A Word from Bob: It is vital that we minister with love and wisdom in all situations related to mental illness and the church. For an expanded look at this issue, please download my free resource Mental Illness and the Church. This resource explores how God calls us to compassionate, comprehensive care for those struggling with deeply distressing and chronic emotional and mental health concerns.
The Gospel and Mental Health
In my previous post, we examined Martin Luther, Pastoral Counseling, Sola Scriptura, and the Sufficiency of Scripture. We might think:
“Well, sure Luther could use Scripture for the easy, spiritual stuff. He didn’t have to deal with modern issues that we would now label mental illness. Had he done that, then he would not have found gospel-centered counseling to be sufficient.”
Let’s take a look at the historic facts…
Luther’s Compassionate, Competent, and Comprehensive Pastoral Counseling
Winfried Schleiner examined 500 years of the treatment of schizophrenia, psychosis, and melancholy from the Renaissance through the Reformation. Schleiner concluded that “medical writers of the period rarely show any sympathy for such delusive conditions.”[I]
Renaissance doctors delighted in mocking psychotics (persons thinking themselves other than they were—a clay jar, a cock with flapping wings). They were considered comic fools. “The sense of ridicule overcomes pity. Of course the pain and inhumanity resulting from unsympathetic attitudes towards psychotics have mostly gone unrecorded.”[ii]
Schleiner set as his task finding some source whose treatment and healing methodology might be more compassionate.
If, then, a certain kind of psychotic case tended to attract medical ridicule and …did not lead to serious consideration of therapy, we may have to look elsewhere in the Renaissance for a glimpse of what has become so strikingly obvious in our times: that a knowledge of the patients’ histories, empathy with their condition, and endeavors to understand their particular thought processes are important in the treatment of psychotics, whose suffering and pain are beginning to be fully recognized.[iii]
According to Schleiner, “one must look to theologians…to find sympathetic treatments of the condition” (of schizophrenia).[iv] Only in Luther did he find someone manifesting “an encompassing sympathy for the psychotic.”[v]
Redemptive Relationships
Schleiner’s work bears examination because it highlights what was so important to Luther—personal encounter or cure by redemptive relationships. He called Luther’s cure, the cure by charity and company—“societas.” Schleiner summarizes his findings by noting that compassionate care was a major part of the cure in Luther:
“Indeed it can be said that this sense of caring becomes a vehicle of therapy.”[vi]
And Schleiner notes that “clearly human company is the essential ingredient in the cure of the melancholic.”[vii]
3 Difficult Cases
What sort of strugglers does Luther interact with? One was a “melancholic who refused to eat and drink and hides in a cellar. He rebuffs any charitable helpers with the words ‘Don’t you see that I am a corpse and have died? How can I eat?’”[viii] Here is a person who is both depressed and psychotic—thinking he is dead.
In a second case, Luther dealt with an individual who thought he was a rooster “with a red comb on his head, a long beak, and a crowing voice.”[ix]
What was Luther’s care and cure for these two individuals? Schleiner says the two elements common in every one of Luther’s cases were “the consideration of the psychotic’s past and the role of societas (company, relationship) in re-integrating such a person into the community.”[x]
Reintegrating the soul through compassionate relationships was an essential element in Luther’s soul care. He used his personal relationship as a way of encountering another person on behalf of God so that the other person’s image of God and relationship to God could be altered in ways which brought integration to their personality. In fact, Schleiner even labeled Luther’s approach “compassionate reintegration.”[xi]
In his conclusion, Schleiner writes:
Luther shows none of the dehumanizing amusement that often animates even learned physicians when they report certain kinds of cases. The “cure” is brought about not by trickery but by friendly persuasion, by appeal to common humanity, by company. The entire story is informed by a strong sense of sympathy for a patient who becomes stigmatized by society.[xii]
Luther believed that spiritual wholeness or integration was achieved through personal encounter. This was true in his ministry to others and in his openness to being ministered to by others. After reading 1,000s of pages of first-hand accounts of Luther’s interactions, August Nebe said of Luther, “He never regarded himself as all-sufficient, nor as highly lifted up above all others; humbly and urgently he besought help in hours of trial.”[xiii]
Schleiner discussed a third case that Luther addressed. This person was labeled a “voluntary retentive”—someone who refused to urinate. In most Renaissance cases like this, no history was taken or given. Not so with Luther. In talking with this person, Luther traced the beginning of this disorder to a sermon this person heard about works-righteousness. The person came to believe that if he could perfectly control his body and soul, that he would be accepted by God.[xiv]
Having gleaned this history, Luther then gives an etiology or cause as he calls this person a “iustitiarius”—someone attempting to justify himself by works rather than by faith.”[xv] His cure was redemptive/gospel-centered—pointing the person away from works of righteousness to the righteousness of Christ. His interactions with the voluntary retentive person helped him to see that his behavior was rooted in the pride of self-sufficiency. Luther also helped this man see that he must put on renewed images of God in Christ as a God of grace.
This vignette is one of many examples of how Luther encouraged his followers to reinterpret life by exegeting it from a gospel perspective. He cared for souls by promoting the curative attitude of spiritual insight into the redemptive meaning behind events and experiences: cure through looking at life through the lens of the cross of Christ.
Note: I excerpted the preceding material from Chapter 7 of my recently-released book, Counseling Under the Cross: How Martin Luther Applied the Gospel to Daily Life.
[i]Schleiner, “Renaissance Exempla of Schizophrenia: The Cure by Charity in Luther and Cervantes,” 157-176.
[ii]Ibid., 159.
[iii]Ibid., 158.
[iv]Ibid., 163.
[v]Ibid., 163, 165.
[vi]Ibid., 163.
[vii]Ibid., 163.
[viii]Ibid., 173.
[ix]Ibid., 166.
[x]Ibid., 172 .
[xi]Ibid., ibid.
[xii]Ibid., 172.
[xiii]Nebe, Luther as Spiritual Advisor, 13.
[xiv]Schleiner, 164.
[xv]Ibid. 164.
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