Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4185. I want to write about the Spirit in depression with great care, because this is a subject where careless words from a pulpit have wounded many sincere believers. Depression is not the same as ordinary sadness that lifts after a good night’s sleep. It is a heavy, often prolonged darkness of mind and…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 11102 The relationship between secular counselling and Christian faith has been contested territory for decades. Some believers regard therapy as a purely secular enterprise that has no place in the life of someone who has the Bible and the Holy Spirit. Others have embraced therapeutic culture so uncritically that it has reshaped their understanding…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 11100 Mental illness is one of the areas where the church has often failed its own people. Whether through ignorance, fear, or a misguided belief that all psychological suffering is fundamentally spiritual in origin, many believers have been left without the help they need. A biblical view of mental illness must take seriously both…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 11101 This question generates more anxiety in Christian circles than it should. Some believers feel guilty for taking medication, as though reliance on a prescription is a failure of faith. Others have been told, sometimes by well-meaning pastors and sometimes by manipulative ones, that true Christians should trust God for healing and that taking…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 08097 This is one of the most pastorally sensitive questions in the entire area of spiritual warfare, and getting it wrong in either direction causes real harm. The person who attributes every psychological struggle to demonic activity risks neglecting legitimate medical and therapeutic help that God has made available. The person who dismisses any…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 11070 Depression is one of the most misunderstood experiences within the Christian community. Well-meaning believers have told sufferers that their depression is evidence of weak faith, unconfessed sin, or spiritual failure. The effect of such responses is not healing but additional pain layered on top of pain that was already unbearable. Before asking whether…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 11069 The Bible contains more than three hundred commands not to fear, which might suggest that every experience of fear or anxiety is a failure of faith. That reading, however, misunderstands what those commands are actually doing, and it places an additional burden on sincere believers that they were never meant to carry. Scripture…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 5001 Few questions sit at a more genuinely interesting intersection of science and Scripture than this one. Neuroscience has made extraordinary advances in mapping brain function, tracing the neural correlates of emotion, memory, and decision-making, and treating conditions of the mind with increasing precision. None of this, however, settles the deeper philosophical and theological…