Ministry

The Use of Scripture in Cases of Abuse (with Steven Stracy)

Kirk E. Miller

God’s Word is meant to be a source of life and healing. But when misused, it can become a weapon to inflict harm. This damage is all the more the case when Scripture is mishandled to justify, excuse, or shield abuse.

When done by spiritual authorities (pastors and churches), such misuse scripture is itself spiritually abusive and thus deeply harmful in its own right. As Steven Tracy helpfully put it,

While any type of abuse can be extremely damaging, we have found that spiritual abuse is often some of the most damaging due to the way it shatters the very resources we need for health and healing.1

In this episode of Logos Live, I sit down with Steven Tracy to talk about how to use Scripture to heal, not harm, especially in instances of abuse.

Check out the full episode and accompanying article.

Check it out!

  1. Personal correspondence over email. February 5, 2026. ↩︎

Autism Isn’t Sin: Mistaking Difference for Disobedience

Kirk E. Miller

The following is an excerpt from Jonathan Machnee’s “Autism & Christianity: A Square Peg in a Round Hole?” 

Within many Christian circles, autism in all its forms remains little understood. Autistic ways of thinking and processing are often construed by pastors and clergy as problems to fix, rather than as different ways of understanding. …

Don’t mistake difference for sin. Autistic people will see things differently; they will process information differently; and they will interpret relationships and social dynamics differently.

Christians often interpret these differences as sin, disobedience, defiance, or a lack of spiritual fruit, when in fact they are simply differences in neurodevelopment. While autistic people are undoubtedly imperfect and sin like everyone else, differences that are often benign are treated as matters of spiritual failure. …

Because people are different, the fruits of the Spirit (Gal 5:22–23) will often express themselves differently in an autistic person than a non-autistic person. What love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control look like in someone without autism will often be quite different from what they look like in an autistic person.

We know that these qualities take different forms across different genders, ages, and cultures. Yet for some reason, we fail to extend that same expectation to differences in neurodevelopment. We unfortunately expect these fruits to appear identical. But fruit looks different when it grows on different trees.1

  1. Jonathan Machnee, “Autism & Christianity: A Square Peg in a Round Hole?,” Word by Word (Logos Bible Study blog), May 15, 2026, https://www.logos.com/grow/min-autism-and-christianity-contextualization/. ↩︎

Is It Wrong for Victims to Be Angry at Their Abusers?

Kirk E. Miller

In To Heal or Harm: Scripture’s Use as Poison or Medicine for Abuse Survivors, Steven R. Tracy asks the question, “Is it acceptable for abuse victims to be angry?”1

He observes, “Countless times, I have seen abuse survivors condemned by church leaders for being angry at their abusers or those who failed to protect them from their abusers.” They are indicted “for their ‘victim posturing’ and … ‘sinful anger and bitterness.'”

“Many argue that virtually all anger over what others have done to us is sinful.” As one author contends, “Ninety-nine percent of my anger is sinful; I don’t want to give tacit permission to my frustration by calling it righteous indignation. … If I am angry because of what someone did to me, I am always wrong.” Yet, while recognizing that we should be on guard against the potential dangers of anger—for instance, “Jesus condemned anger in Matthew 5:22;” likewise we are told to “refrain from anger (Ps 37:8), put it away (Col 3:8), and not make friends with someone given to anger (Prov 22:24)”—Tracy nonetheless poses the question, “Is it always sinful to be angry at injustices we suffer?” (emphasis mine). He answers,

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