← Ask NT Wright Anything
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- [00:02]
Rico Tice
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- [00:52]
Tom Wright
Welcome to this replay of Ask NT Write Anything, where we go back into the archives to bring you the best of the thought and theology of Tom Wright, answering questions submitted by you, the listener. You can find more episodes as well as many more resources for exploring faith@premier unbelievable.com and registering there will unlock access through the newsletter to updates, free bonus videos and ebooks. That's Premier unbelievable.com and now for today's replay of Ask NT Wright anything, the Ask NT Write Anything podcast. Well, today we're continuing the conversation on well being. Last time we were talking about how we develop good spiritual disciplines. We were talking about the nature of addiction and how we reach out in love to those who do experience addiction. Mental health issues today, a number of questions, and I think this is reflective of the way that modern life has increasingly brought to the surface. I suppose that the mental health issues that exist partly I think because of the way culture is changing. Tom, partly it may be just that we're better at diagnosing what previously went unrealized in the past. But lots of people asking questions around mental health, the use of medication, how that intersects with the way we should approach these from a spiritual issue, a spiritual perspective. So we'll start with two questions here that are some very similar things. Ryan in Indianapolis and an anonymous listener in New Jersey. Firstly, Ryan's question. Tom and Justin, I'm curious what your thoughts are on antidepressant medication. I've had social anxiety for most of my life, and medication has been helpful in the past. But I always had this thought that maybe God would want me to rely on him alone to overcome my disorder. I'm also in cognitive behavioral therapy, which I believe will be the most effective step in treating my condition. But I want to take the medicine as well so that I can get back on my feet in the meantime. Would love to hear both Your thoughts? Thanks for the awesome podcast. And again, I'll read the next one as well as it's similar. This person Sundays, I'm a 25 year old female who was diagnosed with bipolar five years ago. I thought I was healed by God, but symptoms continued to become more apparent, at which point I surrendered to my Christian counselor to go on medication recently to stabilize my mood changes for the sake of myself and those around me. Does medication mean that I'm no longer fully reliant on God? Does taking medication mean I don't believe that God alone holds the power of healing? I find myself obsessing about these questions and condemning myself as a bad Christian. Any suggestions? So both of these questions are really around, you know, what's the place of medical intervention? You know, the kind of drugs that may help to stabilize someone's, you know, psychological condition. And is that effectively not relying on God and relying on, you know, a bit of medicine?
- [03:56]
Justin Brierley
Right. I mean, there's. There's a well known story, a rather silly story, which is used to answer this, and I've heard it in various contexts, of a guy who is lost at sea and is drowning and prays to God, please rescue me, please rescue me. And a boat comes by and says, can we, can we help you? He says, no, I'm relying on God to rescue me. And then a helicopter comes by and Chap shouts, can we fish you out? And no, no, God's going to rescue me. And so on and so on. And the answer is, you just prayed for something. You prayed for rescue. Maybe this boat is how God is answering your prayer. Or I've heard it as a Jewish joke, a guy who prays that he'll win the lottery and goes on badgering God, please let me win the lottery. And God eventually says, you could meet me halfway, you could at least buy a ticket. In other words, excuse me, let's not be stupid about this. And it's very interesting that this question comes often in terms of what we might loosely call mental illness or things like bipolar disorder. It doesn't come up when somebody has a broken leg or when they have, I don't know, some other basic physical ailment, at least in some extreme context. For instance, Christian Scientist contexts, people would say, you know, if you've got cancer or if you've got bad eyesight or whatever, you just pray about it and you mustn't seek for help because that means a lack of faith. And this all emerges from a basically deist model of who God is and how God might work in the world as though it's just God and us and nothing else going on. But as soon as you say God is the God of creation, and God has put into his creation all kinds of plants and trees and so on, not just for food, but also for medicine and healing. In fact, one of the lovely moments in Revelation 21 is when the trees, the tree of life by the river which flows out of the garden, out of the city, the tree bears fruit every month and its leaves are for the healing of the nations. There's something there which goes way back into the creational theology of the Old Testament, where God has put into