Speaking the Unspeakable

A Johannine Vision for Religious Trauma Healing, Part 1

Did you know January is spiritual abuse awareness month? There are increasing numbers of helpers, providers, and organizations offering more hands-on, practical resources, and I am so thankful for that. I take a lot of my cues for religious trauma healing from the Gospel of John, which is more imaginative, symbolic, story-driven, and theological. But practical guides and imaginative visions are complementary. So, in honor of spiritual abuse awareness month, I wrote a three-part series looking at John through the lens of Diane Langberg’s three elements of trauma healing: talking, tears, and time.

I’m going to use those three as a guide to show similar means of healing from religious trauma in the Gospel of John. As Langberg is a trauma specialist, and already has many great books on healing from trauma, I don’t aim to say anything new or better.¹ Instead, my hope is to provide imaginative Scriptural grounding for the healing path. If Paul’s letters to Timothy and Titus are the Pastoral Epistles, John is the Pastoral Gospel. I trust you will see why by the end, and hope you will be encouraged to return again and again to John’s Gospel and the Pastor to whom he testifies.

As I am reading John in light of Langberg, one might complain that I am just finding what I’m looking for. However, these elements of talking, tears, and time are truly there in the text. Sometimes we just need the right glasses to see what’s there.

Here is Langberg’s summary:

“Recovery involves a reversal of the experience of trauma. Trauma brings silence because it feels like there are no words to really describe what happened. Trauma brings emotional darkness and aloneness because it feels like no one cares and no one could possibly understand. Trauma makes time stand still because we get so lost in what happened we cannot see forward and we lose hope. There are three main things that must occur to reverse this and bring about recovery. All three must happen. Just one of them will not be enough. The three things are: talking, tears, and time.”²

Photo by Nik Shuliahin 💛💙 on Unsplash

The Divine Word, Human Words, and Trauma

Jesus’ words are powerful, and they amount for about 75% of the Gospel of John. If you use a red-letter Bible, there is hardly a page that isn’t full of those red words. The obvious exceptions are 1) the prologue and John the Baptist’s ministry (1:1-37), and 2) when Jesus is crucified and buried (19:31-20:10). We don’t expect the Word of God to be speaking during those parts of the narrative. But ch. 9 is an unexpected variation from this centering of the words of the divine Word. In this narrative the Word of God becomes silent, as the man he healed is made to face religious wolves who throw him out and scatter him like the sheep of Ezekiel 34. When telling the good news about Jesus, why would John include a story where Jesus is largely absent?

One possible answer is that John’s audience lived that man’s story. Following scholars like J. Louis Martyn, Raymond Brown, and most recently Martinus de Boer³, I believe John’s repeated emphasis on religious persecution and fear of religious authorities suggests that the blind man epitomizes the experience of John’s audience. Demonstrating that position is a topic for another time.⁴ What’s important here is to imagine being a Jewish Christian suffering from the trauma of religious abuse and the loss of faith community (cf John 9:22; 12:42; 16:2).

The narrative of John 9 speaks to this dilemma, but indirectly—by example and symbol. I know of no other Gospel narrative that so features a character other than Jesus (once Jesus has been born, of course). After the man’s healing, Jesus is noticeably absent. Standing alone, without even his family to support him, he faces off with religious leaders who are obvious and explicit in their rejection of his voice: “You were born entirely in sin, and are you trying to teach us?” (9:34). But John the evangelist allows this man, an anonymous beggar from the margins of society, to stand in for Jesus and teach his audience about the Gospel’s central questions on the origin and identity of the Son of God (9:17, 25, 30-33).

Re-telling, from Victim to Survivor

As I’ve read, and re-read, and re-read this story, it looks more and more like a therapeutic trauma narrative of a survivor who has re-told his story many times. I imagine the story we have in John 9 is different from the first time that man told his story. Of course, that’s just a hunch that can’t be proved. But given that isolation is the heart of trauma, we might wonder if his initial storytelling resembled the fractured narratives of trauma survivors. For survivors further along the healing path, the story that was initially told in fear and trembling grows into a story told with safety, strength, and conviction. And that is the story we have in John 9.

