In 2013, Lifeway Research conducted a survey which revealed that 48 percent of Evangelical Christians believed that “prayer and Bible study alone can overcome serious mental illness.” While it is important for Christians to see a spiritual dimension to managing or experiencing some degree of healing in their mental health, the study may point to a failure to realize that mental illness is a real illness, an illness involving the body.
Michael Horton writes, “Contemporary brain science has shown the remarkable extent to which our thoughts, feelings, attitudes, and actions are connected to our bodies specifically, our brain and chemical interactions. This leaves no room for the soul if we reduce ourselves to what can be subjected to observation and repeatable experiments. The fact that body and soul are so intertwined is elementary for a biblical view of humanity.”
It’s a mistake to put the soul in opposition to the body and deny the existence of mental illnesses like depression. People imagine that this view is somehow a denial of supernatural realities like sin, salvation, or demonic powers—it’s not. It’s an affirmation of the physical world with physical defects like illnesses and diseases of all kinds. People can suffer from cancer, a broken leg, or the flu and, like depression, these are physical realities.
According to the American Psychiatric Association, several factors are involved in depression:
- “Biochemistry: Differences in certain chemicals in the brain may contribute to symptoms of depression.”
- “Genetics: Depression can run in families. For example, if one identical twin has depression, the other has a 70 percent chance of having the illness sometime in life.”
- “Personality: People with low self-esteem, who are easily overwhelmed by stress, or who are generally pessimistic appear to be more likely to experience depression.”
- “Environmental factors: Continuous exposure to violence, neglect, abuse or poverty may make some people more vulnerable to depression.”
Given what the Bible says about humans being both body and soul, we should expect these sorts of realities. Though we don’t want to reduce a person to a list of physical symptoms and pretend that there is nothing spiritual about struggling with depression, we also don’t want to reduce the real bodily or physiological issues involved with depression. Michael Horton writes,
Because we are psychosomatic (body-soul) unities, physical and spiritual issues intersect in ways that can’t be easily pulled apart. A person suffering from a spinal cord injury will be especially susceptible to bouts of spiritual depression, doubts, and even anger. The same is true of mental illness. On one hand, a naturalistic perspective reduces human beings to a mass of physicochemical accidents. On the other hand, a hyper-supernaturalistic reaction is to treat physicochemical problems simply as spiritual maladies. Good theology is not enough, but bad theology kills literally, physically and spiritually.
It’s perfectly consistent with the Bible to see depression as a physical illness, a medical issue tied to the brain.
Footnotes
https://blog.lifeway.com/newsroom/2013/09/17/half-of-evangelicals-believe-prayer-can-heal-mental-illness./
Michael Horton “Faith and Mental Illness,” Modern Reformation, July/August 2014.
https://www.psychiatry.org/patients-families/depression/what-is-depression
Michael Horton “Faith and Mental Illness,” Modern Reformation, July/August 2014.
