship. It was a man mistaking a wedding ring for a leash, and calling the leash "biblical." Scripture already answered him in Ephesians 5:25 and in 1 Peter 5:3 — he just never bothered to read past the parts he liked.

So What Do We Do With This?

Here's where I think we need to stop talking about the show for a minute. If the only lesson we take from Death of the Pastor's Wife is “Wow, that guy was a terrible pastor,” then we've learned almost nothing. There will always be another charismatic man who discovers that if he says “God told me” loudly enough, people will stop asking whether God actually did. The more important question is why this stuff keeps finding an audience. Why, when somebody finally says “This isn't love”, do Christians so often reach for another Bible verse? Because control is easier than love. Love wants the good of the other person. Control needs somebody underneath it. Love kneels down. Jesus had some very unkind things to say about religious leaders who used their positions to burden other people while making themselves comfortable. Love one another. If your interpretation of “headship” requires fear, it's worth questioning. If your interpretation of “submission” requires coercion, it's worth questioning. If your interpretation of “marital duty” requires rape, throw it in the trash.

For all the ugly things that can be found in this story, I don't want the final word to belong to the ugliness. Christ is not standing over you with a clipboard asking whether you've performed well enough to deserve love. He already gave Himself for you. Husbands are supposed to love like that. Shepherds are not to lord it over the flock. Not every pastor is secretly a monster, not every troubled marriage has an obvious villain, and not every accusation is automatically true. Jesus gave us a test for false religion:

Look at the fruit.

Any man can tattoo his signature on somebody, put a cross on the wall, open a church, preach three sermons on Sunday, quote Paul until the cows come home, and call himself “pastor” until the Second Coming. But if the fruit of his ministry is fear, coercion, humiliation, isolation, sexual exploitation, and control— don't tell me how biblical he sounds.

Tell me where Jesus is.

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