The Life of Bondage in the Light of Grace

Many Christians have responded readily to the social trend that views our persistent behavior problems as addictions. But serious theological questions remain:

How does addiction relate to original sin? How does an addict’s helplessness fit with our evangelical call for personal decision and responsibility? Is the addiction model merely another secular invention to avoid talking about sin? Or does it have its roots in Scripture? Is addiction primarily a spiritual problem? If so, should it be “, treated” spiritually? How does addiction relate to demon possession?

Institute editor David Neff recently talked with theologian and ethicist Richard Mouw in his office at Fuller Theological Seminary, Pasadena. Here is a summary of their conversation about sin, addiction, and sickness in the context of evangelical teaching and experience.

Evangelicals seem uncomfortable with applying the concepts of sickness and addiction to alcoholism or compulsive behaviors. And we are not sure how to relate these notions to sin. Where does that discomfort come from?

One key element is our strong emphasis on decision. We are volitionalist people. We stress the individual’s personal accountability before God for his or her sin, and we call that individual to decide to turn away from sin and receive what God has offered in the gospel. Consequently, any way of treating sinful patterns that would take the pressure off that decision makes us nervous.

But there is a confusion here. First, as an evangelical, I believe sin has its origin in the individual will. Chronologically, sin had its origin in the decision of our first parents to rebel against the living God and to try to be their own gods. In a sense, every one of us is held personally responsible—not that everyone comes in pure and then decides to become a sinner, but there is a profound and mysterious sense in which “in Adam’s fall we sinned all.”

The only way sin can be undone in our lives is by our turning away from our sin and turning to God. There is the hour of decision. We reject all other perspectives, even those labeled Christian, that take the pressure off that sense of personal accountability before God.

But we have often failed to recognize that sin is not necessarily sustained at every point by individual decision. That is clear in Romans 1: that we rebel against God and suppress the truth in unrighteousness, and that we are then “given over” to it—given over to evil thoughts, to the worship of false gods, to our lusts and our sinful desires. For me, that is the central biblical passage for understanding a “theology of addiction.” Elsewhere, Paul applies the term bondage to that “being given over.” What may start as a simple decision can be difficult to undo. It may take a lot of work. It may take people helping us in complicated and professional ways to undo the power of sin in our lives.

We have also been insensitive to the ways in which one person’s bondage can be passed on to another person without their necessarily having control over it: There are babies who come into the world screaming for heroin because of what their mothers did. There is a more complicated way in which tendencies to certain addictions—including certain sexual misbehaviors—seem to run in families. I’m convinced there is a genetic propensity to alcoholism. That makes us nervous, because we want to say that if a person is drinking too much, it’s her own fault; or if a person habitually commits adultery, that’s because of a decision he made.

There are also ways in which societies promote addictions. Our sin begins in our individual choices, but those choices get woven into certain societal stimuli. We are surrounded by the lure to materialism, to infidelity, to harmful substances, so that our behavior is not just completely dependent upon our wills. Its relation to our choices is much more mysterious than that.

The will is part of our spiritual and psychological selves. But many addictions are bodily. Are we being too simplistic in focusing on the will?

We often have a reductionist view of human problems, wanting to attribute complex disorders solely to spiritual difficulties.

Take alcohol addiction. It functions on at least three levels. There is chemical dependency—a physical thirst in the body crying out for that stuff. But it’s also a psychological addiction that has to do with compulsive behaviors and rescuing patterns. Third, it’s a spiritual addiction. It’s idolatry. The drunk who wants whiskey more than anything else, who says, “Let goods and kindred go, this mortal life also; I’m going to drink,” has put that at the center of his life. That is simply idolatrous. I’m convinced that you really cannot heal the alcoholic unless you deal with all three of those levels.

