spirit and healing in africa - University of the Free State

enabled to experience new life, but not to the full: “the current presence of the Spirit is seen as a
beginning that will be complete in the resurrection, a process that will be perfected in the
spiritual body” (Thomas 2002:267) 66 . The Spirit is thus involved in actual resurrection activities,
but their nature is that of anticipation. Resurrection life of this world is new life that anticipates
what is still to come in the final resurrection of the dead. When the Spirit then infuses our life
with resurrection power, a particular newness of life can already be experienced in this reality,
because the Spirit presents the first-portion or the guarantee (pledge) of complete newness of life
(Romans 8:23; 1 Corinthians 1:22; Ephesians 1:13-14). For example, the experience of healing
can be defined as the Spirit’s gift of new life, even though it will always be ‘unfinished healing’.
10.3 POWER, SPIRIT AND HEALING
The profound dialectics of divine power, embodied by the Spirit, requires a particular
understanding of healing as the first-portion of new life. Healing by the Spirit means that one’s
full life, including the accompanying weakness and affliction, has been placed in the shadow of
the cross and is resurrected by the Spirit of God. Welker (1994:326) speaks of the ‘resurrection
of the flesh’ as life that is led out of the discontinuity signified by its own death by being led
through this discontinuity. Resurrection life, then, is not to be understood as a perspective that
offers an escape from this vulnerable life into ‘a better world’, in triumphant and soothing tones.
Rather, resurrection life entails a redefinition of death that confesses God and acknowledges that
one cannot survive the grave. As Alan Lewis (2001:428) emphasizes, “God’s victory over death,
as the Christian gospel tells it, is not a matter of smooth, ensured survival but a new existence
after non-survival — a quite different reality, for us as well as God”. This new life after nonsurvival,
this being led through the discontinuity of life, is what Welker (1994:325, 328) calls a
valid reality of the communion of the living and the dead. By identifying resurrected life as valid
life, he circumvents the suggestion that healing or resurrection life is predominantly
eschatological, and allows for speaking about earthly life that is capable of experiencing
resurrection in this world, despite its discontinuity.
The discontinuity, the non-survival of human life is fully part of earthly life. Creaturely life
means that there is termination of life. Yet through the power of the Spirit, it is also possible to
say that creaturely life has a resurrection dimension, because our non-survival can be identified
with the cross of Christ in the sense that God’s own death redefines our death, and leads human
66. Paul’s understanding of a spiritual or pneumatic body (1 Corinthians 15:44) is that the creation of the new body,
the post-resurrection body, transcends the present body in a way that is totally beyond all possibilities of the old
aeon. The expression of the post-resurrection body as the spiritual body is to emphasize that God’s Spirit is the only
force that creates the new body (Lampe 2002:103-114).
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