spirit and healing in africa - University of the Free State

which the Spirit of God brings new life to the dead. Romans 8:11 is an important foundation for
biblical thought on the Spirit as the Spirit of resurrection. The basic thrust of Paul’s link between
the Spirit and the resurrection is that the Spirit of the Father is the One who gave life back to
Jesus, and She is the same who gives life back to us. Durrwell (1986:146) says about the Spirit
that “He is in the Fatherhood in whom he has his source, and in the sonship of the Son from
whom he wells up. The mystery of the resurrection of Jesus is an illustration of this: the Spirit
himself is the power of the resurrection which enables Christ to be the channel of the Spirit”. The
Pauline emphasis on the power and the presence of the Spirit does not only reveal the Trinitarian
nature of the cross and the resurrection, it also reveals that the Spirit is distinctively the One who
is present in the suffering and death of Christ. It is precisely this ‘function of presence’ (Novello
2011:94) that belongs to the Spirit. In the cross, the Spirit is not subjected to the loneliness of the
Son, nor does She experience loss as the Father does. Instead, the Holy Spirit is present “all the
way into the horror of death, so that death will be finally conquered and transformed into life;
that is, the resurrection life” (Novello 2011:95). Through being present there where no one else
can be present anymore, the Spirit presents God’s faithfulness to Christ and, in the reading of
Romans 8:11, also to creaturely life. In other words, the resurrection event is the other crucial
event of God’s creativity, bringing chaos and hopelessness to a halt: the breath of life, the Spirit,
has found a way to move past the power of death. By holding together the mourning Father and
the dying Son, She is their love in the midst of agony; her presence is life in the midst of death.
Dabney (2001:58) identifies the Spirit as “the Spirit of the self-sacrifice and resurrection of Jesus
Christ made manifest in the Trinitarian kenosis of God on the cross, the possibility of God even
in the midst of every impossibility”. This naming of the Spirit as presence and as possibility
offers promising ways to reflect further on the relation between the Spirit and the resurrection of
our mortal bodies. In this light, one could say that the Holy Spirit embraces the dialectics of
cross and resurrection, and reveals God’s power in creative and surprising ways. She points to
death in order to reveal life, to weakness in order to reveal power, to suffering in order to reveal
healing. The cruciform and life-giving ways of the Spirit reveal the paradox of God’s power: in
and through weakness, God has assumed power over his creation.
In the cross and the resurrection, the Spirit reveals new life. This new life is not only Christ’s
new and glorified life, but has become our new life as well, through the power of the Spirit.
Thomas (2002:263) emphasizes that our resurrection life is not only a state of being that refers to
the new world of the new creation, but includes our creaturely being, our world with its space,
time and finitude as well (see also Torrance 1976, Chapter 4). In other words, the resurrection of
Christ becomes relevant to our daily life through the power of the Spirit (Romans 8:11; 1
Corinthians 6:14). The Holy Spirit relates Christ’s new life to our life in such a way that we are
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