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Mac Nutt's Healing Explores The Meaning And Essay

Mac Nutt's Healing explores the meaning and messages behind the author' own struggles with fait, healing, and personal issues. It comes from a Christian perspective and is broken up into four basic parts. The first part is devoted to the importance and meaning of Healing Ministries and helps the reader identify the common misconceptions of the practice as well as outlines the basic structure of the movement. This part of the book is an attempt to cast the Healing Movement as an exclusively Christian path, that is to say that MacNutt believes that true healing can only come through Christ. As author, MacNutt has certainly dealt with his fair share of personal struggles with Christian issues like sexual abuse and addictions. In this way, he comes across as relatively convincing as he guides the reader through the ins and outs of the Healing Ministries. As far as a critique goes, MacNutt has had off and on issues with homosexuality, which he argues can be healed through faith in God and through his Healing Ministries. From a scientific perspective, or a humanist perspective, this is one of MacNutt's fallacies, the claim that one can be healed from this "affliction." In his own words, he writes that homosexuality and the words of the Bible are irreconcilable, and that through Christ, one can become healed (MacNutt, 1999). This notion is first explored in the first part of the book, and MacNutt's Healing is the first in his series of books that explains how to do so. However, the notion that homosexuality is derived from evil, and can be cured through demonic repossession and exorcism, is something that MacNutt has exclusively claimed within his book.

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This is another point in MacNutt's argument where religion and psychology become equally important. Here, in the argument against homosexuality ad abuse, MacNutt makes the assertion that Healing Ministries do not always work, and that the fait of the person wishing to be healed may not prevail against their diseases and personal shortcomings. Certainly no counseling or healing program can have a 100% success rte, but MacNutt's very argument about the ability to be healed through faith in Jesus Christ has a convenient loophole in the own person's personal ability to adhere to the tenets of Christianity and the Healing Ministries. MacNutt acknowledges that healing, "May not always occur, even where faith is present." (MacNutt, 1999). This assertion is quite common within the pseudo-science realm, and puts the burden of proof and the onus of transformation upon the worthiness and strength of the individual instead of the system itself. This is a very unscientific way of performing a "transformation," but one that is not uncommon within MacNutt's circles.
The next part of the book deals with the four basic kinds of healing according to the author. It also includes how to pray for each, and, according to MacNutt, the different conditions that each type of healing hinges upon (MacNutt, 1999). From a critical perspective, these conditions are far more important, or telling of the author's prerogatives, than the fur types of healing. This third part of the book focuses much on the negatives, that is to say the conditionality…

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However, from a Christian perspective, the book as well as MacNutt's Healing Ministries has been quite commercially successful within certain social and religious circles. This is to say that the book Healing, the first in a series of books devoted to this topic, helped to spark a revolution among Christian fundamental healing projects and ministries. These not only help to cover for and explain away the personal transgressions of people like MacNutt, but in doing so, offer personal advice coupled with spiritual advisories relative to specific afflictions and societal issues. All of which stem from a Biblical perspective, as well as the personal translations and justifications of MacNutt, as he guides the reader through the Biblical do's and don'ts associated with their "disease." Without a doubt, MacNutt's work and reputation are airtight within the community that accepts it. However, outside of his community, the contents represent a backwardation of everything that has been learned, studied, and explored in many realms of social science. The book itself is a commercial and religious success but a scientific failure.

Citations

MacNutt, Francis. Healing. Creation House Publishing: Lake Mary, FL. 1999.
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