Hell and Madness; Grace and Sanity

348 Pages·2012·4.41 MB·English

Hell and Madness;
Grace and Sanity:
The true biblical basis for
mental health

Pauline Holmes PhD
Hell and Madness; Grace and Sanity: The true biblical
basis for mental health

First printing, 1992
Second printing, 1998
Revised, 2012

This edition published by Ransom Press, a division of Grace
and Sanity Ministries, a not-for-profit religious corporation,
P.O. Box 1172, Crescent City, CA 95531.

Copyright © 1992 by Pauline Holmes. All rights reserved.
No part of the publication may be reproduced, stored in a
retrieval system or transmitted in any form by any means,
electronic, mechanical, phtotcopy, recording, or otherwise
without the prior permission of the publisher, except as
provided by USA copyright law.

Printed in the United States of America. ISBN 0-9634540-4-8
Contents

Introduction: The Biblical Basis for Mental Health 7

Chapter One: Genesis and guilt 9
Why the predicament? What happened in the
Garden? 9
What is sin? 14
The conscience 16
Jesus is the Torah 17
Why die? Why the Lake of Fire? 23
To sum up… 24

Chapter Two: Why we reject the Bible despite its
scientific and historical basis 29
Human characteristics that blind us 29
Science and the Bible 36
The Bible as the basis for astrology? 39
The evolution hoax 40
Scientific validity and God’s Word 43
To sum up 48

Chapter Three: How psychology validates the Bible 55
A Bible-based model of the human psyche 56
Attribution theory and the fear of the Lake of Fire 57
Low self-esteem…is existential guilt 59
To sum up… 62

Chapter Four: Archetypes from Jung and the Bible 67
Wheat and tares 67
Nativism 69
Jung’s archetypes 70
The Bible and the unconscious 71
Archetypes from Genesis 72
Chapter Four: Archetypes from Jung and the Bible, ctd.
Awareness of God 72
Satan archetype 74
Law archetype 79
Paradise archetype 83
Hell/Lake of Fire archetype 83
Rescuer archetype 88
To sum up… 92

Chapter Five: Can Freud help us? 99
Model of the psyche: Freud versus the Bible 100
The learned superego vs the innate Law 102
The ego versus grace 105
Psychoanalysis versus the Gospel 110
To sum up… 116

Chapter Six: The Freudian Fig Leaves 123
Why defenses? 123
Existential guilt 124
Primitive/hiders 126
Sophisticated/ pseudo-atonement 130
The only genuine defense 136
Ego control and the fruits of the Spirit 136
To sum up… 139

Chapter Seven: Schizophrenia, Psychotic Delusions, and
God 143
Is psychosis as a spiritual opening? 143
What is schizophrenia? 144
Perception and the supernatural realm 144
Schizophrenia and revelation 145
Revelation and content 146
To sum up… 159

Chapter Eight: Where Does Psychotic Religiosity Come
From? 163
What causes schizophrenia? 167
Chapter Eight: Where Does Psychotic Religiosity Come
From?, ctd.
Bible-based model of schizophrenia 175
Is religiosity innate? 175
To sum up… 180

Chapter Nine: What’s wrong with secular therapy? 189
Satanic humanism 190
Secular “healthy” delusions 191
Major secular psychotherapies 193
Humanistic approaches 194
Non-humanistic approaches 199
Does research support the efficacy of secular
approaches? 204
To sum up… 205

Chapter Ten: Merciless legalism versus grace-filled
legalism 211
The doctrine of perfection versus grace 212
Left and right wing religions 214
Left wing religions 214
Right wing merciless religions 219
Grace 224
To sum up… 224

Chapter Eleven: Dangerous spiritual therapies 227
Psychosynthesis 227
Transpersonal psychotherapy 228
Twelve Step Recovery 230
The big flaw in the Twelve Steps 231
To sum up… 234

Chapter Twelve: Fatal Flaws in Christian
Psychotherapies 237
Jay Adams and stopping the sin 238
John White: grace is important… 241
M Scott Peck’s liberalism 241
Chapter Twelve: Fatal Flaws in Christian
Psychotherapies, ctd.
Paul Tournier 243
Minirth Meier clinic approach 245
Inner Healing movement 246
To sum up 248

Chapter Thirteen: Research on Religion and Well-
Being: Where’s Grace? 251
Measurement of religiosity 253
To sum up 263

Chapter Fourteen: The Bible and the DSM 275
The Lake of Fire, grace and the DSM 275
The spectrum of mental disorders 277
Psychotic disorders 278
Neurotic disorders 285
Personality disorders 300
Substance Abuse disorders 309
Impulse Control disorders 310
Other disorders 314
To sum up… 314

