John MacArthur discounts the seriousness of abuse.

1.  He does this subtly but surely, in multiple ways. I’d like to show you how. Here are a couple of quotes from MacArthur

   1. From Grace to You, "Answering Key Questions About the Family:

   “If a violence-prone husband becomes agitated and abusive, the wife should remove herself from danger, by leaving the home if necessary. God has promised that He will not test us beyond our ability to endure, but will always make a way of escape (1 Corinthians 10:13). Sometimes escape is the only way. If you have children and they are in danger, take them someplace where you will be secure until you feel you may safely come back.
   If you are not truly in any physical danger, but are merely a weary wife who is fed up with a cantankerous or disagreeable husband–even if he is an unbeliever who is hostile to the things of God–God’s desire is that you stay and pray and sanctify that husband by your presence as a beloved child of God (1 Corinthians 7:10-16). The Lord will protect you and teach you in the midst of the difficult time.  

   2. From Grace to You, "Dialogue On Divorce"

   You know, I can’t counsel a mother who says, “What am I going to do? This man has committed incest with my child and he beats me up and etc. or beats up the children and so forth and so on. Do I just sit there and take it? And the chairs on my head, and the stuff he throws at me, and the cigarette burns on my arm, and battered wives and all this stuff? What do I do?” Well, certainly there is nothing in the Bible that says you just stand around until you are just beaten to a pulp. You know, God has built into the human being a certain sense of self-preservation. Right? And it’s normal to separate yourself in that kind of situation. And maybe that’s what Paul is thinking about. There may come circumstances where divorce occurs, but if it isn’t on biblical grounds, that’s it. I mean, you can remain unmarried or be reunited.”
   “But I would say that’s only a possibility in that text. I really feel that if we are obedient to the word of God in that kind of a situation, God would give us the grace to endure a lot more severe things than we think. So, what we do is this; we counsel people this way:if you’re in an abusive situation, there’s not adultery involved, it’s just abusive, cruelty, or something like that–I don’t think alcoholism is necessarily in the same category. But where there’s beatings, where it affects you or the children, there’s nothing to say that you shouldn’t step away, get away to preserve your own health, and your own safety, and your own security. You don’t need to stay there and just be beaten to a pulp. God’s given us a self-defense mechanism. But I don’t think that’s grounds for divorce biblically. I think you have to hang in there and that’s what makes great prayer warriors People who can turn that kind of a thing into a draw nigh unto God kind of relationship. You know, when all your family has forsaken you the Lord will be your family.

   Let me spotlight how MacArthur discounts the seriousness of abuse. 

   ‘“This man has committed incest with my child and he beats me up and etc. or beats up the children and so forth and so on. … And the chairs on my head, and the stuff he throws at me, and the cigarette burns on my arm, and battered wives and all this stuff?”

   To me, the words “and etc, … and so forth and so on… and all this stuff” are a backhanded way of painting the victim as whining, moaning, complaining to the point she bores the pants off everyone she talks to. I can imagine MacArthur thinking "She lays it on too thick! She’s making mountains out of molehills! I wish she’d just be quiet!” So as a victim-survivor, I feel discounted and belittled by MacArthur’s choice of words.

   “… the chairs on my head…” – why did MacArthur choose that example? Yeah, some victims have certainly had chairs thrown at their heads; but I would venture to suggest that it’s one of the less common examples of abuse. I think MacArthur might have chosen that illustration as a way of making victims’ complaints sound exaggerated or ludicrous.

   Then MacArthur portrays an abuser as “a violence-prone husband [who] becomes agitated and abusive…” This minimises the husband’s sin. Calling him ‘violence-prone’ is a way of diminishing the man’s CHOICE to be violent and abusive.
   We say some people are ‘accident-prone’ when they lack the spatial relations or cognitive or mobility skills to avoid accidents. But an abuser doesn’t lack the skills of respectful relating: he possesses those skills in abundance when it comes to enlisting allies in the church. He CHOOSES to relate disrespectfully and abusively to his target victim. So we should call it that, not excuse him with weasel words like ‘violence-prone’.

   “….if you’re in an abusive situation, there’s not adultery involved, it’s just abusive, cruelty, or something like that–…” The word “just” in this sentence is atrociously disrespectful to abuse survivors. It shows MacArthur is clueless. 

   Which would you prefer, Mr MacArthur? Your wife committing adultery on you? Or your wife exercising a relentless pattern of power and control over you till you thought you were going crazy and you lost virtually all sense of yourself? If you were being abused by your wife, would you think it was "just" abuse – a bit of a problem, but not nearly as bad as adultery? But the trouble is, Mr MacArthur, you probably can't imagine being abused in this way by your wife, because you have no idea how much power and privilege you enjoy just from being a man. Women rarely are able to create the kind of electrified, charged atmosphere that leaves a person living in fear and causes them bit by bit to sink into a bottomless black hole. (Yeah, women sometimes are abusers, but much less often than men.) 

   And the icing on the cake, the confirmation of all I’ve said about how MacArthur discounts the seriousness of abuse, is the following:
   “[if you] are merely a weary wife who is fed up with a cantankerous or disagreeable husband–”
   Did you catch that word “merely”? How belittling! Clearly MacArthur doesn’t understand that because abuse is a pattern of conduct designed to exercise power and control over the victim, every victim will inevitably end up feeling incredibly weary and exhausted, and will be fed up. MacArthur never says that weariness and fed up-ness can be red flags for abuse, so victims of abuse who read his words will stay longer in the fog, because they not been helped to identify whether they are Victims of Abuse.

   Lastly, I want to note that a spouse can be cantankerous and disagreeable in order to deliberately exert power and control over his partner. So even (“just”) cantankerousness and disagreeableness can be abuse, IF they are a deliberate pattern designed to maintain power and control. This kind of abuse is often seen in more elderly abusers. They don’t have the violent rages they displayed in their prime, but they can still exercise abuse by maintaining a tiresome cantankerousness and disagreeableness.
   Many survivors have said, “He didn’t hit me often. He didn’t have to. Fear is a powerful weapon.” And others say, “He never hit me. He didn’t have to. Fear is a powerful weapon.”