spirit and healing in africa - University of the Free State

The vulnerable and broken body of Christ is included in His resurrection. Christ’s glorified body
is a site of wounds and scars, because this is how God reveals himself: He is the Lord of life who
endows vulnerable life with quality, and with his resurrection power. In other words, in the gaps
of vulnerable life, the Spirit of God offers a new hermeneutics of embodied life on the basis of
Christ’s resurrected body. Resurrection of vulnerable life does not imply the move from
vulnerability to invulnerability, but the transformation from broken vulnerability into restored
vulnerability through God’s grace. Creaturely life will always remain vulnerable, but God’s
resurrection power reveals a deeply hidden quality in vulnerable life. It is this quality that
enables us to speak of restored or healed vulnerability, which means the susceptibility to affirm
God-given life amidst suffering. Eiesland (1994:101) asserts that the resurrected Christ with his
impaired hands and feet transforms the taboos surrounding vulnerability and disability of the
body, and links them closely with new abilities. Louw (2008:100) even states that in the
disfigurement of the resurrected Christ a new theological model of wholeness and a metaphor for
life within disfigurement can be discerned. The new hermeneutics of embodied life is thus a
discontinuous continuity, because this life is now considered as life that belongs to God who has
bound death, and at the same time has bound life by death.
9.3.3 Quality and beautification of life
One of the implications of accepting one’s vulnerability is the Spirit’s invitation to be involved
in the beautification of life. Beautification centers around the conviction that creation is made to
glorify God 58 . In other words, reclaiming the holiness and beauty of the vulnerable body is at
stake here. It entails owning our vulnerability, that is: living out that we are made bodies who are
endowed with the beauty and the courage to exist in finitude.
Patrick Sherry (2007:12f) argues for a firm focus on the notion of beauty and pneumatology, for
it will assist in retrieving a clear understanding of how God reaches out to his creation through
58. One could suggest that it is more appropriate to use the concept of glorification to describe the relationship of
the Holy Spirit and creation. Glorification, it is suggested, is a more comprehensive concept, embracing both
aesthetic notions of beauty and ugliness, while the concept of beautification seems to refer only to beauty. Yet I
prefer the terminology of beautification, precisely because it offers a more specific perspective on the relationship
between Spirit and human beings. Beautification is inherently linked to the notion of God’s glory, and is in this
thesis intentionally and directly related to the theme of health and healing. While glorification could refer to more
general ideas about human life in relation to God, beautification says something about the particular identity of the
human being before God. Moreover, the concept of the beautification of life embraces a certain kind of dialectics
that is also present in our contemporary thinking about physicality, vulnerability and quality of life. The notion of
beauty provokes thoughts about what is ugly, revolting, unfit, unhealthy and weak. It is this dialectics that is the core
of the relationship between quality of life, beautification of life and the Holy Spirit.
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