spirit and healing in africa - University of the Free State

the power that man receives from God in order to live a human life, to be human. In response to
this gift, man should be willing to be healthy. The will to be healthy is creation’s answer to
God’s will. Messer (2011:168) indicates that Barth’s ideas about the will to be healthy contrasts
with our common assumptions about the relationship between health, physical perfection, and
the ends of human life, because the content of our will to be healthy is Jesus Christ: he who had
no form or majesty that we should look at him (Isaiah 53:2b) was truly and fully human being,
and has revealed God’s will to us. Willing to be healthy, which is being fully human, thus
requires direction to Christ and the testimonies of the Scriptures.
Barth does not provide concrete answers to the question of what health, the strength for human
life, looks like (Messer 2011:169). Besides some general remarks on the holistic dimension of
health (willing to be healthy is willing to be a whole human being), and in the broad sense of
willing to be healthy (hygiene, sports, medicine), Barth explicitly focuses on the role of doctors
in regaining the strength to be human. He warns against overemphasizing their accomplishment:
the doctor is not the one who heals; health is a gift from God. Yet he affirms the importance of
medical care, because doctors and patients should cooperate in resisting the power of sickness
and death. Barth (CD 3.4, 366-369) says that “the realm of death which afflicts man in the form
of sickness … is opposed to His good will as Creator and has existence and power only under
His mighty No. To capitulate before it, to allow it to take its course, can never be obedience but
only disobedience towards God. In harmony with the will of God, what humans ought to will in
face of this whole realm on the left hand, and therefore in face of sickness, can only be final
resistance.… Those who take up this struggle obediently are already healthy in the fact that they
do so, and theirs is no empty desire when they will to maintain or regain their health”. Another
interesting notion of the will to be healthy is one’s social condition influencing one’s health.
Barth (CD 3.4, 363) emphasizes that if a person wants to be healthy (as response to God’s call to
obey His will), he or she cannot exclude the social context from this desire to be healthy. One’s
will to be healthy can never be isolated from the (absence of) health of others: “when one person
is ill, the whole of society is really ill in all its members. In the battle against sickness the final
human word cannot be isolation but only fellowship”.
In summary, Barth’s pneumatology is developed along Trinitarian lines. His Christocentric focus
contributes to a complex approach to the distinctiveness of the Holy Spirit, which leads to strong
criticism by other Reformed scholars. Barth’s understanding of the Holy Spirit is that the Spirit
is clearly the mediator of the communion with Christ, with the Trinitarian God, with fellow
human beings. Barth does not articulate an explicit link between Spirit and healing. According to
him, health is the will to be healthy as a human response to God’s will. Since man is not able to
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