A few days back someone shared a quote by John MacArthur where he says, “Today sin is called sickness, so people think it requires therapy, not repentance.” I have been unable to find the primary source for this quote, but it is attributed to MacArthur in many places. So I will take it as the words of MacArthur. I do not wish, however, to address MacArthur per se in this post. I wish rather to address the point of view that is represented in the quote, though I will bring up relevant episodes from his life since these are his words that I am addressing.
Many Christians perhaps do not know, but it was Jesus himself who made the link between sin and sickness when he said, “Those who are well have no need of a physician but those who are sick; I have not come to call the righteous but sinners.” (Mark 2.17, NRSV) Jesus is drawing a parallel here. He is saying that, what a doctor is to someone who is sick, Jesus is to someone who is a sinner. In other words, while the verse mentions both sin and sickness, we must ask ourselves how close the parallel Jesus was making is. That is, does the parallel work in another way as well? Can we say, what Jesus is to a doctor, sin is to sickness?
Now we know that Jesus had a healing ministry in which he healed people of various physical ailments ranging from a fever to a twelve-year long menstrual dysfunction. In most of these cases we are not told that the sickness was a result of some sin. In fact, in the case of the man born blind in John 9, Jesus explicitly states that there was no sin involved. Hence, while we can certainly say that Jesus is much like a doctor in that he heals people, we cannot draw the other parallel and say that sin and sickness are similarly related. In other words, what we get from our scriptures is a clear understanding that sin and sickness cannot be equated. There are times (e.g. John 5.14, NRSV) when a sickness is said to be related to sin. However, in most cases sickness and sin are considered different phenomena.
This is not recognized in the quote, “Today sin is called sickness, so people think it requires therapy, not repentance.” This kind of hasty generalization betrays an uncompassionate approach to people and is something that Christian leaders should avoid. What the statement leads the reader to conclude is that those who go for therapy are people who are unrepentant sinners. This is, as we have seen, untrue. But it is downright irresponsible and un-Christlike for a Christian leader to make such public statements.
But what ‘sin’ does MacArthur have in mind that others might try to address through ‘therapy’? Suppose I am going through a period of depression. Depression is one of the leading causes for which people go for therapy, with an estimated 5.7% of the adult population needing intervention for depression. What sin does MacArthur think I am covering up with the therapy? Has he not read Psalm 88, in which the psalmist shows absolutely no positive sign and ends with the depressing thought of having only darkness as his friend? Was Heman the Ezrahite, this man who was inspired to write this psalm, actually a closet sinner writing a psalm and pretending to be ‘holy’ only to give voice to the suffering that resulted from his unconfessed sin? We would have to conclude this if we were to take MacArthur’s statement to be true. But I doubt a biblical inerrantist like MacArthur would want to go there. Where then is the consistency of approach?
Suppose I am actually plagued with some kind of bipolar disorder. This disorder affects about 2.8% of the adult population. Does this mean that I have some unconfessed sin that I am refusing to deal with? That would be a strange conclusion since an analysis of the German Reformer, Martin Luther’s voluminous works has led some secular scholars (see here and here) and even some Christian scholars (see here) to conclude that there is a high probability that Luther suffered from some kind of bipolar disorder. Would MacArthur, someone who reveres Luther, be willing to accept this depiction of one of his heroes as plagued with such an unconfessed besetting ‘sin’? Once again I ask, where is the consistency of approach?
The problem with the quote is that it does something that we would never do in another area of illness. If I have some heart problem, MacArthur would not be able to object if I went to a cardiologist to be treated. After all, in 2023 he himself had four stents put in his arteries after he had a bout of breathlessness. Also, his erratic approach to the COVID-19 pandemic is well known, with him first claiming that the whole thing was a conspiracy to later hiding the fact that some members of his congregation, including himself and his wife, had been infected with the virus. MacArthur has been reactionary in most of his declarations about illness and has betrayed an inconsistent approach that is self-serving at best.
But we need to wonder why matters of mental illness are singled out specially for the accusation of sin. This has been a problem within the Church. Prior to our recognizing that there can be physiological imbalances and neurological problems that give rise to mental illness, the Church ascribed most such phenomena under the rubric of demon possession. Given that their knowledge of the brain was much more limited even than ours, I would not want to fault them since they did not have the categories with which to classify such phenomena. However, with the advancement of our understanding of the human brain, admittedly still severely limited, we were introduced to new categories.
Prior to our understanding of the cardiovascular system and the engineering that developed stents any treatment of blocked arteries would have been unthinkable. However, with the advancement of our understanding and our innovation, such treatments are run of the mill today. Hence, when our understanding of the brain has yielded diagnoses of actual mental illnesses it is irresponsible for any Christian leader to issue a declaration that this is just a cover up for sin.
The treatment of mental illness should be done with care and compassion. I do not wish to claim that there can be no spiritual causes. But even experienced exorcists and psychiatrists would say that it is prudent to first determine if there are physical and physiological causes. Only once these are eliminated should a conclusion of the involvement of spiritual entities be entertained. However, even in a situation of demon possession, no instance in the bible allows us to classify it as having anything to do with sin.
We are broken people living in a broken world. We are and things around us are out of joint. The goal of the Church and especially the leaders within it should be to be agents of healing. Refusing to recognize genuine cases of illness is a failure to be empathetic, making us unable to be agents of healing. It is high time we held our leaders accountable for the careless and self-serving words they speak. It is high time we stopped applauding every unfounded sound bite from our leaders just because it is a pat on our backs. It is high time we approached mental health with as much dedication and concern with which we approach other areas of health.
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