Is a person incompetent if they have a predilection for mental illness? What about severe mental illness? What about suicidal ideation?
I often wonder if the prophets of the Old Testament were transported into modern day, whether they would be able to carry out the carry out there calling without being locked up in a psychiatric institution. The prophets claimed to hear supernaturally from God, see visions of future events, and proclaimed the certain doom of their countrymen. Such things are beyond faux pas in the modern world. Such things are not only frowned upon (as they were in their day) but they are considered the signature of madness, or at least ill health.
There are ICD–10 and DSM-V codes and diagnostic criteria for all of the prophets did and said. One study said the following about Abraham,
Abraham’s auditory and visual perceptual experiences and behaviors could be understood as auditory hallucinations (AH), visual hallucinations (VH), delusions with religious content, and paranoid-type (schizophrenia subtype) thought content…
https://neuro.psychiatryonline.org/doi/full/10.1176/appi.neuropsych.11090214
My point in bringing this material into the conversation is that modern and postmodern mankind no longer has room for a prophet. The crater left by the demythologizing all cause-and-effect in the present day has removed people’s ability to think in the way the ancients did. There is no room for legitimate interaction with God on the level of Jeremiah, Isaiah, Ezekiel, and for that matter Jesus Christ and John the Baptist.
In addition, while I dismiss the notion that the prophets were compelled by a psychiatric disorder in the proclamation of their message, it appears to be a very real possibility that many of them did have deep psychiatric wounds from the great difficulty of their calling. Moses, Elijah, Jeremiah, Jesus, and Paul of Tarsus, each indicate either outright suicidal ideation, or stress that causes despair of life itself.
It is easy to see why: the mission of such prophets was to perceive the events of the world exactly as the Creator of mankind does. He or she was to exist by God living their life, and as God had complete liberty to speak through their mouth. Not only that, but like an ancient herald announcing the decree of a king, to resist a prophet was to commit treason against God, the King.
Such power and responsibility came with equal measure of burden. Most prophets found that their message was not received graciously, sometimes it was ignored entirely, and sometimes enraged the hearers so that the prophet was murdered.
The prophets represented a King with no weakness, a King with no imperfections, and thus an unmitigated, nonnegotiable expectation of complete obedience to the word of the prophet was met by corrupt and pitiful subjects of the King.
The messages of the prophets often escalated to almost inconceivable declarations of destruction because of such obstinance. With great inevitability, those whose job it was to represent God in this way, bore the burden of extreme wear and tear, extreme sorrow, extreme exhaustion.
Given the nature of the calling of a prophet, and the despair it often induced, would society consider such a representatives of God as mentally incompetent? As people that needed to be conserved by courts and forcibly administered medication? As persons to lock away, ignore, or zombify with injections, electro-convulsive-therapy (ECT), and lobotomies?
I believe the direction society has gone with both compulsory secularization and psychologizing all spirituality would enforce such an outcome should there appear another man or woman of God with the Word of YHWH, unless God himself for the intervened.
May the Lord Jesus return soon so that not only prophets, but Christians are not treated in such a manner.
SDG. Maranatha.
Come Lord Jesus.