Since medication falls under dominion as an attempt to address the effects of the Fall, psychiatric drug use should seek to restore regular brain functioning. In cases of injury and underdevelopment, this could mean compensation for what is damaged or absent. In cases of uncontrollable excesses or deficiencies of neurotransmitters or hormones, it could mean stabilizing the brain’s regulatory functions.

Watch any daytime talk show with an expert medical guest or flip through Time magazine’s colorful diagrams, and you’ll see that the latest emphasis in neurology, the brain’s causal influence on human behavior, has leaked down to the popular level. Many of these experts consider the human being primarily as a physical creature whose actions, feelings, and thoughts for the most part simply manifest neurological activity. Undesirable feelings or behavior, then, should be addressed by ever-more-precise medical methods.   

Many Christians have correctly seen the incredible danger such an understanding poses to a biblical worldview, which involves realities beyond what can be seen, touched, or medicated. In other words, we know that a human being involves more than the body. But we also know that the body is a vital aspect of our being as designed by God. So we begin to answer this question—How should Christians think about psychiatric medication?—by considering at least two aspects of what it means for people to be made as the image of God.   

1. The Image of God as Union Between Soul and Body   

The immaterial soul does not function independently of the material body. The soul is not a “ghost in the machine” whose function is autonomous of corporeal mechanisms. God intentionally designed humankind to represent himself in the physical world—a psychosomatic unity comprising both a soul that reflects the immaterial God and also a body that grounds him in material creation.   

The keystone passage introducing the image of God is Genesis 1:26: “Then God said, ‘Let us make man in our image, after our likeness’.” Biblical scholar D. J. A. Clines has pointed out that this phrase is better translated, “Let us make man as our image” for grammatical reasons as well as for historical-contextual reasons. Man, as the image of God, is the physical representation of God’s presence in creation.   

This is the case in the New Testament as well. For instance, Paul’s use of soma demonstrates a complex anthropology where “all spiritual relations must be in and through his somatic existence (Rom. 6:12),” according to Clines. “The body is the coordinate of the spirit in that it provides the spirit its agency of expression.” So, amazingly, the brains God constructed out of dirt are the necessary vessel of the spirit he put in them. We could say that physical brain function and spiritual soul function are necessarily correlative in the present age. And, instructively, this is the ideal for all of eternity, since this psychosomatic unity does not disappear with the new creation. Rather, this unity will be rather brilliantly enhanced when people receive imperishable physical bodies like the one Jesus had (1 Cor 15, John 20-21).   

2. The Image of God and Dominion     

But man as psychosomatic unity is not the only aspect of the imago dei pertinent to our question of psychiatric medication. God gives all of us made in his image a function: to have dominion over the created order (Gen 1:26). We rule over “all things,” which implies the larger horizon of the entire animate world, having been crowned with glory and honor, only a “little lower than God” so as to have “all things under his feet” (Psalm 8).   

Thus, we rule over the created order, arranging it in ways that honor the Creator and promote his kingdom. We strategize, organize, invent, implement, and construct in an attempt to bring order to disorder. In this way, we reflect the character of God in the physical world (Gen 1:1-25). Human beings did not lose the dominion function at the Fall.     We are still responsible to rule over the world as God’s agents obedient to his commands. We show dominion over sin and its corruption primarily by preaching the gospel of the kingdom; but we also show dominion by mitigating sin’s physical effects on the created world. For instance, people can make a cursed ground yield more fruit by overcoming it with the latest farming technology.   

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