I am very much in favor of utilizing mental health professionals in certain cases. They can address issues that I as a pastor cannot. However, there are some issues that are invisible to doctors, because they are either unmeasurable or lie beyond the constraints of their worldview. In Life Together, Dietrich Bonhoeffer put it well:The most experienced psychologist or observer of human nature knows infinitely less of the human heart than the simplest Christian who lives beneath the Cross of Jesus.
The greatest psychological insight, ability, and experience cannot grasp this one thing: what sin is.
Worldly wisdom knows what distress and weakness and failure are, but it does not know the godlessness of man. And so it does not know that man is destroyed only by his sin and can be healed only by forgiveness. Only the Christian knows this.
In the presence of a psychiatrist I can only be a sick man; in the presence of a Christian brother I can dare to be a sinner.
The psychiatrist must first search my heart and yet he never plumbs its ultimate depth. The Christian brother knows when I come to him: here is a sinner like myself, a godless man who wants to confess and yearns for God’s forgiveness.
The psychiatrist views me as if there were no God. The brother views me as I am before the judging and merciful God in the Cross of Jesus Christ.
Illness, mental or otherwise, should not be assumed to be directly related to personal sin, but we must not fail to take personal sin into account when seeking to help someone.
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