When I was working as a licensed medical doctor, I always hoped that the treatment I gave would be a step towards real healing. There always seemed to be a difference between curing a condition with the help of the care reckoned to be necessary, and a dimension that involved personal change resulting in health and shalom of spirit, soul and body.

Ignoring the spiritual dimension

Although some degree of healing is innate within us, and wounds heal, another dimension of healing comes from almighty God to whom we have access only through the crucifixion and resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ of Nazareth. We may yield our sicknesses and pains to Jesus (Isa 53:4, 1 Pet 2:24). He will show us His way to be whole. Miracles do occur.

At first I was naïve because I did not realise how pervasive is the secular belief that medical practice should only deal scientifically with material and physiological facts. Spiritual matters are deemed fanciful and not to be taken seriously because they cannot be proved effective by experimental controls or by randomized controlled trials - although they are certainly evidence based.

Spiritual matters are deemed fanciful and not to be taken seriously because they cannot be proved effective by experimental controls or by randomized controlled trials ...

When I became involved with the problems, torments and distresses of people’s minds, spiritual matters seemed particularly relevant. Yet scientific psychiatry and psychology ignored the distinctions between spiritual powers. After all, if allegiance to a political party can determine what goes on in your mind and how you think, how much more can the deity you effectively worship.

Magnetic Resonance Imaging

The other day I was alerted to an article in the press, sensationally titled, ‘Your Brain can Reveal if you’re Rightwing’. The writer claimed that a Magnetic Resonance Imaging scan (an MRI scan) can reveal even which political party you will vote for, which I actually find quite plausible. Functional MRI scans will show brain physiology adapting to one’s behaviour and intent.

And yet, people’s beliefs and ideas may change. What comes first, interest in a subject or the consequent physiological changes? That voting habits change is obvious from election results. Similarly, as people change with maturity, their habits and beliefs may change. Our mental attitudes depend primarily upon whom we worship, even if that is only ourselves.

Functional MRI scans will show brain physiology adapting to one’s behaviour and intent.

Relationship

Maturity develops as sense is made of experience, including the knocks and setbacks, and even the illnesses, as well as the good times. Sense is made of experience as it is related to other people, including our ‘god’. Relationship cannot be fully measured by science, which is essentially sceptical. Relationships involve all the qualities of the mind: perception, emotion, cognition, memory, imagination, reflection, reckoning, intention, conscience.

We are not necessarily even conscious, with all the activity in our lives, of the relationships we have. Unless we use all these faculties for the praise and glory of our Creator, we shall harm ourselves by being divided against ourselves. Living relationships are spiritual. Opening one’s heart in intimate relationship with the one true God who knows all things can bring shalom into one’s whole being (1 Jn 3:20, 1Pet 5:6-7).

Unhealthy conditions

In this fallen world, however, trouble comes when a person reaches what seems to be stalemate, so that no further change seems possible, and no current relationships help. Fixed beliefs and diagnosable mental and physical illnesses can follow. Then there are two courses of action that may be taken: treatment can be applied to normalize what science suggests is the abnormality, or another relationship can be sought in the hope of breaking the stalemate by opening up some possibility of healing.

Can our fallen world find no way for psychological distresses, such as gender dysphoria, other than to use chemical coshes or surgical mutilation, and to ban ‘conversion therapy’ because powerful people do not really believe in God?

Sometimes, of course, both approaches are best taken together. But if the strictly scientific approach is the only one taken, how much alteration or mutilation of the living, adapting, changing, thinking, loving body, soul and spirit will be permitted? Can our fallen world find no way for psychological distresses, such as gender dysphoria, other than to use chemical coshes or surgical mutilation, and to ban ‘conversion therapy’ because powerful people do not really believe in God?

Fixed beliefs may be sealed in by false assumptions perpetrated by social media. Tribal and sectarian pressures may involve serious threats. Many people have committed their lives in ritualistic ceremonies to deities whose deceptively deadly purposes are worked out through their adherents. Demonic powers will make sure that associated curses will always be effective, unless broken and washed away by acceptance of the redeeming blood of Jesus.

Stones on the highway

There are two common systems of thought that cause people unthinkingly to become spiritually insensitive and to collude with secularism and materialism. One comes from René Descartes whose famous statement ‘Cogito ergo sum’ (‘I think therefore I am’) underpinned much of the Enlightenment. Full of doubts because of his feelings, Descartes concluded that being certain of his own existence was the gift of a perfect being, and that therefore God must be the author of perfect logical reason, which he called “the pure light of the mind.”

The “pure light” of human reason without reference to God has driven our academic institutions for a long time, and its Luciferian nature has led us to become dependent upon the wonderful things technological logic has produced, instead of upon God.

This contradicts Matthew 7:24-27, in which God plainly tells us that certainty comes from hearing the words of God and putting them into practice. This notion of “pure light of the mind” goes back to Plato in classical Greece and was later developed by Plotinus and absorbed into much Christian thinking. The “pure light” of human reason without reference to God has driven our academic institutions for a long time, and its Luciferian nature has led us to become dependent upon the wonderful things technological logic has produced, instead of upon God. And it has made us intolerant of feelings, unable to bear disturbing feelings, unwilling to have compassion and understanding for other people’s suffering. Repentance is called for.

Come Holy Spirit

The other thought system that leads to a similar error is the religious notion that the purposeful influence of Holy Spirit cannot be resisted and that the elect will be saved regardless of anything we do, and that we shall only hurt ourselves if we get involved with their lives in any way other than expository preaching.

A corollary of that is the belief that rather than being simply justified by faith, people are also sanctified by faith alone, in which case there is no need to make sense of one’s doubts and confusions and suffering by relating with others.

Many of us know, however, that God’s injunction is to “confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed” (James 5:16.)

John Gordon was formerly a GP, a psychiatrist and a psychoanalyst. He is now a licensed minister in The Order of Jacob’s Well.