We’ll get to the second element (tears) next week, but Langberg combines talking and tears and says this:

“Expressing emotions, finding words for them, is also a way of gaining mastery over them. In both talking and tears the victim is staring down the trauma as one might stare down an enemy and say, “I will speak of you; you will not silence me.”⁵

It’s almost as if Langberg, a psychologist and trauma specialist, is in sync with Bible scholar Colleen Conway, who writes that the healed man

“acts much like Jesus does in his encounters with the authorities [ie by presuming to teach them]. This may also explain the authorities’ final action. They drive him out of their presence because they cannot tolerate the truth which he has so forthrightly spoken—he reminds them too much of Jesus.”⁶

Conway puts it even more strongly: “the man effectively stands in for Jesus in combating the opposing dark forces in the Gospel.”⁷ It is thus less strange that the healed blind man is given the second most amount of spoken testimony to Jesus in the Fourth Gospel.⁸ Like the divine Word, this religious abuse survivor speaks, and his words are powerful.

I imagine it must have been powerfully healing for John’s spiritually traumatized audience to hear this story over and over again. It is the story of the triumphal voice of a religious trauma survivor, and shows what is possible when talking is combined with tears and time. Whether you care for survivors or bear the scars of religious wounds yourself (or both), I encourage you to read and re-read this story to see for yourself how the Spirit has testified to the power of talking and using your voice—using language and words to speak the unspeakable.

Quote from Diane Langberg

“Talking is about telling the truth. It connects the survivor to another person. It restores dignity because their story matters. It gives them choice because they can decide when to speak or be silent, and victims get to choose their own words. Again it is the reversal of what happened during the trauma. Injustice, violence, and abuse teach us lies. Such events suggest we are worthless and do not matter [cf John 9:28, 34]...Telling the trauma story gives a place of caring connection that helps the soul. Trauma recovery requires talking, and as the story is repeated, strength to say and grasp the truth grows” [cf John 9:25].⁹

Next week we will look at the story of Mary Magdalene to explore the role that tears play in healing from spiritual abuse.

Question

Do you have someone who will listen to your story and help you put the pieces together? If you sense the need for more professional help, I would love to speak with you. You can reach me via my counseling website, www.aaronjhann.com.

1. See her list of books here, including: When the Church Harms God’s People; Redeeming Power: Understanding Authority and Abuse in the Church; Suffering and the Heart of God: How Trauma Destroys and Christ Restores; In Our Lives First: Meditations for Counselors (Vol 1 and 2); On the Threshold of Hope.

2. Diane Langberg, Suffering and the Heart of God: How Trauma Destroys and Christ Restores (Greensboro: New Growth Press, 2015), 147.

3. See J. Louis Martyn, History and Theology in the Fourth Gospel, Revised and Expanded (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2003); Raymond Brown, The Community of the Beloved Disciple: The Life, Loves and Hates of an Individual Church in New Testament Times (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 2024); Martinus de Boer, John 1-6: A Critical and Exegetical Commentary (New York: T&T Clark, 2025).

4. An easy entry to this view is to read all of these verses sequentially: John 5:18; 7:1, 13, 30, 32, 44; 8:59; 9:22, 34, 35; 10:10, 12, 31, 39; 11:8, 53, 57; 12:42, 10-11; 15:20; 16:2, 32; 19:38; 20:19, 26.

5. Langberg, Suffering, 152.

6. Colleen Conway, Men and Women in the Fourth Gospel: Gender and Johannine Characterization (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 1997), 133.

7. Ibid., 135.

8. 185 words, with John the Baptist foremost at 264 words.

9. Langberg, Suffering, 148.