his world the answers to so many of our dilemmas. And it's the vocation of the medical profession over. Over many, many centuries to tease out which herbs, which plants, which chemicals will help which particular ailments. And we don't normally. Most Christians don't normally worry about that when it's perfectly ordinary ailments. But when it's mental disease or mental ailments, people then think, oh, if I was a truly spiritual person, I wouldn't be going through this. And the answer again and again is no. It's all part of God's rich continuum. And there is shame in asking for help when, as a pastor, I have sometimes said to people, your particular problem is actually above my pay grade, I'm going to recommend you to a psychiatrist who will actually be able to help you. Sometimes they say, you know, are you saying I need a shrink? And I say, no. Look, as a pastor, I go and see a counselor regularly because that's how pastorally you are reinforced or directed. Much as I go to the dentist every six months, whether I think I need it or not, there are sometimes things which need checking up on, and we are all in that continuum somewhere. So there is absolutely no shame there. And so, yes, taking the medicine helps. Excuse me. Of course, if you can get to the point where you can come off the medicine and then find your own way forward, well, that's wonderful. Not everyone can do that. Some people go through their lives having to take certain kinds of medication, and I think we must work away from that obsession, which this anonymous person from New Jersey says, and condemning ourselves as bad Christians, of course, it may be that we do. All of us have a lack of faith in certain respects. But needing medication is not a sign of being a bad Christian. It's just a sign of being a human being in a broken world which we're waiting for God finally to heal.
- [08:24]
Rico Tice
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- [09:34]
Tom Wright
The next question very much comes on the heels of that Medina in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin says what what about mental disorders in general? As someone who has recovered from an eating disorder, I remember how hard it was for me to explain to someone at church what is a mental illness. I was told to pray about it, to read and memorize passages from the Bible. I tried that for 10 years and still couldn't recover until I started studying and using the traditional psychology methods and neuroscience. I recovered. But it breaks my heart to see someone who clearly needs a psychiatrist to be stigmatized as someone who just doesn't have a good relationship with God. Thanks in advance. I appreciate every single one of the podcast episodes as well as all of your books. Tom. So yeah, it's a very similar sort of area here. But yeah, do you want to comment on Medina's sort of experience there and her view that we shouldn't be stigmatizing those who go down a psychological route when it comes to dealing with these kinds of issues?
- [10:32]
Justin Brierley
Yes, I think there are some Christians, some churches, some pastors who have seen a sort of over psychologizing in Western culture as a whole as though post Freud, post Jung, whatever was wrong with you, just go and talk to a shrink and it'll be sorted out. And that has sometimes offered itself almost as an alternative form of religion. And so that then the churches have said no, no, no, it's all about your relationship with God. And I want to say it really isn't an either or. It is about your with God, but the relationship with God is also about God wanting you to be a person in a community, a community which will include people who can heal, people who can help, both at the informal level, somebody who just takes you out for a drink or A meal and chats to you in general. But at the more formal level, where somebody with actually a medical or psychological qualification will actually be able to have a professional relationship with you and put their finger on something which really does need addressing either by medication or by certain lifestyle changes or whatever, where that's very often the key, somebody will say, I notice that in your life you're regularly doing X and Y. Have you ever thought about just not doing that and doing A and B instead? And sometimes people have just never thought maybe I could change that bit. And sometimes that's all that's required. Sometimes it's much longer term, sometimes it is medication and sometimes obviously psychiatric help. So I totally agree. Somebody being stigmatized as somebody who doesn't have a good relationship with God, that is very cruel. It is possible that somebody's problems may have to do with the fact that they're careless about God, that they never say their prayers, that they don't read their Bibles in a sense of open and listening to God. But often people are praying, people are attending church, people are receiving communion, people are reading the Bible and still the problem persists. So let's get the pastoral help, the psychiatric help, the medical help that we need, and let's not worry about if only I was a better Christian, then this wouldn't be happening. Because that's a dead end street.