Chapter Fifteen: Feed my sheep
To sum up 321

Chapter Sixteen: What This Book Was About 335
To sum up 338

Index 343
Introduction

The Biblical Basis for Mental Health
We have to go to the Bible for mental health because secular
psychology does not have the answers. Humans are stuck with a
crushing issue that has nothing to do with this world; it is about our
eternal destiny, the reality of the Lake of Fire (or hell), and
humans’ sense of being destined to go there.
God Who? For reasons that will become apparent in this book,
God is the God of the Bible; the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob;
the Father of Jesus. We humans can only understand ourselves and
have peace of mind—or mental health—if we accept the Bible as
literally true and embrace it.
Heaven or hell: Accepting the Bible from Genesis onwards is
likely to be a road block for many who consider themselves
“enlightened.” This is a huge problem for anyone trained in the
secular Bible-rejecting realm. It means throwing away a lifetime
of accepting that the Bible is just metaphor and myth.
The Leap: The choice lies between staying in one’s semi-
comfort zone, still wearing blinders, or plunging into a what seems
like a risky new field of vision. This leap for the truth can have
some painful short-term worldly repercussions, but in the long
term it is the only solution. There can be the problem of keeping
one’s job in an anti-Bible university or counseling center—and
many so-called Christian counseling centers and universities
willfully reject the idea of hell, too. But the author found that once
one knows the truth, it is intolerable to be in such an environment.
The terrible predicament: To really understand mental illness
means recognizing the terrible predicament humans are in: that
anyone who is not one hundred percent holy, pure and undefiled is
separated from God, will not only die physically, but will burn in
the Lake of Fire. Further, knowledge of this is born into the
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human psyche. We call it the sin=death/hell equation; another
way of expressing it is “existential guilt,” the sense of deserving
eternal damnation. This guilt is at the bottom of all human
psychopathology.
The good news: The good news (or gospel) is the rescue
spelled out in the Law God gave Moses, a provision fulfilled in
Christ. This is the cure for mental illness. This means it is not
enough to know a bit of the New Testament. Jesus himself made it
clear that we have to be familiar with the Law (or Torah, or
Pentateuch) and prophecies (Matthew 5:17-18; 7:12; Luke 24:44).
Secular humanistic psychology: The main enemy of the Bible
in the mental health world is secularism.1 Secular humanistic
psychology has no trouble observing the symptoms of existential
guilt, but interprets them in a limited worldly context. It notes the
universal craving for unconditional love, the universal fear of
abandonment, the low-self-esteem, and the searing anxiety in
humans, but understands these things only in non-spiritual terms.
The real problem is our sense of being eternally separated from
God, facing something horrible on the other side of death.
Only the God of the Bible accepts humans just as they are,
loves them unconditionally and will never abandon them. We
cannot make ourselves flawless, nor does he demand it for
entrance to his2 fold or for the freedom to remain there. This book
will show that the covering He has given us, His payment of the
entrance fee, is the basis for mental health and much, much
more…
Notes

1 By the way, this is not to say that we have to reject all secular scientific
research and theory. Some of it can illuminate our understanding of the
Bible, as we will see in this book.
2
In keeping with the practice of the King James Bible, which is the source
of quotations in this book, the third person pronoun for God is not
capitalized.
Chapter One

Genesis and Guilt
The book of Genesis gets to the bottom of who we
humans are and what makes us tick. Nothing else goes to the
universal root of human guilt and anxiety. Humans are
trapped in a dire situation: separated from God, sentenced to
physical death, and stuck with a one-way ticket to the Lake
of Fire.1 This predicament is at the root of every type of
mental disorder; humans are born with knowledge of it deep
inside them, information mostly hidden but oozing up to the
surface in feelings of worthlessness and deserving of
punishment.

Why the predicament? What happened in the Garden?
How did we get into this situation? In Genesis, we learn
that God gave a single command to the first humans he
created: they were not to eat the fruit of a specific tree, the
Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. God said: "In the
day that thou eat the fruit of that tree, thou shalt surely die"
(Genesis 2:17). This death was separation from God which
led to physical death and the Lake of Fire.
However, Adam and Eve naively listened to a competing
source of authority: Satan, a fallen angel out to destroy the
creation he could not have dominion over. Satan wanted
God to lose the humans he made and loved; he knew
disobedience would rupture their connection with their
heavenly Father. So he told them the promised consequence
of death would not apply if they ate the forbidden fruit. He
knew firsthand about power hunger and pride, so he used it
in some convincing lies. He said: "Ye shall not surely die:
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For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your
eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods knowing good
and evil" (Genesis 3:4-5).

Lies, Truth and Law
Satan's persuasion got Adam and Eve separated from
God. Once they disobeyed him, they immediately found the
truth: they were doomed. God did not have to tell them this;
they had ingested the Knowledge of Good and Evil, God's
law. The Law2 had become part of them and it told them the
price for sin—the slightest flaw of any kind—is death. In
other words, the consequence of falling short of total
perfection from conception to death, i.e., the slightest
departure from the Law, is eternal alienation from God,
involving separation from the Tree of Life and eventual
destruction in the Lake of Fire. Now they could put two and
two together and make foreboding. They not only knew they
were lawbreakers, they also knew they faced a terrible
penalty.
All of us face this penalty because we humans fall short
of perfection. Even if we were not willfully disobedient,
which we are, the perfectionist law would still doom us for
all the flaws we have no control over. And Satan's lies—the
promises of godhood, omniscience, and immortality—
continue to appeal. Wanting to be gods, we rebel against
God's authority. Implicitly, we do what Satan did before
God kicked him out of heaven: try to build a "throne above
the stars of God" (Isaiah 14:13).

False religions
Satan's lies are the basis of every false religion. They all
have doctrines that appeal to human rebelliousness. We
think knowledge, or enlightenment, will empower us.
Instead, it shows us how utterly vulnerable we are. In fact,
"knowledge increaseth sorrow" (Ecclesiastes 1:18). Satan,