spirit and healing in africa - University of the Free State

subject of health within the various sub-disciplines of theology alone (see Conradie 2006:3).
Rather, it seeks the insights and wisdom of other scientific disciplines to achieve a better and
broader understanding of health, illness and healing. The interdisciplinary nature of health,
therefore, is to be included in theological approaches to health and healing.
The contextual and interdisciplinary nature of this study is connected with the African health
discourses. These health discourses play a crucial role in how Reformed believers conceptualize
health and healing in the African context, thus to respond meaningfully to what Reformed
believers need when it comes to God and health, it is necessary to understand the various frames
of reference regarding health. The first part of this study will, therefore, describe the four most
prominent health discourses in Southern Africa, which are the traditional healing or the ngoma
paradigm, missionary medicine, HIV/AIDS and church-based healing. This discourse study is
based on literature-study of research provided by the disciplines of cultural anthropology,
medical anthropology and epidemiology.
The second part of this study consists of a discussion between the African discourses on health
and Reformed theology. The basic notions of health, as deduced from the four health discourses,
will be included in pneumatological discourse, in order to explore new possibilities for speaking
of God and health. In other words, the contextuality and the interdisciplinarity of the research is
dependent on the fact that pneumatological discourse is informed by health discourses existing in
the African context. The engagement of African multi-layered understandings of health with
pneumatological discourse will produce what I call ‘pneumatological fragments’ of healing. The
method of gathering fragments (Tracy 1997:122-129; 1999:170-184; 2000:62-88) attempts to
avoid a totalitarian system for understanding Spirit and healing, and seeks to appreciate notions
like contextuality, particularity, diversity, non-closure and creativity. Just as the social
constructivism theory provides the epistemological frame for the first part of this study, so will
the approach of ‘gathering fragments’ be the epistemological frame for constructing
pneumatological proposals on healing. Both frames are an expression of the postmodernist desire
to move away from the grand narrative (about healing, about God) with its totalitarian system,
because the ‘one size fits all’ approach of modernity is not a productive approach, at least not
when it comes to addressing the relationship between God and healing. The ‘gathering
fragments’ approach inherently considers the subjective experiences of believers, the contextual
frame of health perceptions and the open-ended nature of doing theology, and thus corresponds
well with the idea that African theology is a multifaceted project that should be done in openended
ways (Maluleke 1997:17; 2005:486).
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