spirit and healing in africa - University of the Free State

Healing refers to every aspect of human life as having a place and purpose in God’s desire to
restore creation.
8.4. CONCLUSIONS
This chapter forms a part of the exploration into possibilities of speaking about God and healing.
The aim of this chapter was to show that one way of creating articulations about God and health
could be found in the motif of transformation. This theme of transformation was retrieved by
engaging the discourse of missionary medicine (as an African health discourse) with Reformed
pneumatological discourse. In both discourses, the theme of transformation is considered highly
significant.
The missionary medicine discourse, with its focus on transformation in various forms, has
already been described in Chapter 3 of this thesis. Transformation was understood as an
existential change located at the intersection of materiality (body) and spirituality (soul),
whereby the notion of healing referred to the intended transformation. In this chapter, missionary
medicine’s concept of transformation was related to theological discourse, provoking the
question what transformation precisely means in Reformed pneumatology, and whether
transformation can be articulated only metaphorically? To what extent are the aspects of
physicality and materiality included in Reformed pneumatological perceptions of
transformation? Where in the metaphor of adoption and transformation does the theme of healing
fit in?
In Reformed soteriological discourse, the theme of transformation is mostly associated with the
event of justification and with the believer’s union with Christ through the Holy Spirit. These
form the heart of Reformed soteriology, in which the metaphor of adoption is firmly rooted.
Reformed theology uses metaphorical language to refer to transformation, because the nature of
the believer’s transformation is elusive and beyond definition. The use of metaphors in theology
is important and necessary in order to refer to something that cannot be said in a direct way.
They help to understand the concept of a new identity in God, and the metaphor of adoption, in
particular, embraces the idea that this new identity includes our physicality and materiality.
Reformed perceptions of transformation, thus, include the physical dimension. Yet, when it
comes to literal transformation and real physical healing directly related to God’s salvation,
Reformed thought remains silent. The voice of Karel Kraan, whose view on ‘realizing
eschatology’ has major implications for the link between transformation and physicality, is an
exception in Reformed theology. In his perspective, God’s salvation became fully real and
immediately effective in the resurrection of Christ. As a result, physical healing is not to be
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