There is a strong tendency to say, “Well it’s all really chemical.” And there are people who want to see it as purely psychological, something you can deal with through behavior modification. And then there are those who offer simple-minded spiritual solutions: “Just trust in Jesus and it will all go away.” But we’ve got to deal with alcoholism on all three levels. Alcoholism is a multilevel and complicated disease because we’re multilevel and complicated persons.

Are these addictions in different proportions in different people?

You have to start the healing at a different point with different people, because one level of addiction may be more dominant in one person, and another level more dominant in someone else. There are people for whom the key is to go to the rescue mission and accept Jesus, although accepting Jesus means they will have to begin to address the other two levels—they have to be resocialized and go through a physical withdrawal period. For others, physical, “cold turkey” withdrawal works. And others must go to AA and become resocialized. I know a person who went to AA and was so hostile toward religion that for a long time he just couldn’t handle the “Higher Power” idea. But he became, as it were, addicted to the group. Only later could he begin to deal with the spiritual dimension.

Is there something in our theology or in Scripture that should have clued us in much earlier to that multilevel character of addictions?

Well, yes and no. When you go back to the rich discussions of the theologians in the Reformed, Lutheran, Anglican, and Wesleyan traditions, you find that every one of them gives a framework that can handle and even encourage this multidimensional understanding—and that puts certain kinds of nuances and limits on our thoroughgoing volitionalism (“The reason that guy is drunk right now is because he decided right now to be drunk”).

But alongside that theological richness is a tendency in pietism (and I identify with the pietist tradition) to insist on the centrality of the spiritual. Addiction to pornography is a spiritual issue; it’s idolatry. Alcoholism, too, is a form of rebellion before the face of God. But remember that rebellion can take the Romans 1 form of being “given over” to where it’s not enough to “just say no.” By emphasizing the spiritual, we’ve often gone from a spiritually centered view to a spiritually monistic view, from putting the spiritual at the center to reducing everything to spiritual decisions or spiritual relationships.

It is important to have the spiritual in the center without denying that it’s at the center of a rich and complex nature, and that our spirituality can manifest itself in a number of ways in the different dimensions of our nature.

It is easy for us to confuse spirituality with morality, to think that doing things the right way is what it means to be spiritual. Can you help us distinguish moralism from true spirituality?

It’s very difficult to distinguish the two biblically because the language of the New Testament isn’t always technically uniform. But if I had to give a simple account of the New Testament sense of what it means to be spiritual, it is to be living the whole of our lives in the service of God. The “spiritual” is to respond obediently to God in our wholeness, and the “fleshly” is to orient our lives around the creaturely, to direct our service toward something other than God. Thus doing mathematics could be “fleshly,” and eating can be “spiritual.” Those two general categories of the spirit and the flesh don’t refer to body and mind or body and soul. They have to do with our basic orientation. Unfortunately, we have had a dualism that identifies the spirit with the rational, the nonmaterial, and eternal; and then the fleshly with the material. Those categories are more platonic than biblical. The next step, of course, is to say that abstaining from something material is somehow more spiritual than learning to use that created good to the glory of God.

People in the temperance movement used to talk about “demon rum.” Is there a sense in which alcoholics are serving “the powers,” some spiritual beings? How does spiritual warfare enter into the healing of addiction?

I think we’re surrounded by spirits. Saint Andrew of Crete wrote a hymn, “Christian, Dost Thou See Them?” in which he talks about the spirits “goading,” “luring into sin.” The evil powers are very real in our lives (although we don’t want to fall into a simplistic “the Devil made me do it”). Nonetheless, my soul has an enemy, and that enemy wants to lure me into sin, and that enemy is very flexible. He will pick up on whatever point of weakness is mine. It could be spiritual pride; it could be professional pride; it could be a chemical or sexual weakness; or it could be food or political ideology or racial pride or gender pride. The Devil has got a lot to work with in luring us into sin. There is no question: one of the ways in which Satan lures people into sin is through dependency upon alcohol. But we must not treat that as a very special and unique kind of “possession” (as over against what possesses the academic who places professional advancement over all things, or the teenager who is obsessed with pleasing the crowd).

