MENTAL ILLNESS AND DEMONIC ACTIVITY by Simonetta Carr for Core Christianity
Mental illness can cause mystifying changes in both appearance and behavior. Many relatives of people with schizophrenia, for example, have learned to detect changes in brain activity by looking at the eyes, which can go from a dead stare to rapid movements or incessant blinking. This is both frightening and puzzling.
For this reason, many Christians throughout history have chosen to make simple associations. Since some people in the Bible who had a strange and scary appearance and lost control of their movements were possessed by demons, Christians today assume that those who exhibit similar traits must fall into the same category. This type of reasoning creates a host of interpretative problems.
First of all, trying to find a biblical correspondent to a mental health issue is poor exegesis and can be grossly misleading, because correlation doesn’t imply causation.
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Second, the “symptoms” exhibited by the demon-possessed in the Gospels vary so much from one individual to the other that this correlation would have to extend to neurological or physical conditions (such as deafness, blindness, speech impediment, and epilepsy), which few Christians would identify as demonic.
Third, the examples of demonic possession listed in the Gospels were not provided as a manual for modern exorcism (let alone as a diagnostic manual of mental disorders), just as Jesus’ miracles are not a blueprint for a higher Christian life. This is a general hermeneutical rule: We shouldn’t automatically deduce general principles or doctrines from a biblical narrative. In this specific case, Christ’s miraculous activity had the purpose of revealing the kingdom that had come bursting into this world and the utter defeat of Satan and his minions.
Finally, this interpretation generates a swarm of complications on the practical level. If we accept that, in this case, correlation implies causation, then how can we apply this to the numerous Christians who live with schizophrenia? Taking this reasoning to its next logical step, we’d have to say that Christians can be demon possessed, even if the Bible teaches that they belong to Christ, who dwells in them by his Spirit (1 Cor. 6:19–20; Rom. 8:10; 14:8; Gal. 2:20; Col. 1:27).
