Depression: A Christian Theological Approach

“The Word” by M. Bellini

One of my lifelong goals as an interdisciplinary scholar and practitioner has been to develop a comprehensive and holistic approach to minister with persons who are challenged with mental health battles and to advocate for social awareness and change. Incorporating into that model the best that theology, medical science and the social sciences have to offer was never in question. The difficulty for many is reconciling faith and science, a long-standing rivalry. As a minister and seminary professor, my concern is with an antiscientific faith among the faithful. A theological rejection of the sciences can be tragic. Too often the church’s remedies have exacerbated the challenges faced by persons with disabilities and disorders. I have seen and heard of too many preventable suicides and attempts due to lack of treatment. The greater question for me has been how the church and its theology can be an asset and contribute constructively to the conversation. The Cerulean Soul is my continuing attempt to answer that question. 

Tackling depression is a daunting task. It is essential to remember that although we would like a convenient, manageable, simple, uniform definition and treatment, depression is a complex, pluriform, and multivalent phenomenon that is quite elusive to nail down. Currently, there is no one ultimate identifiable cause or treatment of melancholia, nor is there one unified theory that encompasses and connects all of the various explanations, from evolutionary to genetic to neurochemical to cognitive behavioral to psychosocial and so on. Further, Christian theology has been known to attribute depression causally to God, the devil, the fall, an imperfect world, individual sin, or to psychological origins. It is too easy simply to dismiss any or all of these or to accept blindly any or all of these explanations.

What is depression? Is it a chemical imbalance? Is it the qualia of despondency emerging from the empirical ego? Or perhaps it is a semiotic construction culturally experienced? Depending on one’s frame of reference, depression has been said to be biochemical, psychological, socio-cultural, or all of the above. One main conclusion I reached is that theories of depression often reflect one’s philosophical anthropology. A biological view of humanity generates biological theories (neural correlates). From cultural views of anthropology emerge cultural theories of depression and so on. How one defines the human person is telling as to how one defines mental disorder and depression. So how do we define the human person? The hard and soft sciences and philosophy debate the case. However, these competing strategies tend to be reductive and can lack explanatory power, since each field only speaks its own language. Philosophical anthropology and ontologies of depression rarely consider that we may be immaterial or spiritual beings and entertain a theological approach. 

One of the reasons I recently wrote The Cerulean Soul was to provide a corrective. I propose a relational theological anthropology to fill in the obvious gaps that exist in identifying etiology and potential treatment of depression. The book examines a wide selection of theological models of the human person. I found the image of God to be a proper and sufficient starting point. The human person is made by God in the imago Dei that is defined by Jesus Christ, the divine-human. The incarnation embodies the relationship between divinity and humanity, which not only defines who we are but lends generously to a theological construal and therapeia of depression. Depression is inexorably tied to our relationship with God as created being: original, fallen, and restored. As a result, the disorder of the mind can arise in a variety of ways: as part of the natural order of creation, as a consequence of living in a fallen world, or even as an instrument of growth and sanctification. So what follows is the construction of a theological typology of etiology: natural, consequential, or purgative types of depression. I work critically with each type in dialogue with their various historical representative interlocutors. In the last chapter, I illustrate how Christ faces each type, and how in Christ, those afflicted with depression can likewise face the malady in union with Christ and the Holy Spirit.

My approach is unapologetically theological, reimagining the human person in light of the image of God (imago Dei) in Christ, the divine enfleshed in human weakness.  Christ is the true image of God and its telos. God in Christ assumes our humanity and takes our depravity and depression onto himself that we may be healed. As Gregory of Nazianzus stated, “What has not been assumed has not been healed.” Identifying with our suffering and disorder, he invites us further to become like him and be restored in holiness and wholeness. And as Athanasius proclaimed, “God became man so that we may become God.” Christ is God’s way for us to become like him, culminating with the cross. The cross amplifies for us where Christ identifies and assumes our brokenness and transfigures our disfigurement. A via crucis or cruciformity affirms, assumes, and invites, rather than marginalizes, universal human contingency, limitation, and suffering in all forms, “abled” and “disabled.” More so, our union with the risen Christ initiates an eschatological trajectory of hope and peace for all persons to experience the redemption and transformation that is given freely in Christ and appropriated through the healing and sanctifying work of the Holy Spirit.  

