Is Mental Health a Biblical Concept?

Is Mental Health a Biblical Concept? [1]

By: Garrett Higbee

Selected Quotations:

“I think it is important to note that our epistemology, anthropology, and etiology differ from our secular counterparts, who are measuring secular well-being. We see personal sin at the root of mental dysfunction and sin’s effects on this world causing tremendous suffering. We are not ignorant of human weakness and, in effect, mental illness as a result of the fall (Gen. 3), but we measure and treat it differently. Our truth as Christians is not simply based on objective and empirical evidence but also on the unseen (Eph. 6:10-12) and the authority of Scripture (2 Tim. 3:16-17).”

“Secular scientists, while often well-meaning in their pursuit of mental health, are searching in vain without understanding the power of the Cross to redeem relationship and peace with our Creator. Thus, if we pursue mental health through means of addressing symptoms and focusing on self-esteem, self-help, and self-sufficiency, we too will reap misery in the end (Matt. 10:39).”

“I believe we must continue to develop ways to reframe issues and guide our people to a biblical worldview of mental illness (Col. 2:8). While causality may vary, based on Scripture, we believe that every “mental illness” has a spiritual origin (Jer. 17:9; Rom. 1:20-24). Having a holistic and biblical perspective of man, we cannot let mental health assessment, standards, and care be abdicated to the secular therapeutic community as it has for over a century.”

“God left us the key to true mental health in His Word, the gospel. The standard for wellness is a heart redeemed by and satisfied in Christ (Ezek. 11:19). A life where we are growing a Christ-like character, mindset, and demeanor is a believer’s “new normal” (2 Cor. 5:17; Gal. 2:20, Phil. 2:1-5) and the baseline for mental health in a biblical worldview. There is a paradigm shift from being conformed to a set of criteria that the world calls functional to being transformed through progressive sanctification (Rom. 12:1-2). But how? First, by abiding in Christ in deep dependency (John 15), second, by being mindful of Christ in all that we do (2 Cor. 3:18), and third, by being renewed in our thinking primarily through His Word (Eph. 4:22-24). Scripture does not mention mental health but does use words like shalom, joy, soul rest, contentment, and blessed to describe a person at peace in Christ (Ps. 4:8; 119:165; Prov. 3:17; Isa. 26:3; 32:17; John 20:21; Acts 10:36).

[Emphasis mine}

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1. https://www.biblicalcounselingcoalition.org/2022/04/25/is-mental-health-a-biblical-concept/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=is-mental-health-a-biblical-concept

The Unity of the Transcendentals

What a mindful! The unity of the transcendentals! It sounds like a notion developed by someone with too much time on their hands.  I hadn’t ever recalled hearing of such a concept.  The unity of the transcendentals. This is what  Dr. Albert Mohler entitled his lecture in the series Truth and Consequences, produced by Ligonier Ministries and shown in the Elk Point Baptist Adult Sunday School class on Sunday, May 1st.

So what is it, or are they?  The transcendentals are those universal virtues of the good, the beautiful, the true and the real.  They have been understood in the history of Western thought to be indispensable categories for understanding the world.  Mohler points out that the unity of the transcendentals is a foundational theological belief for the Christian because it points to the One who is good, beautiful, true, and real. The concept of unity suggests that they are indivisible.  You can’t have something good, if it’s not true or real.  Scripturally they are seen clearly in Paul’s letter to Philippi:

Philippians 4:8 (ESV): “Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.”

Our culture craves beauty but has no clue what beauty is because it denies basic truth about God and the world as He created it.  Instead we fabricate fake beauty; we manufacture our own truth; we consider it our right to create our own reality; and so on.  All this due to a denial of God and His Word.  Dr Mohler gave an example.  He said that from the Christian worldview, a Down-syndrome child is more beautiful than a exorbitantly made-up fashion model. The former carries the Imago Deo, the latter is a fake.  Yet the former is aborted (killed) in thousands by our culture.  

Another important thing that Dr. Mohler said was that truth is never bad news.  In relation to the gospel, telling someone about the truth of their sin is necessary to point someone to Christ. The fact that Christ is presented as the solution to the problem of sin makes the bad news of sin, while a harsh reality, good news in actuality. He illustrated that point by showing that a physician’s news that one has a malignant tumour is “hard” news but if there is a remedy it is not bad news.  It is never unloving to give hard news (the Truth) if you have a solution.  So-called “bad” news becomes good because it is true.  And if it is true then it is beautiful and real.

The transcendental realities of the good, the beautiful, the true, and the real are not just philosophical mambo jumbo, they are deeply theological, because they speak of the character of God.  This Christian worldview is the only worldview that can hold together in a logical, cohesive, comprehensive package because it is based on the reality of a God who is the good, the beautiful, the true, and the real. Other worldviews cannot claim the same ability, therefore they are fractured, inconsistent, confusing and lack all logical integrity.

