spirit and healing in africa - University of the Free State

and instead use beneficent powers to become united with God and one another in the power of
the Spirit” (Cooke 2004:189).
The relationship between Spirit, power and healing draws attention to the theme of justice. The
work of the Spirit is not a-political, but fully involved in the enhancement of love, mercy and
justice. Welker’s God the Spirit is an important source for understanding the Spirit’s agency
regarding power and healing, because it offers an indispensable socio-political perspective on the
Spirit’s presence in this world. In Welker’s terminology (1994:228ff), the outpouring of the
Spirit is the power by which God accomplishes the divine will of love and righteousness. This
means that the Spirit inspires people to influence both their proximate and their distant
environments in ways that lead to the extension of God’s people, to the unity of people with
Christ, and to their deliverance from lostness, powerlessness and dejection (Welker 1994:229).
The link Spirit/justice has been recognized as a crucial perspective in the development of
Reformed theology and pneumatology in Africa. Particularly with respect to the development of
healing theologies, it is important to accept that theological and pneumatological reflection ought
to be shaped and influenced by social, economic and political realities. In this light, the challenge
of epistemological transformation of Reformed theology must be mentioned. Rian Venter
(2012a:1-21) argues that doing theology in a South-African post-apartheid context requires new
approaches that include the existing social realities and conflicts. He emphasizes that new modes
of knowledge production are necessary for theological education, and identifies ‘space-making’
as the keyword in the transformation of doing theology. Space-making is about epistemic
compassion, and stands for deliberately extending the focus to Others, for including the excluded
and the neglected, and for valuing the notions of memory and recognition (Venter 2012a:9).
Doing theology with space-making as its leitmotif has notions as justice, compassion and
resistance to existing social power relations at heart.
Sensitivity to the socio-political work of the Spirit, the establishment and enhancement of justice
and mercy, creates an epistemological and hermeneutical challenge for the entire community of
believers: “a community that is obligated to practice mercy thus becomes committed to constant
self-change and self-renewal, to self-critical rethinking and reorientation. (…) [M]ercy is to go
hand in hand with the establishment of justice” (Welker 1994:119).
Once again the tale of Grace Bande provides an appropriate example for this debate on power
and resurrection: Grace Banda grew up with the understanding of power as an existential force
of life. Power was something that had its origin in God, and was mediated through spiritual and
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