The Bible and Newton's third law of motion.

BEING A FORMER MINISTER'S WIFE, I get nervous when people start quoting the Bible. My phobia didn't happen overnight. It came gradually over decades of studying the book and finding one thing for certain: Scripture is like Newton's third law of motion--for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. In other words, for every biblical directive that exists, there is another scriptural mandate challenging it.

As a young Bible college student, my favorite verse was Galatians 3:28, where God pronounced everyone equal ("in Christ there is neither male nor female, Jew nor Greek, bond nor free"). However, several books later, in Titus 2:9, I discovered that God also told slaves to obey their masters with fear and trembling.

God seemed just as muddled when it came to his children the Jews. In Genesis, he said that they were his chosen people and that their entire ancestry would be blessed. Then in Matthew 27:25, he changed his mind and said they were responsible for the crucifixion of Jesus and their sons and daughters would be cursed for generations.

And although in Galatians he'd claimed there was no difference between men and women, by the time God dictated the book of I Timothy to the Apostle Paul he had resolved himself to female subjugation. God explained his decision by citing the creation story, where Eve tempted Adam and caused the fall of the entire human race. Because of this tragic episode, woman revealed herself as a simpleminded creature who was easily deceived. As a consequence, the woman's job was now to submit to the intellect and rule of men.

In those early years of fervent Christianity, God's mind seemed quite complicated to me, but who was I to interrogate the Creator, me being a representative of temptresses in the collapse of humanity? I decided that God was the boss and I was in no position to question his universal scenario or, for that matter, the male professors who declared that our highest calling was to marry and serve our husbands. Females flourished in this role of helpmate by the very design of creation. Instead of making women in his own image, the Lord made them in the image of men to provide an assistant for the species made in God's likeness. Turn to I Corinthians 11:15 and read the passage yourselves, they said.

I decided the Lord's plan must be perfect when I fell in love with the most handsome, charismatic preacher on campus. In addition to being a Richard Gere look-alike, he was school president, a 4.0 student, and a brilliant Greek scholar all rolled into one magnificent body. (I tried not to look too hard at the body because in Job 31:11 God warned that lust was a shameful sin, a fire that would consume.) So I watched David from a distance. Then, to my amazement, in our second year of Bible College he asked me out. We dated over the next year and a half, spending much of our time memorizing Scripture and being careful not to touch each other. We promised the Lord we would wait and honor the abstinence rule he had mandated for Christian couples. Our professors insisted it was the ideal way to conduct a spiritual courtship because we got to know one another deeply without lust obscuring our senses.

A week after my graduation David and I were married in a beautiful white chapel near Missoula, Montana. Over the next four years, David completed two Master of Divinity degrees and I had babies. I felt content; I loved being a mother and it ranked up alongside serving one's husband as the chief mission a woman could aspire to (besides, according to I Timothy 2:11 childbearing would eventually get us out of trouble with God for causing the Fall).

After graduating with his second master's degree, David was called to a church near Seattle, Washington, where we began coaxing others into the kingdom of heaven. We discovered that God himself vacillated on the exact formula it took to get through the pearly gates, which was a real boon to those of us in the ministry. When we wanted people to give more money--to the poor or to the church--we quoted Matthew 19:24, where God said it was easier for a camel to get thorough the eye of a needle than for a rich man to get into heaven. When we wanted people to take the plunge of baptism, we quoted Mark 16:16, where God declared that baptism was the grid he used in sifting the wheat from the chaff. When we wanted to keep the members content, we quoted Ephesians 1:4, where God said not to worry about salvation because he had simply chosen certain people--for no particular reason--and others he had not (we taught this approach most often because our parishioners had a lot of possessions they didn't want to give away).

Eventually, David's favorite verse became Ephesians 5:22, where God appointed husbands to rule over their wives as Christ ruled over the church. And according to the original Greek, David said that required me to stay at home and forsake any outside or worldly interests. I didn't know Greek but pointed out that my most-loved verse, even if it was in the King James Version of English, was still Galatians 5 where God said everyone was equal. David argued that that Scripture only applied once we were all in heaven (I needed to remember that certain verses were valid for today and certain verses were valid for the future or maybe even the past). In this case, Galatians 3:28 was relevant for the future but Ephesians 5:22 was relevant for modern times.

