Systematic Theology
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Item Open Access Spirit and healing in Africa: a reformed pneumatological perspective(University of the Free State, 2012) Van den Bosch-Heij, Deborah; Venter, R.; Van der Kooi, C.English: This study is an exploration of the link between the Holy Spirit and healing in Africa from a Reformed perspective. It is meant as a contribution to the development of Reformed contextual perspectives on healing in Southern Africa, and investigates whether a pneumatological exploration, sensitive to multi-layered understandings of health, could open productive avenues for Reformed theology in Southern Africa. The exploration consists of two parts. The first part is based on interdisciplinary research, and gives an overview of African health concepts that are influential in Southern Africa. The exploration starts with the struggle to find an appropriate definition of health, resulting in the understanding of health as a social construct. This means that one’s social context determines one’s understanding of health. The approach of social constructivism is non-essentialist and inherently open to the contextual, social and subjective nature of health. As such, social constructivism provides the epistemological frame for this thesis’ understanding of health and healing in the African context. Social constructivism implies that there are multiple understandings of health in a society. When a health concept occurs in a systematic or coherent pattern of ideas and practices, this coherent structure can be characterized as a health discourse. In Southern Africa, various health discourses can be identified: (1) the African traditional healing or the ngoma discourse; (2) the missionary medicine discourse; (3) the HIV/AIDS discourse; and (4) the church-based healing discourse. Each African health discourse is determined by a specific notion which characterizes the way health is interpreted according to that particular health discourse. The notions that have been identified are: (1) relationality; (2) transformation; (3) quality of life; and (4) power. In the second part of the study, the relationship between African health discourses and Reformed theology is developed on the basis of a pneumatological focus, which begins with an account of pneumatological approaches, developed by Reformed theologians (Calvin, Kuyper, Barth, Van Ruler, Moltmann, Welker, Veenhof and Van der Kooi), and a description of the Heidelberg Catechism’s pneumatology. The overview of Reformed pneumatologies suggests that most key ideas of the African health discourses correlate with specific motifs of the Reformed pneumatological matrix. Only the motif of power seems to be underdeveloped in Reformed thought. Four pneumatological sketches of healing are offered. These sketches are fragments of language about God and healing, because the suggestion of a grand narrative about God and healing should be avoided. This study seeks to appreciate aspects such as contextuality, nonessentialism, diversity, non-closure and particularity. The implication is that the four pneumatological sketches may be contradictory but cannot be mutually exclusive: that is, each fragment refers to the diverse ways of the Spirit who brings healing in human life. The four sketches show that Reformed language about Spirit and healing can be developed on the basis of the motifs of relationality, transformation, quality of life and power. It is proposed that Reformed pneumatological perspectives on healing include (1) the retrieval of the identification of the Spirit as the bond of love and as ecstatic God who communicates God’s relational life to creation; (2) the focus on the disorienting and counter-cultural ways of the Spirit of adoption; (3) the biblical idea that the Spirit, the breath of life, redefines the vulnerability of human life as quality and beauty; and (4) the development of the idea that the Spirit redefines power and gives resurrection life after non-survival, even in this life.