RE: Voices: The light through Christmas depression
Ruth Cook asked an interesting question about depression that carries implications for how Christians respond to a highly psychologized culture.
She pondered, “I wonder if people in Jesus’s day experienced depression?”
The first pages of the Bible answer that question in Genesis 3, when Adam and Eve hid from God after their sin, isolated themselves, and withdrew from life. The first case of depression [was] six millennia before Freud claimed conquest of the psyche like Sir Edmund planting a flag on Everest.
So, yes, people in every age are depressed because of sin.
“How can you say people doing the Lord’s work are sinning?”
I’m not.
But have we considered sin can dress itself in the crisp suit of an over-busy pastor as easily as the torn jeans of a drunk in a gutter, that it wears the frazzled wings of an overworked Christmas play as easily as the skimpy skirt of a Tik-Tok video?
One of the mystiques of modern psychology is it alone possesses knowledge to unravel emotional complexities too sophisticated for the scribblings of prophets. Yet, depression is as old as an apple in a garden.
If our first response to the couple sitting at opposite ends of the couch is always, “You need to be in counseling,” aren’t we saying by default the Bible has no wisdom?
Sign up for our weekly edition and get all our headlines in your inbox on Thursdays
Perhaps it’s time to shoo the skit team off the stage and bring the bread and cup back to the center of the church, where Paul suggests in 1 Corinthians there is a real spiritual feeding on Jesus at the table.
Perhaps it’s time to pull the plug on the Sunday morning monologue about raising kids and return to the fervent preaching of John or Genesis.
Aren’t words of life more life-giving than Prozac?
Ben Mullen
The Colony, Texas
We seek to connect God’s story and God’s people around the world. To learn more about God’s story, click here.
Send comments and feedback to Eric Black, our editor. For comments to be published, please specify “letter to the editor.” Maximum length for publication is 300 words.