Documenti di Didattica
Documenti di Professioni
Documenti di Cultura
Positive Mental Attitude (PMA) can be found: Both in Christian circles & secular circles including: Medical schools Cults like mind science and Christian Science The occult that moved into western esotericism
like New Thought and Theosophy.
Christian Circles
From the Holiness/Keswick/Higher Movements: Joe McIntyre, E.W. Kenyon Dr. Paul King, Only Believe From the Faith-Idealist Christian Movement: Rev. Percy Dearmer, Anglican Priest (1867-1936) Rev. John Banks, Anglican Priest, 1929 wrote - Redemption of the Body and Manual of Christian Healing Rev. Alfred Price, Episcopal Rev. Robert B. H. Bell, Episcopal Priest Glen Clark Agnes Sanford
A religion that ignores the physical effects of the Spirit health, that is to say and the spiritual element of healing is clearly not commensurate with the Christianity of Christ. It is defective... It is beyond controversy that our Lord devoted a great deal of his ministry to healing the sick, that he sent forth his rst disciples to carry out the same two-fold mission of preaching and healing... Our duty is to take him as our pattern and to be imitators of him.
Secular Circles
Dr. Herbert Benson, Biology of Belief Dr. Harold Koenig, The Healing Connection: The Relationship Between Faith and Healing
Examples of positive thinking in the Bible: Proverbs 23:7a Romans 8:5-6 Proverbs 17:22 Philippians 4:8
2 Corinthians 10:4-5
Capps, the converse is true (Believe in good and good will come. Believe in evil, and it will empower satan.) The thing you fear will come upon you.
The objective mind lays hold of Christs promises and accepts Also, The mental attitude [thinking on Christ] will vitally and
Faith Homes developed by Blumhart, Trudel, Simpson, Montgomery were intended to provide a positive atmosphere of faith in which a person could receive healing, not unlike todays retreat centers. More than thirty faith homes had been established in the latter part of the nineteenth century. Andrew Murray was healed after spending three weeks at Baxters Bethshan Home.
Classic Faith Teaching: Avoiding Negative Attitudes of Fear, Doubt, and Anxiety Classic faith leaders believed that negative attitudes may
result in negative effects.
Fenelton warned about the consequences of the negative mind. Hannah Whitall Smith expanded upon Feneltons thoughts: Our mental conditions are far more powerful to affect material things than we know, and I believe that there is here a secret of enormous power, if human beings once understood it.
Classic Faith Teaching: Avoiding Negative Attitudes of Fear, Doubt, and Anxiety
thinking can even cause illness: The healthiest people do not think about their health; the weak induce disease by morbid introspection.
Classic Faith Teaching: Avoiding Negative Attitudes of Fear, Doubt, and Anxiety
Simpson
Dont expect to have a spell of weariness and reaction, but rather, just go calmly forward... expecting him to give you the necessary strength to carry you through. Worry, fear, distrust, care -- all are poisonous! Fear is dangerous. It turns into fact the things we fear. It creates the evil, just as faith creates the good. What I feared has come upon me (Job 3:25), is the solemn warning of Job. Let us therefore be afraid of our fears lest they should become our worst foes. The remedy for fear is faith and love.
Classic Faith Teaching: Avoiding Negative Attitudes of Fear, Doubt, and Anxiety
S.D. Gordon and Carter also view this scripture (Job 3:25) as a principle of the consequences. Unlike some contemporary faith preachers that would castigate Poor Old Job for his lack of faith, however, they did not view Job so negatively. Carter put the correct perspective and balance into the teaching when he wrote Job, although perfect in heart, was not mature, and God wanted him to grow.
Christ over mind and matter. On the other hand, I would share with Hunt and McMahon their concern for humanistic or New Age types of thinking creeping into Christian belief on PMA.
