The Bible and Mental Health

For a mental health chaplain like me working in a Veterans Affairs hospital, The Bible and Mental Health: Towards a Biblical Theology of Mental Health is a welcome collection of essays, well suited to a personal library for reference and educational enrichment. Rarely does one run into a book exclusively dedicated to how Christian Scripture might engage contemporary issues of mental health, and vice versa. The essays in this edited volume cover a lot of thematic ground, yet each is detailed and insightful in its analysis.

The book comprises three large parts, beginning with a biblical theology of mental health, which is foundational for the whole volume. It then covers some important contemporary issues, such as trauma, anxiety, and even truth-telling, in part 2. In part 3, the book delves into some of the practical issues of how the Bible can be used as a resource for pastoral care, community formation, trauma-healing, and resilience.

Part 1 discusses the importance of narrative and meaning-making, which Jocelyn Bryan deals with in chapter 1, “Narrative, Meaning-Making, and Mental Health, noting that “the positive relationship between a belief that there is meaning and a purpose to life and mental health and life satisfaction is well documented” (10). Part I also addresses specific biblical material, like how Paul’s “life and thought were shaped by traditions in Judaism and the wider Greco-Roman world which were expressive of serious attention to the life of the mind and the attainment of happiness” (55), in “Paul and Mental Health” written by Stephen C. Barton in chapter 4.  In part 2, as a chaplain specializing in mental health, I closely followed and benefited from Isabelle Hamley’s discussion of how the dynamic between language and reality changed over time in Job’s experience of trauma in the Bible (89) in chapter 6 entitled “Patient Job, Angry Job: Speaking Faith in the Midst of Trauma.” Part 3 is enormously helpful in emphasizing the pivotal role of faith communities for people’s mental health. For example, Nick Ladd, in his “The Formation of Christian Community: Reading Scripture in the Light of Mental Health,” writes the following: “when we are struggling to understand what we are going through . . . we also need a community that has a narrative that is broad enough and strong enough to encompass the pain and give the freedom to find voice and be heard” (177).

This book is an important addition to the literature on theology and mental health for three reasons. First, for mental health professionals who are also researchers and educators in Christian theology, hospitals are often unwelcoming toward religious practitioners who join their faith with their work of healing and restoration, believing that religion has nothing to do with empirically grounded, scientific research. However, what this book (and many others like it) shows is that religious traditions do play an important role in maintaining and cultivating people’s mental health. How do we bring the wisdom of religious traditions to the hallways and patient rooms of hospitals, thereby creating synergy between religion and the science of mental health? This is the exact question I and many other healthcare chaplains pose, and I appreciate the fact that this book provides guidelines for how to address such a question (and countless others like it) by treating the Bible as a rich resource for mental health.

Second, this book provides an important corrective to the myth/stereotype that religion is harmful to mental health. Indeed, while there are countless examples of religion being harmful to  people’s mental health, is it necessarily so? In the Christian tradition, while mental health is not at the top of the agenda, loving God and neighbors as ourselves is, and through such love  human mental health flourishes. This book amply testifies to the connection between love and mental health, and I believe that many will benefit from it in that regard.

Third, the book is the collaborative work of renowned biblical scholars, practical theologians, and religious practitioners, all speaking to the issue of what the Bible means for contemporary mental health issues. There are not many books like this, and I hope to see more collaborative scholarly works like this in the future, especially between psychiatrists, mental health counselors, theologians, pastors, and chaplains.

Personally, I would have appreciated hearing from a greater array of theological traditions, such as postcolonial theology, process theology, liberation theology, Reformed theology, Roman Catholic theology, Asian-American theology, and feminist theology, which would all approach the Bible and mental health in different ways. Had this book included all such perspectives, it would have been even richer. Still, this book is a good start as we move toward tracing the connections between religion and mental health, and as a practical theologian-chaplain, I will be part of that endeavor.

Sang-il Kim is a mental health chaplain fellow in the South Texas Veterans Healthcare System in San Antonio, Texas.   

Sang-il Kim

Date Of Review:

November 29, 2022