Mac Nutt's Healing Explores the Meaning and

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. The second part of the book is devoted to faith and hope, recognizing that the Healing Ministries are a form of love and faith in one's self.

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 of the healing, than the healing itself.

From the Christian perspective, the healing and forgiveness of a person's sins also hinge upon personal conditions of acceptance, and MacNutt's Healing Ministries helps to tie these together with those conditions exclusive to the healing itself. These conditions include forgiveness of sin, inner healing, soaking prayer, and even demonic conditions requiring deliverance (MacNutt, 1999). MacNutt's understanding of human psychology and addiction science are rudimentary, at best. This is evidenced by the faith-based nature of healing that supposedly occurs when a person accepts Christ into their hearts and begins to transform themselves.

The last part of the book takes a more scientific look at the root causes of people's personal issues. This means that MacNutt breaks down, from his own Christian perspective, using his own experiences, the evils of the world and how people become ensnared in their own personal prisons, as he writes. MacNutt also revisits the reasons why people are not healed, as he first explored in the second part of the book.

Coming from a Christian perspective, MacNutt delivers a powerful appeal to addicts, homosexuals, and otherwise "unhealed" people in the final chapter, praying for them to have the faith and hope to consider his Healing Ministries. For those looking for solace from social alienation or persecution, this appeal my be all too convincing on the surface, especially I one is unfamiliar with the tenets of MacNutt's beliefs about healing and afflictions themselves.

All in all, the final part of the book wraps up a rather Christian-specific worldview of addiction pseudo-science and beliefs that are not grounded in scientific fact. MacNutt's book Healing takes a very religious and Christian-oriented stance on many of the problems that MacNutt argues are identified in the Bible. However, the book itself is not backed up with any hard facts or science, and does not draw one comparison wit any psychological, social, or humanist study or work. In other words, MacNutt's book is an excellent way.