When the Christian Collapses: Wow. I just read something posted on Facebook, and while I generally do not read Facebook posts, this one was unsettling, to say the least. I hope I do not regret offering a few preliminary thoughts before I have had more time to think through everything that was said.
The post was titled: “SUICIDE and PREACHERS!” Its subject was pastors who had died by suicide, but the argument quickly widened into questions about depression, mental illness, psychology, medication, the sufficiency of Scripture, and finally the power of the gospel. Much of it was stated with great certainty: Christians are engaged in a spiritual battle; God has given sufficient armor; the Word of God is sufficient; the gospel is powerful; believers are called to endure and overcome.
I agree with every one of those statements. And yet I found myself increasingly troubled by what seemed to follow from them. What do we do with the believer who collapses? Not the Christian who denies Christ. Not the Christian who says the gospel has failed. Not the Christian who has abandoned the Scriptures. I mean the Christian who believes, prays, hopes, reads, struggles, and nevertheless reaches a depth of anguish from which he cannot seem to climb. Does his collapse mean that he did not use the armor correctly? That his theology was defective? That he failed to appropriate the strength available to him? Does the fact that he became overwhelmed somehow tell us that he did not fight faithfully enough? Before answering too quickly, we may want to spend some time with Job, Elijah, Jeremiah, Jonah, and Paul. Scripture gives us faithful people who were bewildered, exhausted, afraid, crushed, despairing, and at times wishing for death. The Bible gives us a much more honest picture of what faithful suffering can look like.
This is where I think the argument begins to move too quickly. Yes, the gospel completely answers the guilt and penalty of sin. Yes, believers continue to live amid sin, weakness, suffering, and frailty. Yes, Scripture is sufficient for everything God gave Scripture to accomplish. Yes, Christians are called to look to Christ, walk by faith, put off what is sinful, and live in dependence upon the Spirit. But none of those truths establishes the conclusion that every psychological or emotional collapse must therefore be traced to defective theology, insufficient faith, or failure in the spiritual battle.
The difficulty is that biblical truths can sometimes be made to carry conclusions they were never intended to bear. Christ has delivered His people from the dominion of sin. But that does not mean they have been delivered from every consequence of living in mortal bodies, every weakness of temperament, the effects of trauma, every physical disorder, every season of despair, or every form of mental and emotional suffering. Otherwise we have changed the gospel from the announcement of what Christ has accomplished into a promise that Christians should possess sufficient internal strength to withstand every possible form of human anguish. Scripture does not promise that.
The Bible gives us something much more honest than a theology of inevitable emotional victory. It gives us saints who believed God while trembling, trusted Him while bewildered, prayed while despairing, and sometimes spoke from depths that make many of our modern categories look painfully shallow.
There is much more in the post that deserves consideration: mental illness, medication, counseling, responsibility, the role of psychology, the sufficiency of Scripture, and especially what we are entitled to conclude about the spiritual state of someone who dies by suicide. Those are serious questions, and I do not want to pretend they can be settled in a few paragraphs.
But this much seems important at the outset: Let us speak boldly about the sufficiency of Christ. Let us speak boldly about the power of the gospel. Let us encourage one another to pray, believe, endure, seek help, and continue looking to Christ even in the darkest places. And let us be very careful about turning another person’s collapse into proof that Christ failed him, or that he failed Christ.
Perhaps those of us whose lives have been comparatively sheltered should also be especially careful here. It is very easy to speak confidently about endurance, victory, and what another believer ought to be able to withstand when we have never carried the particular burdens some believers are carrying. Some have endured grief, trauma, illness, loneliness, fear, exhaustion, and losses that many of us can scarcely imagine. That does not make truth relative. But it ought to make us humble. MPJ
Postscript: I’m familiar with the Cowper story, and I have often wondered about it. That was so many years ago when I first heard about him, and I remember at that point not really having any understanding of these things. I think I saw suffering much more mechanically then, if someone was struggling deeply, there had to be some identifiable spiritual reason for it. I don’t think that way anymore.