You might know Dr. J.P. Moreland from the PBS series, Closer to Truth.
Or from his numerous books on philosophy and Christian apologetics.
Or for his debates over the existence of God with Clancy Martin and Eddie Tabash.
But you might not know of his, at times, intense battles with anxiety, or the strategies that have brought enormous relief, or the fact he wrote about all of it in an excellent book, Finding Quiet: My Story of Overcoming Anxiety and the Practices that Brought Peace.
We recently talked about anxiety, medication, what skeptics get wrong on contemplative prayer, why self-compassion isn’t selfishness, and some of the complexities surrounding suicide.
Our discussion has been edited for brevity and clarity.
HEINZE: Can you tell me about your battle with anxiety, and why you decided to write the book?
MORELAND: I’ve had issues with anxiety my whole life. I was born with a genetic predisposition towards it and was raised in a highly anxious family.
But I was always able to function fairly normally until 2003 when I had what I call a nervous breakdown. It lasted seven months and then ten years later, I had a five-month breakdown.
Following that, I felt led by the Lord to use my research skills, with his help, to read everything I could about anxiety and depression. Then I boiled it down into a set of things I was going to practice.
The book captures the things that have literally transformed my life. And that’s cheap talk, and we hear people say that, but I’m serious about it.
I’m a different person since I began to put into practice this set of things. If someone is reading and they suffer from anxiety or depression, I know what they feel like. I’ve been there.
HEINZE: Some Christians are skeptical of antidepressants and anti-anxiety medication.
You wrote in your book that medication stabilized you during your most severe moments.
MORELAND: It helped me tremendously.
HEINZE: What would you tell Christians who urge people to treat anxiety from the natural world, instead?
You know, they say, “Eat better. Fruits and veggies. Do the herb thing. Don’t go the medication route.”
They say God didn’t create medications. But he did create herbs.
MORELAND: That’s idiotic. God didn’t create penicillin. There are all kinds of things we were put on this earth to discover and to do something about. We’re not just puppets.
Farmers have learned to do a better job at farming, and doctors have developed great medications for a whole range of things.
There are tremendous medications that help with your brain chemistry. What Christians fail to realize is that we’re body, soul, and spirit.
We’re unified beings that have a soul, spirit, body, intellect, and emotions. Though different, they function together. And that means I’m a holistic being.
So when I have a problem with anxiety, I’m going to attack it using every aspect of me.
I’m going to try to get counseling, I’m going to work on some spiritual practices I talk about in the book, and I will use whatever is effective.
It turns out these medications are proven to be more effective than natural means. The studies are in. The natural remedies have not really been tested carefully. They’re anecdotal stories, and I believe anecdotes do count, but they’re not as rigorously tested.
These meds have been honed and perfected and tested, repeatedly, under highly-controlled conditions, and they’re really helpful.
So I would see a psychiatrist. Not a GP. A psychiatrist is a specialist in brain chemistry. Go straight to a specialist. Don’t spend time with someone who knows a little bit about it, but isn’t an expert.
That makes more sense to me than the natural remedy.
And by recommending the natural remedy route, you’re assuming the natural world is the way it’s supposed to be. You’re assuming that what you find naturally is good. The natural world is fallen. So natural remedies are a dice roll. There are going to be good ones and bad ones.
There’s no general preference in my mind for natural remedies over created medications. That’s grossly misunderstood, regarding the fall.
HEINZE: You were talking about the body, soul, and mind, the intellect.
Historically, there’s been a significant strain in Christianity that claims if you address depression or anxiety with the mind, the body will follow.
These folks allude to Romans 12, where Paul talks about “renewing your mind.”
And they’ll say that if you renew your mind with right theology, then your body will follow.
MORELAND: I just don’t understand people who say that. I don’t get it. They make absolutely no sense to me.
People who recommend that probably haven’t had anxiety as severely as other people. So they’re armchair quarterbacks, if you ask me.
If I’m fighting cancer and know that there are three treatments that, taken collectively, give me the greatest opportunity to get well, why would I take one of them and forget the other two?
I agree with the view that you need to work on your self-talk and memorize a set of Scriptures. Memorize those things. Mull them over. Make them a part of your prayer life.
But then there are other things to do. The idea that if you [just] do X, you’ll get well? You might.
But if I’ve got two other things that I could do, too – those might be counseling for the psychological aspects and medication for the neurological aspects – why would I want to use one treatment instead of all three?
HEINZE: In the book, you write that “it’s actually all right with God if you’re nice to yourself,” and urge Christians to use anxiety and depression as an “opportunity to soften your heart to yourself.”
Why is this important for Christians with depression or anxiety to hear?
MORELAND: Christians latch onto current evangelical subculture teaching, because they haven’t been taught to think.
They don’t know how to think carefully about the Bible. So instead they tend to absorb whatever their pastor and Christian community is saying. And that’s a recipe for disaster, because the Christian community can be right about things, but they can also be really wrong.
The Scriptures motivate us all the time by rewards and punishments. Jesus did that all the time. So if I’m not supposed to care about myself, why would Jesus do that?
