“What do you mean this feeling won’t last forever?”
I was in shock as I sat across from my mentor. A sophomore in college, I’d stopped feeling God’s presence in my soul. The spiritual bliss I once knew was now an infrequent occurrence, and I couldn’t take it anymore. So I sat across from a wise man and asked, “Can I have as much of God’s presence as I want?” I waited for him to say yes and start showing me how to maintain that burning feeling. A curt but kind no was his only response. I didn’t realize it for some time, but I was spiritually sick.
What does it mean to be spiritually healthy? What does it mean to be spiritually sick? Without answers to these questions, Christians are hard-pressed to accurately assess their spiritual condition and respond appropriately. If we aspire to live balanced and mature lives before God, we must first understand what spiritual health looks like and be aware of the various pathologies that can attack the spiritual life.
Few expound on the concept of spiritual health and disease quite like Herman Bavinck (1854–1921). In his recently published Reformed Ethics, Bavinck notes the goal of every Christian’s life is to imitate Christ. This is, on the most basic level, what it means to be spiritually healthy. But we all know imitating Christ isn’t a simple undertaking. Bavinck writes that “like natural organisms, the spiritual life can be afflicted by illnesses that disrupt it” (415). He puts his finger on a problem every Christian faces: diseases seek to hinder our spiritual development at every turn. How do we recognize them?
Spiritual Health
Diseases seek to hinder our spiritual development at every turn.
Before we can understand spiritual disease, it’s essential to flesh out a biblical concept of Christian health. Bavinck orients his discussion of spiritual health around one word: harmony. A Christian is healthy when the entire counsel and ministry of Jesus Christ works its way harmoniously through our entire being. Bavinck writes,
We are healthy when the pure food of the Word of God finds its way through our spiritual personhood, encounters no hindrances or disruptions along the way, and engages all our organs—intellect, soul, and will, together with their subordinate faculties, namely reason, understanding, conscience, feelings and passions, instincts and inclinations. (418)
A strong Christian life is one where the Word of God in Jesus Christ is absorbed by each of our “organs.” Our mind intellectually grasps the Word, our affections are stirred by its truth, and our hands are led to do the work Jesus prescribes. Each distinct part of our person works in harmony with the Word.
Bavinck looks to Jesus as the perfect example of such health: “[In Jesus] there was no domination of mind, of reason, of the will; he did not lack the capacity for reason but knew its proper place and did not succumb to intellectualism; he was not a fanatic. . . . He is the model of our spiritual life” (418–19).
For Bavinck, to be like Jesus and live a healthy spiritual life is to be a whole person. When the Word interacts equally with our mind, affection, and will, we live a harmoniously healthy life with God.
Spiritual Disease
If “harmony” defines a healthy spiritual life, it’s no surprise that Bavinck counts the opposite as pathology. For him, spiritual disease comes from one-sidedness. He identifies three major spiritual pathologies that regularly attack Christian spirituality and hinder growth.
1. Disease of Mind
Bavinck identifies intellectualism as a terrible disease often found in Protestant circles. This pathology leads good Christians to place all their spiritual emphasis on doctrine and knowledge while “failing to appreciate the rights of the emotional life and the practical life” (422). What separates this from healthy orthodoxy? This error esteems correctness and right doctrine, just like good orthodoxy does, “but considers it the highest and the only criterion” (422).
Thus, doctrine is the only thing that matters. Agreement with confessions is the only test of value. Bavinck notes this disease inevitably leads to a “doctrinal righteousness which is worse than a works righteousness” (423), one where the Christian life is fossilized and robbed of its true vitality. When Christians overemphasize the work of the mind, Christianity becomes little more than an assortment of ideas and concepts that have no connection to real life or to the transformation that comes from the Holy Spirit.
2. Disease of Heart
The pathology of the heart “restricts the religious life to feelings, to the soul, putting emphasis on the subject” (427–28). People who fall ill with this disease make the mistake of building their belief system entirely around their feelings, around a subjective pursuit of spiritual bliss in God’s presence.
When the Word interacts equally with our mind, affection, and will, we live a harmoniously healthy life with God.
This was the virus I struggled with during my sophomore year. According to this broken way of thinking, true knowledge of God is found when we “allow ourselves to sink away into [God] through our emotions” (428). Some religious forms of this mystical approach annihilate active personhood altogether, and some relegate Scripture to a “lower form” of revelation.
Of course, not all mysticism is bad. Bavinck notes that sanctification and real communion with God are truly mystic experiences that work deeply within our souls. The error, however, is to assume only experience and spiritual feelings matter, that they’re the only true sources of intimacy with God. When we overemphasize the role of emotion, Christians will employ all kinds of unhealthy artifices out of a desire to maintain their spiritual ecstasy.
3. Disease of Will
The disease of the will occurs when Christians make piety and external acts of morality the main thing. Pietists fall into error when they find value only in what they see as purely religious. They emphasize actions seen as spiritual and proper but can’t find a place for “secular” activities like appreciating art, history, science, or other aspects of culture not deemed religious. Ironically, in focusing so intently on being religious, such pietists often become separatists who tend to neglect the church—“whose value,” Bavinck observes, “the Pietist does not see” (432).
Next to pietism, Bavinck denounces what he broadly labels as “Methodism.” This tendency orients itself entirely around being moral, performing evangelistic acts, and zealously pursuing conversions. This error, he says, “is filled with an exaggerated zeal for conversions and makes everything subservient to them” (433). Bavinck says those who overemphasize action and feats of obedience, though well meaning, are often “spiritually poor on the inside” (433). Having failed to cultivate their minds and affections, they seek to give away in their good works more than they possess.
Spiritual Cure
In the years after I broke down in front of my mentor, God has slowly brought greater health to my life. Through wisdom from Bavinck and others, the Holy Spirit has helped me see that my own internal sense of God’s nearness doesn’t give me an accurate assessment of my spiritual life. When examining myself, I need a whole-person approach.
How do we address the three forms of spiritual sickness that Bavinck has identified? When you approach God’s Word, actively engage his truth with each part of your being. For example, Jesus commands us to love people. Intellectually understand what this command entails; define it with clear thinking. Feel Jesus’s call and the affection that accompanies love. Then act on his Word: be loving. When we approach and respond to God’s Word in this way, we live in harmony as whole, spiritually healthy people.
Jesus lived an integrated life. Every part of him was engaged in ministry, and thus he stands as the balanced and perfect example we ought to emulate. Let’s walk with healthy heads, hearts, and hands—striving to be Christians within whom God’s Word works harmoniously through every one of our spiritual organs.
The Gospel Coalition