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Blame it on the Brain - Distinguishing Chemical Imbalances, Brain Disorders and Disobedience

Blame it on the Brain
Distinguishing Chemical Imbalances, Brain Disorders and Disobedience.
By Edward T. Welch
P&R Publishing, New Jersey. £8.95

I welcome this book, and wish it were a better one. It is heartening that any Christian book is willing to try and make us think of the role of the brain, as opposed to the mind, the soul or the spirit in the problems that increasingly confront Christians. I therefore read it avidly, with high hopes that Christians who read it might give up the view that their depression was due to sin or some fault of theirs like lack of faith. I give it one or two cheers instead of three.
The author is a counsellor in Glenside Pennsylvania who thanks his students at Westminster Theological Seminary. He says he worked in research in brain disease in the 1970s and speaks of his 'rudimentary understanding of brain functioning being useful.'
The meat of the book is first about dementia, starting with President Reagan's Alzheimer's disease and, perhaps surprisingly, head injury. For these two topics his sub-heading is 'The brain did it.' Then comes depression - inadequately dealt with, under the heading of 'Maybe the brain did it'. He deals with attention deficit disorder (ADD) and the use of Ritalin, and mentions briefly other problems such as schizophrenia. His last section, subtitled 'The brain didn't do it'' covers homosexuality and alcoholism.
It is his long preamble about mind-body questions that I found least helpful and the four practical principles that follow. The first: 'the brain cannot make a person sin or keep a person from following Jesus in faith and obedience' seems woefully wrong. Brain disease can make you do things that are wrong, of which you are not aware: dementia or even severe states of mental confusion that used to be called delirium, provide clear examples. Another principle is equally doubtful: 'sinful hearts can lead to physical illness; upright hearts can lead to health.' Perhaps he should think more of the afflictions of the righteous, and not suggest-what so many anxious Christians today are led to believe - that their sin is being punished by illness.
The author's aim is a good one: to help us to develop some basic knowledge of the importance of the brain and other physical factors in making us ill. He gets befuddled by baggage from elsewhere in his belief system. Let me take but one example, because it is perhaps the most prevalent: the Christian suffering from depressive illness. It is a fact that such an illness may follow flu, or something like glandular fever, and that whatever the events that start the depressive illness, we should not neglect to treat the physical aspects. They may be hormonal, they may be the problems in brain neurochemistry which will respond to anti-depressants. The fact is that many Christians who would benefit from diagnosis and understanding, followed by treatment and continuing care, are not helped to find the expert care they need.
If this book is read with discernment, it may help Christians see the role of all other physical causes of illness, which by God's common grace can now be treated. Some of the other excellent books he recommends are mentioned in the author's footnotes.

Gaius Davies