Here I lean heavily on the therapeia of theology. I retrieve from classical resources on the Trinity and the incarnation to approach this perennial problem of human despondency. The missions of the Son and the Spirit are God’s response not only to our depravity but also our depression. Christ and the Spirit minister to our melancholia through their mediatorial roles of advocacy, healing, and friendship, which I develop at length in the last chapter. Experiencing the journey of salvation is a holistic transformation in the image of God that carries an eschatological tension of “healed, being healing, and will be healed.” This promise is extended to persons with depression and to all persons on the via salutis.

Realistically, even with steadfast faith, major (clinical) depression can be an all-consuming experience. It can inundate every aspect of one’s life and manifest physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually, relationally, as well as in other ways. The result is often a sense of multidimensional loss (disconnection with self, others, the world, and God) that can paralyze one’s sense of agency. The will appears deactivated. Persons with depression can feel like their sense of self and their world are disintegrating. Nothing holds together. Life loses meaning, purpose, and direction. Additionally, one feels powerless to change one’s predicament. The circumstances are compounded. One becomes depressed about being depressed. The depressive condition feels like a deadly poison that voraciously eats away at every vestige of order, function, ability, connection, and faith that one possesses. Spiraling despair drives one to doubt self, one’s faculties, reality, and even God. Remarkably though, God sees us even when we cannot see God. And God holds us and our world up when we cannot hold anything together. 

The holy love of God in Christ through the Spirit can create new meaning and order amidst cognitive chaos. God with us and in us can be the ontological anchor for persons with depression. We can find a transcendent mooring for self, our world, and our faith when all seems to be dissipating into nothingness. The transcendence of God becomes that Archimedean fixed point for the myopic, imploding doubt of the depressed to find metaphysical terra firma. The immanence of God in Christ can dislodge and deliver us from the pit of despair and graciously move us forward into the hope of the future. Christ, the suffering servant, was clothed in a body of weakness in order to identify with our human condition, that we might be clothed in him. Our broken human condition does not remain in alienation. Through cruciformity, Christ embraces the shape of our disfigurement. He takes on the disfigured human condition and transfigures it into a new creation, a healing of the imago Dei. Christ then is formed in us through the sanctifying and healing power of the Spirit. Persons who experience depression, anxiety, or other mental disorders in their weakness can be renewed and experience healing and wholeness.  Depression, then, is a state of despondency that serves as a biosocial and spiritual marker for our human weakness, brokenness, and our spiritual struggle for meaning and wholeness. Further, it is a call to grow, to be restored, and to be made holy in the image of God in Christ. What emerges is a therapeia of the imago for depression that fills the gaps in our present attempts to determine the malady’s etiology and treatment.

In my book, I make a necessary distinction between curing and healing with an emphasis on the latter, which eschatologically is a realized trajectory of imago restoration beginning and ending with the resurrection. The bodily resurrection is the beginning, source, and goal of our soteria as healing and theosis. Our healing is appropriated by faith in the resurrected Christ and fully realized with the redemption and resurrection of our own bodies. Whereas curing eradicates the symptoms and presence of an ailment, healing in the via salutis does not exclude the possibility of temptation, suffering, or symptoms. Instead, it sets us on the way of restoration, where the imago spiritually, mentally, relationally, and even physically is being restored. Besides the resurrection, there is no ultimate cure for life, for there is no cure for death. With the resurrection there is always healing (in some form) and in the end even cure. Human suffering in its hurt can yield both hope and humility. In the end, we will truly know how much God knows, cares, and loves us – “For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known” (1 Cor. 13:12, NIV).

Dr. Peter J. Bellini is the Associate Professor of Evangelization in the Heisel Chair at United Theological Seminary in Dayton, Ohio. He is a member of the Firebrand editorial board.