- [12:53]
Tom Wright
I suppose even in that case where we don't want to in any way deny the value of certain types of psychological help and therapy and so on. I think even in therapeutic circles and psychology, it's been shown that simply the practice of prayer is itself greatly beneficial psychologically. And I suppose a Christian wouldn't say that's, that's just a, you know, psychosomatic thing. That, that is actually because there is someone listening at the other end and there's, there's something that happens in us when we, when we do that. So, so I suppose the questions are about how we kind of bring those two things together, not, you know, the both and as you call it, Tom and, and here's, here's a question that sort of feeds into that Todd in Florida who says, how do we reconcile the command and promise of Philippians 4, verses 6 to 7, with something like chronic clinical anxiety? So are those who suffer from anxiety not praying the right way or is this part of God's word not true? So when something like Philippians perhaps, I think you're looking it up there just to get the precise wording. Tom makes a particular claim or promise, perhaps you could read it for us. How do we reconcile that with the fact that obviously some people still struggle with clinical anxiety and so on?
- [14:06]
Justin Brierley
Well, the short answer is that Paul knew perfectly well how difficult it was to obey that command. I mean, the command in Philippians 4, 6 is, don't have any anxiety about anything, but in everything, by prayer and supplication, with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known to God, and the peace of God which passes all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Messiah, Jesus. But two chapters earlier, in chapter two, he has talked about the fact that the Philippians had sent Epaphroditus to him with a gift of money, and the fact that Epaphroditus had got sick while he was on the way. And perhaps then with Paul, and Paul says verse 27 of chapter 2, the same letter, he was sick near to death. Then he says, but God had mercy on him, and not only on him, but also on me, lest I should have one sorrow on top of another. Now that tells you that already Paul has a great sorrow that he's in prison, he's being badly treated, etc. Etc. And that Epaphroditus has come and has got sick. And Paul has been really anxious because he desperately doesn't want Epaphroditus to die right there. And if that had happened, that would be one sorrow on top of another for him. So he doesn't say, yeah, he got sick, but it was all right because I prayed for him and I trusted God and he got better and off he went. And then I couple that with 2 Corinthians chapter 1, where Paul says that when I was in Ephesus, I don't want you not to know this, he says, and that I was so crushed that I despaired of life itself. And you have to put Philippians 4 alongside Philippians 2 and 2 Corinthians 1 and indeed the whole of 2 Corinthians, and hold it together. And I see Paul coming back and saying, have no anxiety about anything, not as a sense of I've sailed through my life with an untroubled way, because whatever happens, I just trust God and it's all right, right? But that at every point Paul has had to have a massive struggle to get back to the Philippians 4.6point. And he's saying that's the goal at which we should constantly aim, however hard it is, to get there. So I want again to say a. Both and here. And obviously some people do suffer from clinical anxiety where a kind of mental loop gets hold of them and then it drags them down into another worse one and into another worse one. And healthy people are usually able to say, this is just a silly train of thought. I'm just going to listen to some nice music and go for a walk and it'll be all right. Unhealthy people often can't say that, and they have to be helped to say that. And discerning where one is on that continuum is a really important feature of Christian discipleship. Of course, there may be a matter of learning how to pray in fragments ways, and sometimes the prayer of silence, or sometimes a repetitive prayer like the Jesus prayer. Lord Jesus Christ, son of the living God, have mercy on me, a sinner, to replace the downward spiral of anxiety with the ongoing upward spiral of praying that prayer round and round and round and letting it soak into all the anxious moments and images. There are ways of addressing this, but it isn't just about learning to pray in the right way. It may be something which, again, pastoral help, psychological help, will be able to do the business for.
- [17:41]
Tom Wright
Well, thank you so much. There's been a variety of different sort of ways in which we've gone at this over this episode and the last, but I hope they've been helpful for all those who have been writing in and indeed all those listening who haven't written in, but I'm sure equally are challenged by these kinds of issues. We are living in what's often called a mental health crisis, especially among a younger generation, Tom, and, and I think more than ever, the church needs to be ready to understand how to present both a biblical, but also, you know, a fully orbed response that brings in the best of medicine and psychology and everything else, but doesn't sort of try and separate it in somehow from scripture, but, you know, accepts that God is using all of these things to bring about wholeness in people. But yeah, thank you very much for being with us on today's show.
- [18:29]
Justin Brierley
Thank you.
- [18:35]
Tom Wright
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