The Bible and Mental Health

Towards a Biblical Theology of Mental Health

Cook, Hamley

• Publisher: SCM Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780334059790
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Studi biblici

Is it possible to develop such a thing as a biblical theology of mental health? How might we develop a helpful and pastoral use of scripture to explore questions of mental health within a Christian framework? This timely and important book integrates the highest levels of biblical scholarship with theological and pastoral concerns to consider how we use scripture when dealing with mental health issues.

Part 1: Biblical Theology

1. Narrative, Meaning Making and Mental Health

JOCELYN BRYAN

This chapter reflects on the power of narrative to reveal meaning in life and how the narrative of Scripture has the power to meet the human need for meaning and transform a personal narrative from one of suffering to well-being.

The importance of stories to make sense of experience is undisputed. Psychology, psychiatry and theology have embraced the narrative turn. But for narratives to function and be meaningful they require interpretation; this applies as much to the narratives we share with others as it does to the Bible. Further, narratives are not created out of nothing, neither are they isolated. They influence one another, get absorbed into one another, contradict one another and compete with one another.

The role of narrative in personal identity and meaning making is significant for mental health.1 The events of our life, our interpretation of them, and what we feel about them are stored in narrative form in memory. But the interpretation of the story of our past is shaped by what we hope for and imagine in the future. We engage in this process of narrative construction to give our lives a sense of unity, purpose and meaning.

This chapter examines personal narratives and their role in meaning making and relates this to mental health. It then draws on the narrative of the Bible to set up a constructive conversation as to how narratives from Scripture can be integrated into a personal narrative and meet the needs for meaning necessary to benefit mental health.

Living narratives: stories and experience

Stories can and do reveal insights concerning ourselves, others and the world. This is the case for the stories we tell about ourselves, the stories we listen to, and the stories we read. A significant amount of our time is spent interacting with stories. The stories we tell to others and the stories we listen to are the main substance of our conversations. In the exchange of stories, we reflect on and process our experiences to find meaning. The need for human beings to communicate and make sense of their experience in narrative form is widely acknowledged and has received considerable attention in academic psychology in recent years. By listening attentively to the stories of others and reflecting on our personal narrative, we gain deeper understanding and knowledge of the richness and complexity of human experience and how it may be interpreted and understood. This connection between human experience and narrative is summarized by Jerome Bruner as ‘narrative imitates life and life imitates narratives’.2 ‘We are living narratives’.3 Our stories are both enacted and created by us. We are the main protagonist in the plot of our lives and we connect the episodes and subplots of our story into an overarching narrative that is shaped by our beliefs and personal goals. In telling our story, we are using language to reconstruct our past, but the meaning we give to it is undoubtedly influenced by what we think the future may or may not hold for us. Stephen Crites makes an important connection between time, narrative and experience, claiming that experience is organized in narrative form because human consciousness is itself ‘temporal’. Referring to Augustine and his reflections on experience and memory, Crites states:

past, present and future cannot be three distinct realities or spheres of being that somehow coexist. Only the present exists, but it exists only in these tensed modalities. They are inseparably joined in the present itself. Only from the standpoint of the present experience could one speak of the past and future. The three modalities are correlative to one another in every moment of experience.4

The point is significant because it means that our experience of the present moment is contingent on both our past narrative and the future plot we anticipate. It is these narratives, held in memory, from which we make sense of our present experience and determine how we feel about it and our response to it. Hence, our responses to the present moments are not distinct from what has happened to us or from what we anticipate will happen. In other words, our narrative of the past and our imagined future narrative impact on our every moment.

But telling our story is not only about meaning making; these first person narratives forge our identity and our individual sense of selfhood. Hence, self-narrative discloses the self as the self sees itself and how our sense of self has evolved over time. In the act of telling our personal story we engage in identity construction describing who we are, how we have become who we are, and possibly who we long to become. Polkinghorne confirms this, claiming that we achieve our personal identities and self-concept through ‘the use of the narrative configuration, and make our existence into a whole by understanding it as an expression of a single and unfolding story’.5

Our individual story may be a story experienced as ordered, planned and fulfilling or, conversely, it may be chaotic, dark and fearful. It might have episodes that are contrasting, including times when life was characterized by stability, ambitions being realized and good health, and other times when an unexpected illness or tragedy has driven the narrative into a time of disorientation and loss. These times of confusion and disruption in the narrative can have a significant impact on self-concept, identity and, consequently, mental health. They may cause us to struggle to make sense of what is happening and how to respond. We might even lose sense of who we are and our future becomes hopeless and fearful. When this happens, we can struggle to cope with the demands of everyday life and our coherent sense of self disintegrates and mental health problems occur. In such circumstances, evidence suggests that it is both important and difficult to revise and reconstruct the personal narrative to recover meaning, a sense of self and its contingent mental health.

