spirit and healing in africa - University of the Free State

materiality 56 . The relation between God and the world involves materiality, ‘the dust of the
ground’. In other words, the physicality of creation is the only site where the Spirit can present
God’s love for the world.
Bodies and other tangible forms of life are indispensable manifestations of God’s grace and
commitment to the world. They are needed in order to understand and experience the quality of
God-given life. These quality-bearers embody the contingency of creation: our bodies reveal our
dependence (since we do not own the breath of life) and they represent the non-necessity of
human life. The orderliness of the body can be disrupted, an illness can occur, and death can
come at any time. In revealing the contingency of human life, bodies represent the vulnerability
of creation.
In relation to the contingency of creation, Christian theology in general has developed an
ambiguous relationship with physicality. On the one hand, Christianity can be seen as a body
religion par excellence, considering the crucial meaning of the incarnation of God and of
Christ’s body that carried away the sin of mankind. On the other hand, Christianity is familiar
with the idea that the body is something that should be overcome in order to live a God-pleasing
life. The human body and its physical and sexual dimensions appear to obstruct a pure union
with the divine realm. The body, with its desires, is perishable and unreliable material, and
therefore the soul has to be separated from the body in order to remain steadily focused on
salvation. It can be said that Christian theology is heavily defined by a body and mind dualism,
while it has never surrendered itself to a complete divorce of body and spirit due to the belief
that redemption and sanctification always include both spirit and body. Ambiguity seems to be
the key notion when it comes to Christian faith and the human body (see Tripp 1997:131-152;
Isherwood & Stuart 1998:9-13).
Body theology is one of the discourses where this deep ambiguous approach to the body is
addressed. The general aim of body theology is to value the meaning of the human body, and the
female body in particular. In the various approaches of body theology, the human body is not
only understood in a literal sense, but also in a symbolical sense: the body is a living organic
entity that has the capacity to make things tangible. The body represents those things that usually
remain under the surface, such as power relations, desires, identity, relations and well-being. One
56. The relationship between creation and physicality found its way to the center of theological discourse, as a result
of topics such as ecology, environment, gender, justice, globalization and physical science that stimulated the debate
about the relation of empirical reality and faith (and about the development of a theology of nature).
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