Some in the charismatic movement take this “demon” terminology just a little further. They would try to cast out the demon of alcoholism or the demon of sexual obsession.

If addiction is a manifestation of the spiritual bondage Paul talks about in Romans, then in some lives it may be necessary to have a dramatic release from that bondage. An exorcistic approach is probably okay, as long as we recognize there still may be chemical and social psychological dimensions that need to be dealt with. The persons who have been released spiritually from bondage, so that they now have given their lives over to God in the area of their addiction, may still have to work on the problem with a counselor, a nutritionist, a medical doctor, or a support group. There is an important role for spiritual warfare ministries that help people to be released from bondage—as long as the ministry doesn’t reduce everything to demon possession.

The scriptural words for salvation have overtones of health. Saving and healing, being whole and being saved—these are closely related concepts. The flip side, of course, is to look at sin as some kind of sickness.

This is where our language in dealing with addiction is not adequate. I think the notion of disease is helpfully applied to a phenomenon like alcoholism. But there is still something metaphorical about it.

It goes something like this: Take an unbeliever who later becomes a Christian—say C. S. Lewis or Chuck Colson. They will say, “Back in the days before I was a Christian, if you had asked me, I would have sincerely told you that I didn’t believe in God. I would sincerely tell you that I thought the gospel was a bunch of nonsense. That was my sincere, conscious belief. But after I came to believe, I saw that I had somehow been responsible for my unbelief, that there had been a kind of self-deception.”

I think something analogous happens in the lives of alcoholics, drug addicts, or sexual addicts. They are given over to their addictions and are caught up in them. They’re not thinking clearly and really don’t understand their situation. In that sense, a “disease” has taken over.

But in their recovery stage, they go back and say, “I was kidding myself about a lot of things. There was a lot of self-deception going on.”

So it’s not just like having cancer or a toothache. It feels the same, in that it takes over your life, it’s something that happens to you, and it isn’t merely the result of an immediate decision that you can easily reverse. Yet there is an element of responsibility: those who have these addictions, when they look back, acknowledge their responsibility.

People who do not like the disease notion want to emphasize the element of responsibility, but they don’t see how complicated that is. And people who want to go completely with a disease model want to emphasize the sense in which people are legitimately taken over by their condition—but often without acknowledging the responsibility that is present. We are mysterious beings.

Why do some people cling so tenaciously to the idea that their addiction is a disease?

We’ve got to listen carefully to the ways in which alcoholics, for example, celebrate alcoholism as a disease. I’ve heard it said many times: “I thought my relationship to booze was a deep, dark, unique thing; that I was the weirdest person on the face of the Earth; and that if anybody ever knew the compulsions that I felt inside they would see that I was a despicable creature. And then I found out there are thousands and thousands of people who have exactly the same experience. And so it’s a common syndrome—we have a sickness together.”

These are comforting words, saying essentially there is help, and that this pain is not unique, it has a name. And in calling it by name, you can join a group of people with a common struggle.

This idea of a shared affliction is especially helpful in the area of sexuality. While we have offered simple-minded solutions, there have been people living in terror before their own sexual energies and impulses. I had a minister say to me once, “If my sexual laundry were hung out to dry, there would be nothing I have done that would have been a matter of serious discipline in my church. But, oh, I would be so ashamed; I would be so ashamed.”

And we all would; I would be, too. It is freeing to bring that stuff out in the open with other people because we are going to find out these are not unique experiences—that I am not the only despicable person on the face of the Earth. And so there is something socializing about the disease model. It brings people into common cause, and in spite of the fear that the disease model is going to take away a sense of responsibility, it actually encourages a sense of responsibility because it says, There are more people just like me, and I can get help.

But (especially in the sexual arena) aren’t we afraid to acknowledge how common some things are, because people are going to come to believe those practices must be okay?

