The Redemptive Function of Theological Anthropology for Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder in Biblical Counseling

Abstract

Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) is a psychological category that aims to describe the condition of a person who regularly experiences unwanted, intense, and distressing ruminations or obsessions that are temporarily alleviated but reinforced by compulsive responses. All counseling approaches to OCD are developed within an anthropological framework, conveyed in explicitly theological terms or otherwise. These approaches either identify people who experience OCD principally in relation to the God of Christian Scripture or in relation to something or someone else. In this dissertation, I approach OCD through the prism of Scripture’s anthropology. I present several of Scripture’s core anthropological themes and establish their direct relation to the experience of OCD. Specifically, OCD should be addressed through a set of anthropological perspectives derived from God’s design of human beings as psychosomatic unities, dependent and finite creatures, and beings capacitated with perception, conscience, and certainty. I establish this framework’s importance by demonstrating its explanatory depth for understanding the core dynamics of OCD, by applying aspects of this framework to assessing clinical, Christian, and biblical counseling approaches to OCD to determine their theological legitimacy, and by signifying how scriptural anthropology functions in helping to reinforce a more holistic biblical counseling methodology.