spirit and healing in africa - University of the Free State

that God’s plan of salvation transpires in the materiality of creation and the corporeality of
human life. The Spirit does not disconnect the believer from his or her corporeality; the Spirit is
given to the believer as a down payment in the tension between the resurrection of Christ’s
mutilated body and the still to be realized promise of full healing of broken creation. Fee
(1994:357) traces this line of thinking in Paul’s understanding of the works of the Spirit: “Both
miracles, evidence of the ‘already’, and ‘endurance’, evidence of the ‘not yet’, were held
together in his understanding precisely through the presence of the Spirit, whom earlier in his
letter he had designated as God’s ‘down payment’ of the future. As already present, he has
touched our human life with some measure of the future, these ‘signs’ take place in the context
of ‘every kind of endurance’” 50 . Being filled with the Spirit, therefore, also leads to a distinct
style of dealing with suffering. It is not an attitude that ignores concrete circumstances, but it is a
force amidst physical weakness. This power of the Spirit should, however, not be understood as
a movement of the Spirit that frees the believer from his or her suffering, because such an
understanding implies that the Spirit would position the believer opposite the corporeality of
creation. Instead, Christ-like transformation means that in this current physical existence, in all
its vulnerability, the Spirit endows the believer with the power to bear the name of Christ in the
tension between the promise and the transformation that has yet to be realized (Van Elderen
2004:27-35).
8.3.2 Counter-cultural charismata
On the basis of healing as transformation through the Spirit of Christ, it is also possible to say
that cruciform transformation consists of counter-cultural elements. Transformation as a process
of healing always refers to God’s grace, and not to the good condition of one’s body, neither to
the goodness of one’s works, nor to the strength of one’s faith. This kind of healing goes against
the grain of man-made structures, and draws attention to the pattern of Christ. Transformation is
therefore an upheaval of human order, of social tissue, of dominant structures, because it is about
growing away from self-centered healing, and towards an understanding of oneself as living in
the chaotic space of the Spirit. One could call this the shadow side of healing (cf. Shields 2001:
n.p.), evolving from God’s saving grace.
50. In relation to the link between Spirit, down payment and healing, Smouter (2008:65) contends that God’s grace
heals because God has given Christ already as (complete) foundation and the Spirit as partial advance. The word
‘arraboon’ is an economic terminology that refers to a down payment of the full amount that is to be received at a
later stage. The down payment itself is in the end not enough, but it is a guarantee, a collateral of the final payment
that will follow. Both the foundation and the down payment are required for human existence: by the Spirit we taste
the full redemption awaiting us.
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