Mirabile Dictu

Faith is apparently required to perform miracles. Jesus says, “if you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there’ and it will move. Nothing will be impossible for you.” Effecting a miraculous cure, he says, “your faith has healed you.” Elsewhere, he says he can do no miracles, because of the general lack of faith in those villages.

This seems to be backwards, doesn’t it? People more commonly look to miracles as proofs of faith. The New Testament pretty clearly says the opposite, that you must have faith in the first place or you’ll never see them.

Nor can this New Testament claim be covered by the common concept of “faith healing”—when what is meant is essentially the “placebo effect.” For we are not speaking only of healing here, but also of walking on water and moving mountains. No placebo effect does that.

So how does this matter of miracles requiring faith work?

Well, here’s my thought. Just imagine you were a disbeliever in all things supernatural. Or better, since I believe this is essentially an intellectually impossible position, imagine you had decided to shut yourself off from God and the spiritual realm and any consideration of them. And suddenly, before your eyes, something impossible happened. A mountain moved. How would you feel?

Very threatened; I’ll warrant. Very frightened. Quite likely, it would drive you mad.

I say this, because I have myself seen people go mad in similar, but relatively trivial, circumstances: as a result of culture shock, or because assumptions about their marriage or relationships or family that they had long held proved untrue. When merely the social organization around them stopped making sense to them. How much more so if the tumult includes the physical world: “hallucinations,” indeed.

And so, a merciful God will not do this. If you do not have faith, he is not going to perform any great miracles for you, for your protection. Even if you ask for them, and sincerely want them, he cannot.

Realizing this suggests another interesting possibility, regarding another New Testament puzzle: what happened to all those demons that possessed people in the Bible and in the New Testament? Have they all disappeared since then? Logically, mustn’t we still have demonic possessions happening today?

It is possible, mind, to believe they are now many fewer then they were then—thanks to the widespread practice of baptism and faith in Christianity, which hold them at bay. But then, these practices are now in decline. It should follow that we get an upsurge in demonic possessions, and this should show up somewhere…

Interestingly enough, it does. The incidence of “mental illness” has risen dramatically since the 1960s—since just about the time our focus on Christianity clearly began to decline.

But of course. If you accept the Bible as true, you must accept not just the existence of God, but also of both angels and demons. Demons will not share God’s compunctions about performing supernatural acts when the human supplicant is not prepared for them. Speak of the devil, and he will appear. Turn from God, and you lose protection against him.

Hence, surely, the traditional legend of the “sorcerer’s apprentice.” Hence the warnings against dabbling in magic. All hell really could break loose.

And hence the possibility that much of what we call “mental illness” is, more or less as the New Testament says—indeed, as many sufferers themselves insist--a demonic possession. It is a spiritual (psychic) “illness,” and so how would it not have a spiritual cause?

It could be the common result of becoming suddenly, dramatically aware of the reality of the supernatural, and lacking the conceptual framework to handle this knowledge. This could be caused by taking hallucinogenic drugs. It could be caused by culture shock, or a shock in one’s personal life--hysteria. Or, especially in severe cases, it could be caused by a demon, a mischievous or hostile spiritual being.

If so, of course, traditional psychotherapy is not going to help—as, indeed, it does not, for the “severely” mentally ill. The therapist is going to insist that the visions and voices and moving mountains are purely imaginary and “nonexistent”—and they are not, and the “patient” in his heart and his mind knows perfectly well they are not. In such a case, talking therapy will be purely counter-productive: striving mightily to hold the sufferer back from the fundamental restructuring of his notion of reality that he needs to perform. Interesting that all severe forms of “mental illness” are now “incurable”—while they clearly were not in the New Testament.

The bottom line is this: the modern techniques, objectively speaking, do not work. Those in the New Testament apparently did. Moreover, similar shamanic approaches, which center on casting out unwanted spirits, still do seem to work in cultures like Korea, India, or Sri Lanka today.

Time for some real “faith healing,” I’d say.