Psychiatry: the New Priesthood?, by Daniel Montgomery

This coming Sunday is going to be all about the Priests – God’s men who had the gritty task of killing all those animals to fight the unending battle against Israel’s uncleanness so that God wouldn’t scatter them before himself. Even though the priests were sinners themselves, God appointed them to stand in the gap and make continual atonement, to reconcile the people to their God.

Now, even if you don’t believe a single word of the Bible and what it says about Jesus becoming the new High Priest, it’s still obvious that the ancient practices of priests and sacrifices, pagan or otherwise, just isn’t part of the fabric of culture anymore (at least in the vast majority of Western culture). But the idea of a person who offers to restore people to a certain purity still exists in the booming mental health business.

Linda Gask, a professor at Manchester University in England, has described psychiatrists as ‘an intermediary between the world from a social context and the world from the perspective of those who are mentally ill.’ Even Karl Jung, heavyweight of modern psychological theory, says:

Patients force the psychotherapist into the role of priest, and expect and demand that he shall free them from distress. That is why we psychotherapists must occupy ourselves with problems which strictly speaking belong to the Theologian.

If we take this idea back to Leviticus, then societal norms (not muttering to oneself in public, killing people or eating your own eyebrows) are the model of ‘cleanness’ and the mentally ill are the ‘unclean’ and the psychiatrist is the priest, the intermediary trying to clean up the unclean and fit them into society. And the sacrificial goat, the means of atonement, often gets replaced with Nexium. People don’t need blood, they need a purple pill.

This priesthood of the analyst pervades daytime TV. Oprah will compassionately agree that you’re broken and sincerely tell you today’s guest has the key to making you whole again. Oprah might look to the Dr. Phils of the world as the new High Priests, but from a biblical perspective, we have to take a more sober approach.

Psychiatry/psychology is a product of our culture and so, just as we learned last Sunday, there is stuff in there that can be redeemed and stuff in there to be rejected.

What can we redeem? First and foremost, the motives of modern psychiatry are good – to help the sick. In our society, the mentally ill are new lepers. They are outcasts, as though people are afraid they’ll get some crazy on themselves and lose their marbles. So the motive of modern psychiatry to minister to those individuals is commendable and certainly fits into a biblical worldview.

So, where does it fall down? David Powlison has written a great article about this question. Basically, there are four fundamental views that will shape any counseling approach – the view of God/Christ, the view of human nature, the weight given to a person’s circumstances, and the goals and methods of any counseling.

The problem with so much modern psychiatry/psychology stems from having either a grossly distorted view of the Creator, the fallen-ness of creation and the redeeming work of Christ, or a complete ignorance of those basic biblical facts. You see this in the self-esteem creed that so many analyst/priests thump. If you just like yourself enough, your life will be great. Affirm your inner child. NONSENSE! Hitler had self-esteem through the roof and it doesn’t seem to have made his life all that great or to be admired. If the ‘pursuit of happiness’ replaces the ‘pursuit of holiness’ in any counseling setting, then we have little reason to expect any lasting fruit. (that line was stolen from No God But God: breaking with the idols of our age, edited by Os Guinness and John Seel. Fantastic chapter on leaving psychology behind. ‘It’s time to appreciate where psychology works and where it does not, and to see how the gospel is the best fulfillment of its insights.’)

Here’s the bottom line: any psychological/psychiatric program, if it is to make any sense, must have the fundamental sinfulness of every human being and the last, best and only hope found in Jesus Christ at the center. Any diagnosis, treatment and discussion must flow from that basic place.

So what do you think? How does the gospel address the categories typically addressed in modern psychology?