Last updated on December 25, 2019
My brother killed himself on June 3, 1992. It was the summer between my first and second year at the seminary. His sudden and violent death caused trauma to our family that has definitely left some nasty scars.
Mike was good with his hands. He was at different times a cook and a mechanic. A couple of years before this occurred, he expressed to me his faith that Jesus is his Savior. Baptized as an infant, he was never much of a churchgoer, but he did experience something of a jailhouse conversion while working the 12 steps and talking to a chaplain and after years of prayers and spiritual conversations in our family.
Christians can suffer from mental illness just as they can suffer from other forms of illness. Mike was dealing with many years of untreated depression exacerbated by addiction. His faith that Jesus died for him did not make his health problems evaporate. To some extent, mental illness may be influenced by one’s genetics and biology. There is a family history of mental illness. The experiences one has in life can also powerfully impact a person’s state of mind. Stress, diet, and relationships can all play a role in mood disorders such as depression and other mental health issues as well.
What leads a person to take his own life? The mind in many ways remains a mystery. The wisdom of thousands of years combined with the finest arts of modern medicine have still not unraveled its complexity.
Materialists believe they have the answer. They think that everything that exists can be identified as matter or energy. Thus, human beings are nothing more than a wonderful expression of atoms at play. The life force, for them, is not immaterial. Somehow, they posit, consciousness emerges from the exquisite arrangement of gray matter within the cranium.
Most people throughout history and still today, however, have found that the materialist view is not a satisfactory explanation of our experiences. No one has mastered the problem of how life occurs from non-life. Material things (brains) are awake and aware after all. They plan and they plot. They love and they hate.
Christians are not materialists. Adam was fashioned from the clay of the earth, but he was also enlivened by the breath of the living God in a way that cannot be said of any other being. We believe that humans are a complex composite of body and spirit. Personal identity, that is to say your emotions, memory, will, desire, and thoughts are, in some way, located in your brain, to be sure, but that is not the whole story. Human beings are also non-material creatures. We are both body and soul. We are embodied souls or inspirited flesh.
Of all the organs of the body, the brain is particularly important. If a man experiences a brain injury, he may lose memories or experience changes in his personality. The famous nineteenth century story of Phineas P. Gage is illustrative. Gage’s skull and brain were pierced by a metal bar in a bizarre accident while he was working on the railroad in Vermont. An explosion shot an iron bar through his head. Not only did Phineas Gage survive, but he lived a relatively normal life for twelve years afterward. His long-term physical injuries were comparatively minor compared to the dramatic alteration of his personality. There is disagreement in the sources, but many say that a reasonable and mature individual became coarse, belligerent, and very difficult to work with.
Cases like this one suggest very strongly that human personality and identity are tied to the bodily organ of the brain. Even though Christians believe that there remains more to the story, the strong relationship between the mind and the brain is not controverted. Furthermore, we know from modern scanning technologies that mental states correspond to brain states. What happens to or goes on within the brain translates into personal experience and expression.
Neuroplasticity refers to the fact that the brain continues to develop and change throughout life. Brain scan experiments performed on London cab drivers, for instance, show that the part of their brains responsible for spatial reasoning is larger, as one would expect when considering how a cabbie must always be thinking of roads and directions and maps. The physical connections between cells in the brain change according to one’s thoughts. You can literally change the structure of your brain by your thoughts. At the same time, the nature of your thoughts is influenced by the arrangement of your cerebral neurons. Mind and brain are not identical, but they do powerfully affect each other back and forth.
All of this is to say that something like chronic depression is not a simple affair. It describes chemical and electrical activity in the brain. It is influenced by genetics as well as environment. It arises from habits of thought. Drugs can help combat it by directing the flow of neurotransmitters between cells and so can, to greater or lesser degrees, diet, exercise, and talk therapy. One way to describe depression is to say that it results when automatic negative thoughts dwell in the mind to the point that, due to neuroplasticity, our brains actually change to be more oriented toward depressing thoughts. Negative thoughts lead to negative moods.
Can we get control of our thoughts? To some extent, many people are able to improve their thinking habits through time and effort and often under the guidance of a mental healthcare professional. Cognitive behavioral therapy, for instance, helps many people to gain control over false and injurious thinking and find some relief from mental illness. Others wrestle with their own mind/brains for their entire lives with varying degrees of success–one day doing well but another day doing not so well.
For a very long time, Christians have wondered about the eternal fate of those who take their own lives. It has been often said that the act of suicide is essentially an unforgiveable sin. I take a different approach. My understanding is that a Christian is simultaneously sinner and saint in this life. We are both old Adam and new man. The new creation in Christ struggles against the old sinful nature for as long as we remain in the flesh. Though our ultimate victory is assured, we do not always come out on top in our daily struggles. To say otherwise is a triumphalistic delusion that surely severs people from Christ as much as anything else. Only at the resurrection on the Last Day, when we are glorified and forever freed from the old Adam does our sinfulness disappear completely forever – and with it goes depression, anxiety, rebellion, cancer, diabetes, and death. As we remain in this realm, however, we battle temptation and doubt on a daily basis, knowing the final victory is ours through Christ alone.
Which human creature, other than our dear Lord, can truly be said today to be in his right mind? Which of us has full control of his thoughts and mental states? When your foot hurts, your walking is impaired. So also, when your mind and heart are in torment, you fail to function properly as a person. You’ve probably said stupid stuff when you stubbed your toe, maybe even uttered a curse. Imagine having a psyche in continual pain. Suffering can make us do things we would not ordinarily imagine doing. Suicide could be a sin of despair and unbelief, but it could also be a sin of weakness. No one is functioning well. God alone knows the eternal state of each one.
Let’s rely on the God’s grace, then, revealed through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ to reconcile sinners to the Father, and point our attention to the objective means of grace such as baptism where we know the Lord meets us in love and mercy. There we find hope that lasts, in spite of what we do or fail to do. And while we’re at it, let’s make room in the church for folks who struggle and those who love them.
I think of Mike all the time. I even semi-hallucinated that I saw him walking beside the road one time, just for a second. As a baptized saint, His life with is hid with Christ in God (Colossians 3:3). It was hard to look at his life filled with addictions, bad choices, and disasters and see Jesus. And yet Jesus is our righteousness, damn the appearances. So on the day of our awakening and final renewal, I look forward to seeing him. We’ve got a lot of catching up to do.