What Is Saving Faith?

Recently Matt Tully from Crossway Books interviewed John Piper on his new book, What Is Saving Faith?, from Crossway in a podcast entitled Can Affectionless Faith Be Genuine?  Here are some quotable quotes from the interview.

“A lot of people think that the people who have been born again out of the most horrific lives of sinning have the clearest idea of what depravity means and what salvation means. I think that’s wrong because I don’t think experience can come close to teaching us about the nature of our depravity that we find in Scripture . . . We have to see in the Bible what our condition was before we were saved, what our condition is after we are saved, and we get from the Bible that line in between, which is what we want to talk about—What is the saving thing that happened in our hearts?”

“What I’ve come to see is that I think the church, especially in certain parts of it, has many unbelievers who think they’re saved. It’s why the church is weak, it’s why the church is ineffective in so many ways, it’s why worship is so flat—because there are a lot of unregenerate, non-born-again people in the church who have been taught that they are to make a decision, so they decide to believe some doctrines, to believe that they are going to heaven, and nothing has changed in their heart.”

“The will, when it inclines vigorously with all of its force, we call affection. I prefer my wife over all other women. That’s not a small preference. I prefer life over death. In other words, the will can act without affection, and the will can act vigorously with affection.”

“America is a free will driven culture, meaning I have ultimate control over my destiny. I’m the captain of my fate! That’s all heresy. We don’t have ultimate control over our fate; God does.”

“Faith is affectional, and so it does rest on knowing and believing that I have a treasuring of Christ that ranks him above mother and father, because Jesus said, If you don’t love me more than your mother and father you don’t belong to me. I can’t get away from that. That’s real. I have to fight for that. I have to treasure him more than I treasure my wife and my children and my mother and father. Otherwise, I’m not a Christian. That’s truth from Matthew 10:37.”

“When we believe and do not work for our justification, we glorify the grace of God. We glorify grace by looking away from ourselves to the all-sufficiency of his justification by imputing Christ’s righteousness to us. However, God aims to get more glory than being a sufficient sin-forgiver, or an efficient righteousness-imputer. He means to get glory for being an all-satisfying treasure, so he built that into saving faith as well. Saving faith embraces Christ as my righteousness, embraces Christ as my Lord, embraces Christ as my treasure. In doing that it is satisfied in him, and so we arrive at the basic statement of Christian hedonism: God is most glorified in me when I, in my saving faith, am most satisfied with all that he is for me in Jesus.”

Normalizing Same-sex Marriage

 Herein is a stunning statement by Dr. Albert Mohler, if you’re an evangelical Christian:

“In the end, we will almost surely have to concede that divorce will harm far more lives and cause far more direct damage than same-sex marriage . . . Heterosexuals did a very good job of undermining marriage before the culture forces began advocating for the normalization of same-sex relationships and the legalization of same-sex marriage . . . Today’s movement toward the total acceptance of homosexual behavior and relationships was only made possible because some heterosexuals first did their best to undermine marriage.“ [1]

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1.  We Cannot Be Silent: Speaking Truth to a Culture Redefining Sex, Marriage, and the Very Meaning of Right and Wrong by R. Albert Mohler Jr.

https://a.co/b3DzsJD

What is “secularization”?

“Secular refers to the absence of any binding divine authority or belief. Secularization is a sociological process whereby societies become less theistic as they become more modern. As societies move into conditions of deeper and more progressive modernity, they move away from a binding force of religious belief, and theistic belief in particular.”

“In his book A Secular Age, Taylor described the pre-modern age as a time when it was impossible not to believe . . . In the modern age, a secular alternative to Christian theism emerged and it became possible not to believe . . . But, as Taylor noted, those days are behind us. In our own postmodern age it is now considered impossible to believe.“

Secularization isn’t the opposite of religion or spirituality.  “Secularization, according to Taylor, is about the rejection of a belief in a personal God, one who holds and exerts authority.” [1]

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1.  We Cannot Be Silent: Speaking Truth to a Culture Redefining Sex, Marriage, and the Very Meaning of Right and Wrong by R. Albert Mohler Jr.

https://a.co/7DwHgP6

You don’t just lose someone once

 You don’t just lose someone once.

You lose them when you close your eyes each night.

And as you open them each morning.

You lose them throughout the day.

An unused coffee cup.

An empty chair.

A pair of boots no longer there.

You lose them as the sun sets.

And darkness closes in.

 

You lose them as you wonder why.

Staring at a star lit sky.

You lose them on the big days.

Anniversaries.

