Watch any daytime talk show with an expert medical guest or flip through Time
magazine's colorful diagrams, and you'll see that the latest emphasis
in neurology, the brain's causal influence on human behavior, has leaked
down to the popular level. Many of these experts consider the human
being primarily as a physical creature whose actions, feelings, and
thoughts for the most part simply manifest neurological activity.
Undesirable feelings or behavior, then, should be addressed by
ever-more-precise medical methods.
Many Christians have correctly seen the incredible danger such an
understanding poses to a biblical worldview, which involves realities
beyond what can be seen, touched, or medicated. In other words, we know
that a human being involves more than the body. But we also know that
the body is a vital aspect of our being as designed by God. So we begin
to answer this question---How should Christians think about psychiatric
medication?---by considering at least two aspects of what it means for
people to be made as the image of God.
1. The Image of God as Union Between Soul and Body
The immaterial soul does not function independently of the material
body. The soul is not a "ghost in the machine" whose function is
autonomous of corporeal mechanisms. God intentionally designed humankind
to represent himself in the physical world---a psychosomatic unity
comprising both a soul that reflects the immaterial God and also a body
that grounds him in material creation.
The keystone passage introducing the image of God is Genesis 1:26: "Then
God said, 'Let us make man in our image, after our likeness'." Biblical
scholar D. J. A. Clines has pointed out that this phrase is better
translated, "Let us make man as our image" for grammatical
reasons as well as for historical-contextual reasons. Man, as the image
of God, is the physical representation of God's presence in creation. Continue at Jeremy Pierre
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