King would agree with Hunt and McMahon; William De Arteaga would not (cf. Forging a Renewed Hebraic and Pauline Christianity forthcoming book 2012) Visualization and imagination, and dreams and visions are part of the long Christian mystical tradition within the history of Christianity. (Evelyn Underhill, Mysticism: A Study in Nature and Development of Spiritual Consciousness: Christian Classic Ethereal Library, 1911)
I would agree with Hunt and McMahon, yet I do also acknowledge that some legitimate biblical forms of the techniques have been practiced throughout church history, particularly among the mystics. Hunt is logically and theologically inconsistent here for his arguments against all mysticism, yet he himself has been inuenced by writers who have been deeply inuenced by the mystics: John Calvin, William Law, and classic faith leaders such as Murray, Chambers, and Tozer.
Foster states against creating a visualization and conjuring something in the imagination: Quite the opposite... The ideas, the pictures, the words are of no avail unless they proceed for the Holy Spirit. Tozer does warn (as Foster also does) against overdependency upon or misuse of the imagination. However, Hunt does not understand Tozer in context.
Tozer also wrote positively about the value of a sanctied imagination... The value of the cleansed imagination in the sphere of religion lies in its power to perceive in natural things shadows of things spiritual... A puried and Spirit-controlled imagination is, however, quite another things, and it is this I have in mind here. I long to see the imagination released from its prison and given to its proper place among the sons of the new creation. What I am trying to describe here is the sacred gift of seeing, the ability to peer beyond the veil and gaze with astonished wonder upon the beauties and mysteries of things holy and eternal.
Final Conclusions
Hunts concerns are valid to a small degree. However, a counterfeit presupposes the genuine. Hunt does not appear to acknowledge the genuine. Additionally, though McConnell has legitimate questions about what contemporary faith leaders may teach about PMA, his assertion that the concept of a positive or a negative mindset comes from the metaphysical cults has been shown by reference to classic evangelical faith teaching to be erroneous.
about what contemporary faith leaders may teach about PMA, his assertion that the concept of a positive or a negative mindset comes from the metaphysical cults has been shown by reference to classic evangelical faith teaching to be erroneous.
Final Conclusions
He also doesnt seem to understand that at the beginning of the experimentation with healing that involved a Faith Idealism in the 19th century there were two streams, one that stayed or ended in biblical orthodoxy, and the other left biblical orthodoxy and became known as New Thought. This led to occultic or irregular views of Christianity. The problem with our language is that Faith Idealism is itself the biblical view of reality rather than deistic or atheistic materialist view. De Arteaga writes of Christian New Thought and Gnostic New Thought with Christian Science being an extreme form and Unity being a much less form of the Gnostic heresy.
Final Conclusions
Though the Christians who were committed to Faith Idealism that are referred to as Christian New Thought did not submit to leaving the orthodox Christian faith, they are distinguished from others who at the same time or actually earlier developed a Faith-Idealism due to their inuence in the Holiness movement and its understanding of confession-possession that had led to salvation and to sanctication, and now could lead to healing because it is all in the cross. The Christian New Thought were Christians who were attracted to the healing they saw in the New Thought movement, discerned the theological errors and worked through them, but found healing a reality.
Final Conclusions The heresy of Gnostic New Thought, and especially Christian
Science, De Arteaga believes God used to stir the Church to discover the truth it had lost due to its Cessationist heresy it had been under for over 400 years at the time.
Final Conclusions
Faith critics should be careful not to brand everything that has some similarities to cultic and heretical teaching as actually originating in cultic ideas. On the other hand, contemporary faith teachers need to be careful that their language, thought, and practice regarding PMA do not cross the line into cultic of heretical concepts, but stay within the bounds of orthodoxy and orthopraxy.
Final Conclusions However, we must come to realize that the modern day
saduceeism of theological liberalism, and modern day phariseeism of cessationism are both heretical in themselves for they too deny the faith that was once for all given to the saints. It does so by denying the ministry and working of the Holy Spirit, ignoring many passages of Jesus and Paul that is incumbent for biblical discipleship, especially the great commission, and ignores the centrality of the teaching regarding the Kingdom of God as now and not yet, putting off the Kingdom completely into the Millenium.