Loving yourself is an extremely important thing because it’s very hard to love other people if you don’t like or love yourself, in any sense of the word.
In the book, I make a very careful distinction between biblical and healthy self-nurture and self-love and narcissism.
Narcissism is an inordinate self-love that says I matter more than anybody else and that everything should exist for me. It’s completely unbiblical.
But there’s a healthy form of self-love where you say that God has certain attitudes towards me about love and tenderness and kindness, and my job is to imitate towards myself the way he thinks and feels about me.
I want to get to the point where I see myself and think and feel and treat myself like he does. Does that take a rocket scientist to think that would be a normal part of the Christian life?
I think healthy self-love is a part of understanding and applying how God feels and looks at me in the first place.
HEINZE: Some Christians hate that phrase “healthy self-love,” because they’re so conditioned to thinking of themselves as sinful worms.
In the hymn, “Alas and did my Saviour Bleed,” Isaac Watts calls himself “a worm,” and my wife attended a church, growing up, where the pastor said of it, “You’re worse than a worm. A worm hasn’t even sinned.”
MORELAND: Would it make any sense for God to die for worms or cockroaches?
Surely if he gave his life for something – whatever he gave his life had to be valuable. That doesn’t mean he had to do it, but it would not have been worth Jesus’ sacrifice to die for cats or dogs, as wonderful as they are.
But human beings are his image bearers and so we have a tremendous amount of value. He died for something that makes sense. We do have worth and value.
HEINZE: In the book, you talk about picturing God as you engage in contemplative prayer.
You give some really wonderful reasons for why it can be so transformative.
Yet some Christians are uncomfortable with the practice because they say it’s making a graven image. Why isn’t that the case, and why is it helpful?
MORELAND: There’s a huge distinction between creating a visual image of God for the purpose of worshipping it versus using imagination to help your mind stay focused on God and realizing that God is spirit and can’t literally be pictured.
But we can use imagery and art to represent aspects of God that will help us focus.
So if you were to think about London and you just have the abstract idea of London, your mind will be distracted. You’ll stick with it for awhile, but you won’t be able to focus.
But if you have a picture in your mind of Westminster Cathedral or The Tower of London, you’re not thinking about that image — you’re thinking with it.
You’re thinking of London, but you’re using the image to keep yourself focused on London and not on the image itself.
If I go on a solitude retreat to spend time praying, I take a picture of Jesus because that image of Jesus – even if it’s not how he really looked – doesn’t matter to me, because it keeps my mind focused.
And I’m not worshipping the image. I’m not that dumb. I’m praying to and worshipping Jesus. And the image is a tool I use, like Christian music. Christian music involves sensory imagery.
HEINZE: Yes, when people think about Jesus, something has to come in your head. It’s almost like you’re a stone’s throw from Gnosticism where you say Jesus was just this invisible being and we can’t picture him, physically.
It’s theoretically ridiculous and literally impossible.
Final question is about suicide.
Let me bring dementia into the discussion about suicide.
We’re finding, more and more, that as Christians get dementia and their condition worsens, they often start doing things like punching others, forgetting who their wives are in the nursing home and finding a new paramour. Stuff like that.
But we don’t really hold them responsible because their mind is totally malfunctioning.
Let me ask you about suicide.
At the point of suicide, how much culpability does a person bear if their mind is totally malfunctioning?
MORELAND: There are two ways one can have moral culpability.
One is if, at the time you act, this was an action that you had the free power to refrain from doing, but you freely chose to commit the action, and you knew what you were doing.
You were in possession of your faculties and you had free choice. That’s clearly something for which you’re culpable.
There’s another kind of culpability and that is when you perform an action that’s wrong, but at the point that you do it, you’re not free to say “no” to it. Because it’s the result of an addiction or the result of a character that’s been formed over a long period of time that’s lost its freedom in a certain area.
Now can you be culpable for that? Well, yes — if when you started going down the pathway that led to the point where you no longer were free to resist in this area – you had the freedom to choose not to go down that pathway.
You’re responsible – not because you’re free at the moment you act – but because you were free to not get into the position where you couldn’t help yourself.
So there can be a culpability that is transferred from past freedom to the present action.
In cases of suicide, there are times when the person could have, earlier on, started making choices to get counseling and help so that they didn’t get to the point where they were so blown out in their brain chemistry that they couldn’t help themselves.
But I think a lot of suicides are the result, like dementia, of an action that is not the result of something you failed to do freely, early on.
Sometimes things happen to people, through no fault of their own, and it overwhelms them, and they’re triggered in a way that is not controllable.
I think sometimes PTSD occurs with such severity that it actually constrains their freedom, and their behavior is not something they’re freely responsible for.
Just like a person with dementia who starts treating people badly – it’s not an action they’re performing. It’s something that’s messed up with their brain.
I think, in those cases, there’s probably not culpability because there’s not an ability, through no fault of their own, to consider what they’re doing and realize it’s selfish.
It’s sad, but in those particular cases, I would say there’s not a moral culpability because they weren’t able to choose to do otherwise – for reasons not of their own choosing.
HEINZE: Thanks so much!
