Journal: Journal for Biblical Manhood and Womanhood
Volume: JBMW 16:2 (Fall 2011)
Article: Confusing a Covenant with a Contract: The Deeper Problem behind Pat Robertson’s Bad Advice
Author: Timothy Paul Jones

JBMW 16:2 (Fall 2011) p. 9

Confusing a Covenant with a Contract:
The Deeper Problem behind
Pat Robertson’s Bad Advice

Timothy Paul Jones

Associate Professor of Leadership and Family Ministry

The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary

Louisville, Kentucky

In September 2011, television host Pat Robertson declared that a man might be justified in divorcing his Alzheimer’s-afflicted spouse as long as the man enlisted someone to look “after her” and to provide “custodial care.” Robertson defended his declaration by defining such diseases as “a walking death” wherein the diseased person is already “gone.” Appealing to the husband’s need for “some kind of companionship,” Robertson declared that forbidding such a divorce was “the last thing” he would do.1

I was not exactly in unbiased circumstances when I first heard this news. I was sitting beside a dying man in my parents’ living room. The dying man was my father.

Less than a month earlier, the physician’s assistant had clicked through a half-dozen scans of my father’s cranial cavity. An undetected tumor in his left lung had sown four, perhaps five, cancerous lesions in his skull. Viewed from that inadequate perspective in which the body is a machine to be repaired if possible and discarded if necessary, no hope remained. Seen from the standpoint of the resurrection, these results signaled that a time was approaching when the “last enemy to be defeated” would rend my father’s spirit from his flesh (1 Cor 15:26) until that future moment when the risen Christ returns for his own.

At that point, my mother made a decision. Not yet knowing if her husband’s body would persist many months or a few weeks, or what pain might mark his final hours, she chose that she would care for him to the end. If necessary, she would do this alone. She chose to walk this path without question or hesitation. From her perspective, nothing less could uphold the vows that she had affirmed nearly six decades earlier, when she herself was barely sixteen: “For better or for worse; in sickness and in health; until death do us part.”

In this way, my mother, my wife and I, some siblings, and a niece began a journey alongside my father down that long dark hallway marked “Death.” He would not die in a sterile cell amid a conglomeration of medical experts. He would pass from this life among all the earthy oddities of home, surrounded by a community of amateurs—“amateurs” both in the modern meaning of “non-experts” and in the etymological sense of those who do what they do out of love.

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