The fact that we inhabit a social world is also important in our narrative. It means that although the content and plot of our personal narrative is unique, it is undoubtedly influenced by the narratives of those who make up the web of relationships that are part of it. The characters in these narratives will be part of our story’s plot and elicit some of the emotions embedded within it. However, the web of narratives extends beyond our close social circle to include the story of our family, community, society, country and, for Christians, the story of God. And, like any web, changes or tension in one thread have an impact on the rest of the web. As living narratives enmeshed in a web of ever-changing narratives, each personal narrative incorporates to some extent these different narratives with their varying degrees of impact and significance on the overall content and trajectory of each personal story. Furthermore, how we interpret this complex interweaving of narratives in our personal narrative has considerable implications for mental health.

The Bible and narrative

Within the pages of the Bible, the truth about the nature of God, his relationship with both creation and human beings and his work of salvation in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, is recorded in narrative form. The numerous stories in the biblical text are set within an overarching narrative of God’s act of creation, the fall, Yahweh and the people of Israel, the incarnation, the work of the Holy Spirit and the beginnings of the Church and the anticipation of a new creation with a new heaven and a new earth. Over the past two millennia, the transformative truth of the narrative of Scripture has been evidenced in human lives. The reality of the human condition and the loving participation of the creator in the world and in human lives captured in these ancients texts, has unleashed not only human imagination, but also the power of Scripture to heal and inspire lives in dramatic ways. We might conceive of this as a unification or integration of our personal narrative with God’s unfolding narrative, and in this confluence of narratives the work of the Holy Spirit brings about transformation. Loughlin goes further and suggests that ‘[n]arrativist theology sets the scripture before us as a consuming text; or better, a text to consume in order that we might grow in the strength and shape of Christ’.6 He suggests that by allowing the text to reside within us ‘we are nourished by its word and enabled to perform its story’.7

In the rich narrative of the Bible a truth is proclaimed that affirms that all human beings are created and loved by God. This is the beginning of the narrative of every human life. The God who is outside of time and eternal, who has created all that is, reaches out to creation in love and gives every human being the identity of his child, who is created and loved by him. In the mystery of the incarnation, the story of God in time is radically manifest in Jesus, the Son of God, whose life events enacted in the history of the world offer us the possibility of a future that is free from the fear of death and gives the promise of everlasting life. This is the fundamental narrative of the Christian faith and it is a narrative that invites human beings to unite their story with the unfolding story of God.

In a reflection on story and the pastoral office, Jensen emphasizes the significance of story and the gospel narrative as one of promise.8 He notes that it offers a future identified as the new creation and everlasting life with Jesus, which is not contingent on human achievement but on faith in Jesus as the crucified, risen Lord. This end point is the telos of the human story and is not generated by us, but is given to us in the sacred narrative of Scripture. It is a promise of a different present and a different future. Throughout the Gospels, the promise is witnessed to in the stories of the lives transformed by the ministry of Jesus. This is particularly evident in John’s Gospel. Nathanael is told that he ‘will see heaven opened and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man’ (John 1.51). The woman of Samaria is told that, ‘The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life’ (John 4.14). After the feeding of the 5,000, Jesus promises that ‘whoever comes to me will never be hungry and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty’ (John 6.35).

The Gospels are stories of promise and of the transforming power of an encounter with Jesus in the present. The narratives witness to how his ministry changed who people were and who they became. In other words, the assumed trajectory of their personal narratives was altered dramatically as they saw themselves, their relationship with others, and their purpose in life in a new way. By believing in Jesus and who he was – namely, the Son of God – the narrative people lived by and by association their personal narrative – whether Jew, Samaritan, Levite or Roman – was challenged and reinterpreted. Jesus transformed personal identities by enabling people to revise their personal narrative and their understanding of the life they had led up to this point, and look to a new future centred on faith in hi...