I suppose so. But we must see that the reason we have to deal with sin is that it grieves the heart of God and ultimately disrupts the good thing that God has planned for us in our relationships. That is true of spiritual pride; it is true of addictions to physical substances and to sexual behaviors.

Somebody says, Racism is so pervasive that we’re never going to get rid of it. But it grieves the heart of God, and it destroys people who are created as imagers of the God and Father of Jesus Christ. That’s why we have to get rid of it. And the argument that somehow the more common it is, the less we’ll feel the need to deal with it is bad theology.

A prominent psychologist told me that the most responsible thing an addict can do is to say, I’m not able to respond; I admit I’m helpless.

Yes, that is the powerlessness-over-alcohol theme. If you take the new sexual addiction groups, they all begin with that first step of AA or some variation about powerlessness—that I must first realize this is something that’s taken over my life and I’m powerless.

That has direct parallel in our evangelical theology: “Nothing in my hand I bring … helpless come to thee for grace.” Evangelicalism is a theology of powerlessness, a theology of helplessness. We haven’t always been very consistent in applying it, but those of us who sat through all the altar calls are no strangers to the admonition that if we think we can do something about our basic brokenness, then we’re on the wrong track.

Spurgeon once said that if he told people to crawl back and forth from here to Rome on their hands and knees they would want to do it; but the hardest advice to take is that there is nothing you can do. That is what the disease and addiction models are picking up on. At the worst they are secularizing our doctrine of grace. But at best they are expanding, extending the notion of grace to areas we have long ignored. It is a move toward the gospel rather than away from it.

How much of our thinking about addiction really comes from our Christian tradition? And how much comes from the therapeutic society?

It’s so hard to say, because we often operate with very simple dichotomies between the secular and the sacred. But actually, the therapeuticmovement doesn’t just come from the therapeutic movement. The gospel sowed ideas in the soil of the culture and many of those submerged ideas have re-emerged in a secular way. So rather than simply saying we’re borrowing ideas from a therapeutic society, we should recognize that the therapeutic society has already adapted and transformed ideas that were originally overtly Christian ideas.

So notions of powerlessness and grace have been germinating in the soil of the secular society and have come back in the form of self-help groups for various kinds of addictions?

Right. To take an analogy, the gospel planted the notion of the dignity of man and woman in the culture, and secular feminism is a secular harvest of that idea. There is not a lot to be gained by trying to evaluate an idea by tracing it to its alleged source in secular thought. The real question is this: Is this admittedly therapeutic discussion of the addiction and disease models an occasion in which we need to go back to our theology and the Scriptures to see whether there are notions there that need to be revitalized in our own lives? Are there long-ignored emphases, complexities to our beings, to Satan’s wiles, and to God’s purposes for us?

We must never just pick up trends from secular culture, but we must listen to the questions in secular culture and go to the Word. And very often we find that the Word says, “This is the occasion for you to open up something that has been there all along.” Then we can reclaim these truths and teach them in their biblically rooted form.

Is there a theological danger in the focus on healing addictions in that people will confuse justification and sanctification—will fail to distinguish between that which saves us and that which helps us to be better people?

I think there is a real danger there. As a sinner saved by grace, I believe I have been justified. My salvation has been purchased and guaranteed by Christ, and when he shall appear I shall be like him. That’s a marvelous hope.

But at the same time that I claim that as my hope, I’ve got to cultivate the humility of knowing that I’m still a broken person living in the country of the broken and that God’s sanctifying ways in my life are often seriously drawn out. You know, even the holiness people and the Pentecostals have articulated that in the more sensitive expressions of their theology. Any theology that reflects on the complexities of God’s working in our lives as revealed in Scripture has to come back to the emphasis for which “pilgrimage” and “journey” are exciting metaphors that express the tension between humility and hope. We have the hope. But we must now have also the humility to know that we have not yet arrived.

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