spirit and healing in africa - University of the Free State

traditional healing, the HIV/AIDS campaigns financed by Western donors are but a few of the
multiple approaches to the theme of health, illness and healing.
One influential domain where people are informed about health, illness and healing is formed by
the churches that are oriented to the Holy Spirit. These churches are known as the African
Independent Churches (AICs) and the Pentecostal churches. The two currents have different
origins, but what they have in common is their achievement to offer a contextual approach to the
Christian faith. Generally speaking, they value highly the efficacies of the Holy Spirit in relation
to everyday life troubles. The fast and wide spread of Pentecostalism over the African context
(and also globally) is ascribed to the success of addressing not only the spiritual but also the
corporeal and material dimensions of life (Anderson 2010:2). One of the recently noticed and
studied characteristics of Pentecostalism is its ability to adapt to different contexts and to extent
its sphere of influence globally (cf. Adogame 2011). As a result, Pentecostalism has an
increasing impact on mainline Christianity in Africa. Pentecostalism’s successful focus on the
work of the Holy Spirit in relation to healing is one of the contributing factors of this research
problem.
The need for a re-visioned, differentiated, contextual Reformed approach to healing leads to a
particular research problem. The specific problem of this research is: could a pneumatological
exploration, sensitive to multi-layered understandings of health, open productive avenues for
Reformed theology in Southern Africa?
3. Research questions
The research problem addresses various fields of attention. First of all, there is the issue of the
complex epistemology of health, which addresses the lack of a universal definition of health. The
second issue is the existence of multiple health discourses in Southern Africa. The focus on
health discourses is a logical result from the acknowledgment that there is no universal definition
of health. The third field of attention entails Reformed resources on the work of the Holy Spirit.
A matrix of Reformed pneumatology is needed in order to identify new and productive avenues
for expressing the link between God and health. The fourth area of attention in this study is the
exploration of the relationship between the Holy Spirit and healing within the contours of the
matrix of Reformed pneumatology.
The identification of these four areas of attention can be translated into various subsidiary
questions. These questions are: What constitutes constructs of health? What are the key
constituent motifs of discourses of health in Africa? What would happen if these key constituent
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