Wellness Cannot Save You

How Wellness and Mental Health can be confused with the Gospel

Photo by Kaylee Garrett on Unsplash

I recently had the treat of listening to my friend and fellow Keller Center fellow

John Starke

give a talk in which he mentioned that contemporary people tend to view wellness as a form of salvation or an alternative gospel. I immediately felt convicted because in so many of my newsletters I have stressed the importance of mental health and healing. I hope I have always done so with the greatest good of God in mind, but I understood John’s point. There is a general cultural drive to see wellness as the Greatest Good, as the Good Life, as our telos. And for all my writing about the importance of pursuing recovery and healing in our lives, I think it’s even more important that we relativize that goal in relation to our need for Christ. The risk is that we come to see our physical or mental health healing as an ultimate goal which, if we can only reach it, will bring us to a place of shalom and wholeness and peace before God. And I fear that if we don’t rightly order our pursuit of healing, we will put a burden on health which it cannot bear. Our health will never satisfy our longings and will make us bitter and anxious for more cures, more treatments, more diagnoses to bring us closer to the elusive wellness. It is only when we see the pursuit of and union with Christ as our telos and health as a good that can be rightly ordered toward that end that we have the freedom to pursue health without making it a false idol.

Wellness as an idol is easy to worship, I think, because no one wants to feel bad. And the dream of being well, being well-adjusted, being cured, being restored, or being healed is so desirable. You wake up sore, anxious, depressed, aching, in pain, or whatever the problem may be, and you think to yourself, “If I could only get over this problem, my life would be good.” And in some tangible ways, that’s true. Your quality of life would improve. But the good you imagine comes to be more than those quality of life improvements over time. It’s more than about dealing with diagnosable ailments; wellness is actually about optimizing the mind and body for contemporary life. Yoga, meditation, breathing exercises, supplements, Andrew Huberman, and so on. The quest is a quest of technique. And you feel a little anxious if you are falling behind on the project of fixing yourself into wellness.

Of course a major component of that is mental health. I was reading an article recently were the CEO of Replika, a AI Chatbot company, bragged about seeing a therapist three hours a week. And while I’m certain that some people need that level of care for medical reasons, this CEO seemed to be doing it out of pleasure. She described herself affectionately as a “therapy junkie.” I do worry that for some individuals therapy has become a kind of hobby, a self-absorbed hobby. There’s a desperation here to hunt for every inch of maladjusted parts of yourself so that they can be reintegrated into the greater whole. While that may sound noble, it’s actually quixotic, particularly the desperation. No one is completely mentally whole in this life. We’re all fallen. That is the nature of things. And whether we can afford to see a therapist three times a week, or four, or five will not ultimately save us from that fallenness.

The appeal to wellness is the allusive dream that one day you may be holistically well enough to live at perfect peace with the universe. It is a desire for shalom. And people will spend billions of dollars a year chasing after it. But as I said earlier, health cannot bear the burden of godhead. It is insufficient. It will come crashing down on us.

If you look to your mental wellbeing for eternal hope, then you will grow bitter and frustrated as treatments fail to bring you to the place of serenity. They always fall just a little bit short. When your recovery slows down, when you have a lapse or a relapse, when you struggle, it won’t just be a difficult part of your mental health journey, it will be an existential crisis. Because your hope will be tied to your mental health. And the same is true for your physical health.

Ultimately, we must come to see our health as a genuine good, but one that is subservient to the greatest good, God. Our health glorifies God and blesses our neighbor, and so we should take care of ourselves. We are God’s good creation, so we have a duty to care for that creation (Ephesians 2:10). Our bodies are a temple of the Holy Spirit, so we have a duty to care for that temple (1 Corinthians 6:19). We are called to love ourselves as God first loved us, so that love should manifest in care for ourselves (1 John 4:19). Working toward your healing whether mental or physical, praying and striving for it, is good. Living a temperate life is good. But all of those “goods” serve one greater good, and that is knowing and loving and glorifying God.

What good does it do you to be “well-adjusted” while you wallow in pornography or greed? What good does it do you to be physically fit while you puff yourself up with vanity, pride, and elitism? What good does it do you to have low anxiety, great breath control, and mental balance if your heart is cold to Christ and your neighbor?

None.

When you suffer mentally or physically, you can become so fixated on recovery that it becomes your standard for the Good Life. And once it becomes your Good Life, it can take over your horizon. It’s what you dream about, think about, desire, and work toward. While it is proper and good to desire recovery, it is also true that when you recover, you will still be a sinner in need of a Savior, just as you are now. It will still be true that the greatest need you have is for one to save you from your sins.

So it’s worth asking, what vision of the Good Life have you allowed yourself to adopt? Does it include recovery or healing, or is it solely defined by those things? Does it include temperate living, or is it defined by Wellness? Does it have, at its core, our union with Christ and the delight that gives us? Or does it only offer you more ways of self-improving yourself to death?