spirit and healing in africa - University of the Free State

meaning of the association of Word and Spirit is about the inspiration of Scripture: God Himself
speaks through his Word. In other words, the Spirit is never to be separated from the Word, but
She authenticates the knowledge about God that is provided in the Bible. The Reformed sola
Scriptura adage evolves from the understanding that Scripture is the product of the Spirit, or
‘dictation by the Spirit’ (Neuser 1994:67-71), and that human beings are not capable of knowing
God without the Word. The certainty of faith thus depends on the correlation of Spirit and Word.
In order to affirm the authenticity of the Bible as God’s Word, the believer depends on two
different but related efficacies of the Spirit. First, the Spirit is involved in the human testimonies
as written down in the Bible; and second, the Spirit’s work is in the heart of the believer,
testifying to the truth of God and transforming faith into certainty of the promise of salvation.
Calvin states that “the testimony of the Spirit is more excellent than all reason. For as God alone
is a fit witness of himself in his Word, so also the Word will not find acceptance in men’s hearts
before it is sealed by the inward testimony of the Spirit. The same Spirit, therefore, who has
spoken through the mouths of the prophets must penetrate into our hearts to persuade us that they
faithfully proclaimed what had been divinely commanded” (Inst. 1.7.4).
Calvin and healing
Calvin’s works show only one obvious reference to healing: the rejection of miraculous healing
and the gift of healing in the Institutes 4.19.18. Calvin, who was more outspoken on this issue
than Luther was, addresses and rejects the Roman Catholic tradition of extreme unction, the one
sacrament explicitly dealing with physical healing. He identifies the sacrament of extreme
unction as a “fictitious sacrament” and a “mere hypocritical stage-play” (Inst. 4.19.18). Calvin’s
cessation theology should be understood against the background of the Roman Catholic—
Protestant polemic. After all, from the outset of the Reformation process, the Reformers aimed at
purifying the whole pattern of Roman Catholic worship (including the sacraments, saints, shrines
and relics) of misleading, false and even demonic influences, and that also included the
phenomenon of miracles (cf. Langstaff 1999:100, 119; Hejzlar 2007:48). Calvin’s reasoning was
that miracles led believers away from true worship, and made people forget that the permanent
signs of divine revelation, namely baptism and the Lord’s supper, had replaced the temporary
signs of Jesus’ time. He acknowledged that miraculous healings existed in Jesus’ time, as
recounted by the Scriptures, but that these were outdated and did not occur anymore after the
apostolic time (cf. Porterfield 2002:233). The only function of those early Christian miracles was
to introduce and to perpetuate the Gospel among the non-believers. In his study on John Calvin’s
writings on the issue of miraculous healing, Pavel Hejzlar (2007) indicates that according to
Calvin, miraculous healing had lost its effect since the Gospel had found its way into this world,
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