spirit and healing in africa - University of the Free State

etrieve or reconstruct their theological reflection on healing, because some approaches to the
relationship between God and healing have already been generated within mainstream Protestant
tradition, but generally they lack the dimension of contextuality, the aspect of being developed in
correlation with African ideas about health and healing. Most of the theological reflections on
healing tend to have either a missio-ecclesiological concentration (‘the church as the healing
site’) or biblical-Christological focus (‘Jesus as exorcist’). The former approach concentrates on
the mission of the church and the responsibility of congregations in caring for those who are in
need of healing, while the latter draws attention to the biblical and soteriological notion of
healing. A Christ-centered approach to healing fits well with African perceptions of health and
healing (cf. Stinton 2004:90f). Both perspectives have their strengths, but also have their
shortcomings: reflections on the church as a community of healing tend to focus on what role the
church should play in healthcare and on how the church can reclaim its role in helping to heal its
followers, at the cost of focusing on the articulation of theological argumentations for the
churches’ practices of health and healing. A Christological approach, on the other hand, does
provide a firm theological foundation, but it runs the risk of a one-sided perception of healing
(that is, that healing is an exorcism or the miraculous and immediate restoration of physical
functions) and thus of the God who heals.
Although the theme of health and healing has been addressed in the disciplines of pastoral
theology, missiology and New Testament studies, it can be said that the current approaches fail
to respond effectively to the African reality of demon possession, the ever-present threat of
losing one’s vitality, and the challenge of defining health contextually and theologically. In other
words, the current approaches are inadequate to address the believers’ quest for healing in a
meaningful way. ‘Meaningful’ means that the believers’ contextual experiences of illness and
healing are included, centralized even, in the process of articulating a link between God and
healing, so that any conceptualization of a healing God actually touches the everyday life of the
believer. This everyday life does not only imply the struggle for physical healing, the combat
with HIV/AIDS, and the fight against poverty; it also means that the believer is informed about
health and healing in many different contexts. The clinical environment with doctors and nurses,
the media and the many publications focused on wellness and health, the matrix of African
and significance of Western medicine for health care development globally, many believe that the medicalization of
health, a result of the dominant Western discourse, constitutes a major stumbling block for further reflection on the
relationship between God and the well-being of creation. In this debate (see 6.2.7) the cooperation between the
theological and medical disciplines is the frame in which new avenues are explored by focusing on the aspects of
prayer, community and relationships.
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