spirit and healing in africa - University of the Free State

8.2.4 Physicality and transformation in Reformed pneumatology
The previous section showed that, in Reformed thought, transformation is the process which the
believer enters when he or she is led to union with Christ through the Spirit. In this union, the
believer changes in a way that embraces both the soul and the body. The believer experiences
that his or her whole life belongs to God. The metaphor of adoption (the believer has become a
child of God the Father), thus, connects seamlessly with the theme of union and transformation.
However, the discourse on missionary medicine (with its focus on transformation located at the
intersection of spirituality and physicality) draws attention to the complexity of the motif of
transformation within Reformed thought, and raises questions such as: in what sense do this
union and adoption imply transformation? To what extent are the aspects of physicality and
materiality included in Reformed perceptions of transformation?
Metaphorical transformation
In Reformed thought, ideas regarding transformation and adoption are generally expressed in
metaphors. This metaphorical approach has implications for understanding the nature of the
believer’s transformation (and of salvation). When one tries to answer the question how one
changes on the basis of the union with Christ and the adoption by the Father, it becomes clear
that one needs metaphors in order to explain the nature of the believer’s new life.
Metaphors relate to something that is beyond our definition: they establish a connection between
what can be said and what cannot be said directly. They project inference patterns from the
source domain to the target domain (Lakoff & Johnson 1999:128), or, in the field of theology,
they take language from finite reality and apply it to a new, transcendent region, involving a
semantic clash (Stiver 1996:129f). By relating the two domains, metaphors carry a truth claim.
Yet this truth claim is not identical to a literal truth claim, because its inexactitude causes the
claim always to be partial and open-ended. Thus, metaphorical statements always contain the
whisper ‘it is and it is not’ (McFague 1982:13).
Within the field of theology, there are various approaches to the phenomenon of metaphor, but
their basic thrust is that it is not possible to do theology without the use of metaphors. After the
shift in meaning from metaphor as ornamental language to metaphor as cognitive language that
connects two semantic fields, there is a general consensus that the use of metaphors is very
important in daily life communication, in science, and also in theology. Scholars like I.A.
Richards, M. Black, P. Ricoeur, G. Lakoff, M. Johnson, J. Soskice, and S. McFague have made
major contributions in understanding the crucial meaning of metaphors in the various disciplines.
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