How Biblical Anthropology Should Inform the Church’s View of Mental Illness

One in five U.S. adults deal with mental illness each year, and one in 20 U.S. adults deal with serious mental illness each year. A 2021 Lifeway survey showed that 26 percent of U.S. Protestant pastors have dealt with some type of mental illness. Given the prevalence of mental illness, a sound, biblical understanding of mental health is vital for the health of the Church.

To understand mental illness, Christians must understand what Scripture says about humanity – in other words, the Church needs a sound biblical anthropology, or a framework for “how the immaterial and material aspects of man relate to each other.”

Given this focus, an examination of the creation story at the beginning of the biblical narrative is particularly crucial. In Genesis 1:26-27, 31 “God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground. So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them…God saw all that he had made, and it was very good. And there was evening, and there was morning—the sixth day.”

God designed mankind’s material existence to be GOOD. Unfortunately, ever since the fall, man’s body is marred and damaged due to sin. Genesis 3:16-19 elaborates upon this reality: “To the woman he said, I will surely multiply your pain in childbearing; in pain you shall bring forth children. Your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you. And to Adam he said, Because you have listened to the voice of your wife and have eaten of the tree of which I commanded you,‘You shall not eat of it,’ cursed is the ground because of you;  in pain you shall eat of it all the days of your life; thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you; and you shall eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread, till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; for you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” These verses vividly outline the physiological consequences of sin – namely, physical weakness and decay in the form of sweat, pain and ultimately death.

The narrative of the Old Testament affirms the idea of the unity of body and soul. Union School of Theology Professor Robert Letham said, “The Old Testament presents humans as a psychosomatic unity; different elements are apparent, but there is no hint of a polarity between them. The early Christians, let alone the Bible, never disparaged the body; it was the Greeks who did that. Running through much pagan thought was a radical disjunction between the spiritual and the material.” Grove City Biblical Studies Professor Carl Trueman further expressed that, “Our bodies are an integral part of who we are. And I do not ‘occupy’ my body as I might occupy a house or a space suit or a deck chair at the beach. On the contrary, it is an integral part of me, inseparable from who I am.” We cannot separate ourselves from our bodies.

A sound biblical anthropology understands human beings as psychosomatic beings, composed of body and soul. Any approach to mental illness that disregards one or the other is flawed. Unfortunately, according to a 2014 study by Lifeway, 48 percent of evangelical, fundamentalist, or born-again Christians stated they affirmed the statement “With just Bible study and prayer, ALONE, people with serious mental illness like depression, bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia could overcome mental illness.” The pervasiveness of this sentiment is troubling. In neglecting this physiological reality, the Church, even unintentionally, harms and shames mentally ill Christians who need believers who biblically steward the clinical treatments that God in his common grace has provided mankind.

The Church must also, however, resist the secular notion that mental illness is a purely biological phenomena that can be addressed exclusively through clinical methods. The telos, or ultimate goal, of counselling for the Christian is to aid her in becoming more like Christ. Any framework of treatment that primarily focuses on alleviating pain while ignoring sin is fundamentally at odds with the biblical worldview.

Christians must recover a biblical anthropology that rightly frames mental illness as the product of the body-soul brokenness of fall while affirming the imago Dei in sufferers. John 4:24 says “God is Spirit” while Colossians 2:9 says “For in him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily.” Like God, who exists as Spirit and was embodied in Christ, the Christian suffering from mental illness can take comfort in the truth that she is designed and fashioned after her Creator. Thus, in the incarnate Christ we see the fullest affirmation of our embodied existence, especially in our weakness.

Ultimately, the Church must reject attempts at reductionist approaches that neglect the reality of the soul and the body. 19^th century Dutch Reformed theologian Herman Bavinck wrote that, “Creation culminates in humanity where the spiritual and material world are joined together. This is part of the wonder of man: he is a creature both physical and spiritual, with feet planted on the earth and a soul that aspires to heaven.”  The Church needs to apply this understanding to be faithful, loving, and helpful to the suffering Christian, until the day she is free from the presence of sin and pain in her resurrected, glorified body.