Birthdays.

Graduations.

Holidays.

Weddings.

And the regular days too.

You lose them in the ordinary.

Paperwork.

Household chores.

Routines taken for granted.

You lose them in the familiar.

A song they used to sing.

The scent of their cologne.

A slice of their favourite pie.

You lose them in conversations you will never have.

And all the words unsaid.

You lose them in all the places they’ve been.

And all the places they longed to go.

You lose them in what could have been.

And all the dreams you shared.

You lose them as you pick up the broken pieces.

And begin your life anew.

You lose them when you realize.

This is your new reality.

They are never coming back.

No matter how much 

You miss them or

Need them.

No matter how hard you pray.

They are gone.

And you must go on.

Alone.

You lose them as the seasons change.

The snow blows.

The flowers blossom.

The grass grows.

The leaves fall.

You lose them again and again.

Day after day.

Month after month.

Year after year.

Time marches on, carrying them further and further way.

You lose them as your hair whitens and your body bends with age.

Your memory fades.

And the details begin to blur.

Their face stares back at you from a faded photograph.

Someone you used to know.

You think you might have loved them once.

Long ago.

Back then.

When you were whole.

You don’t just lose someone once.

You lose them every day.

Over and over again.

For the rest of your life. 

~ Donna Ashworth

Lament for a Son

 In Lament for a Son[1] Nicholas Wolterstorff writes not as a scholar but as a loving father grieving the loss of his son. The book is in one sense a narrative account of events--from the numbing telephone call on a sunny Sunday afternoon that tells of 25-year-old Eric's death in a mountain-climbing accident, to a graveside visit a year later. Lament for a Son gives expression to a grief that is at once unique and universal--a grief for an individual, irreplaceable person.

Quotable Quotes

“Often, I am asked whether the grief remains as intense as when I wrote. The answer is, No. The wound is no longer raw. But it has not disappeared. That is as it should be. If he was worth loving, he is worth grieving over. Grief is existential testimony to the worth of the one loved. That worth abides.”

“It’s the neverness that is so painful. Never again to be here with us—never to sit with us at table, never to travel with us, never to laugh with us, never to cry with us, never to embrace us.”

“IT’S SO WRONG, SO profoundly wrong, for a child to die before its parents. It’s hard enough to bury our parents. But that we expect. Our parents belong to our past, our children belong to our future. We do not visualize our future without them. How can I bury my son, my future, one of the next in line? He was meant to bury me!”

“His death is things to do not done—never to be done.”

“THERE’S A HOLE in the world now. In the place where he was, there’s now just nothing. A center, like no other, of memory and hope and knowledge and affection which once inhabited this earth is gone. Only a gap remains. A perspective on this world unique in this world which once moved about within this world has been rubbed out. Only a void is left . . .  A person, an irreplaceable person, is gone. Never again will anyone apprehend the world quite the way he did. Never again will anyone inhabit the world the way he did. Questions I have can never now get answers. The world is emptier. My son is gone. Only a hole remains, a void, a gap, never to be filled.”

“I believe in God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth and resurrecter of Jesus Christ. I also believe that my son’s life was cut off in its prime. I cannot fit these pieces together. I am at a loss. I have read the theodicies produced to justify the ways of God to man. I find them unconvincing. To the most agonized question I have ever asked I do not know the answer. I do not know why God would watch him fall. I do not know why God would watch me wounded. I cannot even guess.”

“WITH THESE HANDS I lifted him from his cradle—tiny then, soft, warm, and squirming with life. Now at the end with these same hands I touched him in his coffin.”

“And at the end, that we now must learn to live as faithfully and authentically with Eric gone as we had tried to do with Eric present.”

“I will indeed remind myself that there’s more to life than pain. I will accept joy. But I will not look away from Eric dead. Its demonic awfulness I will not ignore. I owe that—to him and to God.”

“I cannot fit it together at all. I can only, with Job, endure. I do not know why God did not prevent Eric’s death. To live without the answer is precarious. It’s hard to keep one’s footing.”

“Will the family all be home for Christmas?” . . . “What are your children doing now?” . . .  “How many children do you have?”

“HIS YOUNGER brothers had begun to ask him for advice. To Claire and me he had become an equal, no longer a child to be cared for. Now he’s gone, and the family has to restructure itself. We don’t just each have a gap inside us but together a gap among us. We have to live differently with each other. We have to live around the gap. Pull one out, and everything changes.”

“The mourners are those who have caught a glimpse of God’s new day, who ache with all their being for that day’s coming, and who break out into tears when confronted with its absence.”

“Lament is part of life.”

 

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[1] Wolterstorff, Nicholas. Lament for a Son. Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.. Kindle Edition.