My husband agreed with most fundamentalist scholars who taught that Ephesians 5 was God's blueprint for Christian marriage. In marriage, like in any successful organization, such as Microsoft or IBM, there needed to be a leader, a president, a boss. God in his wisdom had designated the husband for that role. David asked me if I thought God was the author of chaos. Did I think I was smarter than God when it came to marriage? Did I believe the Bible was the word of God, or didn't I?

"Yes," I said, "I believe the Bible is the word of God."

"Every word of it?" he asked.

"Every word of it," I said.

I tried hard to be faithful to Ephesians 5:22. When David started inspecting the silverware drawer and then throwing the contents across the room if it was too messy, I'd scrub each piece and place it back in a perfect row. When he declared that the ten pounds I'd gained since our wedding date simply made me look unappealing from the waist down, I increased my exercise routine and cut out all carbohydrates. When he pulled our family portrait from the wall and smashed it onto the hardwood floor, I picked up each shard and disposed of it before someone from the congregation could peek through the window and see the disarray. After each outburst David said that he needed some time alone to relieve the stress of the ministry and would disappear for hours.

Then one night, after he returned home at four o'clock in the morning, I discovered that my husband possessed not only an acute veneration for the Greek New Testament but for naked women as well. For years, after each domestic shouting episode or particularly moving sermon, he'd sneak away to watch them dance. After calmly disclosing that his compulsion had evolved into what now could be called an obsession, he said, "But I give so much to so many people--I need something that makes me feel good, too."

"So this has been going on since the beginning of our marriage?"

David hesitated. "Yes, with the stress of everything new, I felt overwhelmed."

"You mean all those times you said you were on pastoral visits?" I asked.

"Yes." He said flatly.

I stared at him, not responding with the understanding any good Christian wife would surely acknowledge he deserved.

"Oh, come on, Carlene, can't you find any sympathy for me?"

"You son of a bitch," I replied.

For three nights I lay on the couch, staring at the ceiling. The hours seemed endless; they were not a measure of time but of space, like a vast ocean spreading out between me and the rest of the world. I lay numb, caught between consciousness and sleep, drifting off astride the cold, pale horse that gallops across the book of Revelation, whose name is Death, then waking with a start to a high, heavy pain in my chest and tears streaming down my face.

During the day I desperately thumbed through the Bible to find a verse to tell me what to do. My Christian girlfriends pointed to Matthew 19:8, where God said that unless my husband was actually sleeping with another woman I didn't have biblical grounds to leave him. A fundamentalist therapist I consulted declared that God's word actually raised the bar higher: according to Mark 10:11 and Luke 16:18, the Bible demanded that even if my husband was having an affair, as well as throwing silverware and smashing pictures, I could never file for divorce.

"But Mathew 19 makes it sound like I can leave if he has an affair." I said with hope.

"That's a misinterpretation of the passage," he scolded. "All good Greek scholars agree that the Bible forbids divorce--even in the case of adultery. The Lord's will is crystal clear in both Mark and Luke. Don't you believe that Scripture is the word of God?"

At that moment I realized that I no longer believed in Scripture; or in the god of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; the deity of Jesus; the virgin birth; the Nicene or Apostolic creeds. The only thing I could bank on was Newton's third law of motion and how it worked itself out so beautifully in the Bible.

Algonquin Books will release Carlene Cross' upcoming book, Fleeing Fundamentalism: A Minister's Wife Examines Faith, in October. It is the story of her escape from the indoctrination of America's religious right and her journey into a secular world that she once feared. Cross lives in Seattle, Washington, where she has worked as a college counselor and a producer for public television. She is author of a previous work of nonfiction entitled The Undying West: A Chronicle of Montana's Camas Prairie.