Introduction

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.

All of these sources believe that PMA can lead to better

health and prosperity.

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

Christian Circles: Rev. Percy Dearmer

Shocked into investigating the healing issue due to the sudden rise of the Christian Science Church Saw the heretical nature of the Christian Science Church and cautioned gentleness in dealing with its believers Understood that the Mind Cure and Christian Science groups were exaggerating the truth Also understood that the cause of so many defections by Christians to Christian Science was the traditional Churchs own absence of healing power Understood the concept of heresy as rst hypothesis

Christian Circles: Rev. Percy Dearmer

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

Secular teaching: Often associated with the human potential

movement or mind science

Sometimes taking on an occult avor

PMA in the Bible

Tozer explained it this way: To be right, we must think right. The Bible teaches a concept of positive mental attitude, but it
is not the same as the secular concept, even though they may appear similar.

Examples of positive thinking in the Bible: Proverbs 23:7a Romans 8:5-6 Proverbs 17:22 Philippians 4:8

Contemporary Faith Teaching

Norman Vincent Peales book, The Power of Positive Thinking Robert Schullers concept of possibility thinking, which he relates to the exercise of faith. Kenneth Hagen teaches, What we believe is a result of our thinking. If we think wrong we will believe wrong.

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.

Criticism of Contemporary Faith Teachings

Hunt and McMahon warn of PMA (Positive Mental Attitude) being paganism in Christian dress. McConnell considers the concepts as a type of charismatic humanism.

Classic Faith Teaching: A Spiritual State of Mind

Contrary to the claims of contemporary faith critics, the
concept of a positive mental attitudes found throughout the writings of deeper life devotional writers. 1. 1651-1715 Fenelon was teaching the concept. 2. Thomas C. Upham was inuenced by Fenelon - The Life of Faith

Classic Faith Teaching: A Spiritual State of Mind

Mller
1. I saw more clearly than ever that the rst great and primary business to which I ought to attend every day was to have my soul happy in the Lord. 2. He accomplished this by establishing a habit of walking and meditation on the Word of God before breakfast each morning. 3. Mller claimed this practice was also benecial to their own health.

Classic Faith Teaching: A Spiritual State of Mind

Mller
4. Instead of being the anxious, careworn man many persons think me to be, I have no anxieties and no cares at all. Faith in God leads me to roll all my burdens upon Him. 5. One of his biographers, Roger Steer, noted, Mllers longevity (he died when he was ninety-two) surely conrms his insistence that he was not worn down with worry. 6. Spurgeon called it the effectual medicine of the joy of the Lord

Classic Faith Teaching: A Spiritual State of Mind

Simpson with regard to sickness and healing:
A ash of ill temper, a cloud of despondency, an impure thought or desire can poison your blood, iname your tissues, disturb your nerves and interrupt the whole process of Gods life in your body! On the other hand, the spirit of joy, freedom from anxious care and worry, a generous and loving heart, the sedative of peace, the uplifting inuence of hope and condence- these are better than pills, stimulants and sedatives, and the very nature of things will exercise the most benign inuence over your physical functions, making it true in a literal as well as spiritual sense, that the Joy of the Lord is your strength.

Classic Faith Teaching: A Spiritual State of Mind

Simpson with regard to sickness and healing: Joy is the great restorer and healer. Gladness of spirit will bring health to the bones and vitality to the nerves when all other tonics fail, and all other sedatives cease to quiet. Sick one, begin to rejoice in the Lord and your bones will ourish like an herb, and your cheeks will glow with the bloom of health and freshness... Joy is a balm and a healing; and if you will but rejoice, God will give power.

Classic Faith Teaching: A Spiritual State of Mind

S.D. Gordon

Right mental attitude in relation to health and healing, rather

than a positive mental attitude: thinking on Christ, not on circumstances. unquestioningly the result already assured. radically affect your body.

The objective mind lays hold of Christs promises and accepts Also, The mental attitude [thinking on Christ] will vitally and

Classic Faith Teaching: A Spiritual State of Mind

Bosworth also used Gordons term right mental attitude in his book, Christ the Healer, to describe a criterion for healing. Hudson Taylor advocated the mind dwelling on Christ Thus the classic faith writers taught that a positive mental attitude can affect ones health and outcome of life. However, it is not by ones own mental effort, but by letting ones thoughts dwell on Jesus and His Word.

Classic Faith Teaching: An Atmosphere of Faith

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

Spurgeon stated, Worry kills, but condence in God is

like healing medicine.

F.B. Meyer, a friend of Spurgeon, avowed that negative

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.

Reections and Conclusions

The Legitimacy of Biblical PMA

Biblical PMA is therefore not mind over matter, but

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.

Reections and Conclusions

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)

Reections and Conclusions

Dangers in Mystical Use of Visualization and Imagination

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.

Reections and Conclusions

Dangers in Mystical Use of Visualization and Imagination

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.

Reections and Conclusions

Dangers in Mystical Use of Visualization and Imagination

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.

Final Conclusions 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.

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.